Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Mark: Hey, guys. I'm joined today by Eric Schumacher. And I have to tell you that he came across my radar because something that had never really crossed my mind until about three months ago became a central issue in our family. And that topic is miscarriage. I had known people that had been impacted by this, and my thoughts were mostly that, man, this is really hard for women to go through and husbands have to be a support to their wife, and it's a tough thing. But, you know, I have a 16 year old and my youngest is 10. I really figured that in our family we had run this gauntlet.
So I'm going to share the story of what happened in our family and then bring in Eric, who has a significant ministry to dads who have gone through this experience of a miscarriage in their family. And I would say oftentimes, like I thought, dads can get forgotten in the whole process of what it's like to go through this. So if you've haven't had this experience, you might think, well, this episode is not for me. I actually think this might be more important for you. If you've never walked down this road, then for somebody who's listening to me talk now and going, oh, gosh, I got to buckle up, this is going to be hard because it's something I've dealt with in my family. So I want to talk to both people who have had this experience and people who maybe never had. And you might be a grandfather. I still think we have something to communicate to you on how the Universal Church is designed to come around and support people. There's something that's really hard. Stay tuned. That's what we're going to cover today on the Abraham's Wallet podcast.
Eric, thanks for being with me and being willing to join us. You're coming to me from Ames, Iowa. That's right.
[00:01:54] Eric: That's right. It's good to be here with you, Mark. I'm sorry to hear about your loss, but I'm grateful for your thoughtfulness in wanting to discuss this important topic with your audience.
[00:02:05] Mark: And I know that our audience probably is excited to hear from you, given how many just reps you have in ministry on this topic.
But I know every time somebody goes through this experience, it's totally different. And my experience is not the same as somebody else's.
But I did have an experience and it's what led me here. And like, I'm going to share, it's kind of how I ended up connected to you through a book that you wrote. And so I Want to share my experience here and then maybe ask you some questions about how dads specifically should go about navigating this, whether it's their family or someone in their circle. So I was in Las Vegas on spring break with my sister and her family and my family, and we're just hiking, going to national parks, playing a couple rounds of golf. It was supposed to be fun, spring break. And my wife called me and was like, mark, get up here. And I said, okay.
And I thought maybe she needed something carried out to the car. And she was holding a positive pregnancy test.
And for us in our mid-40s, we didn't think that was possible. We had been kind of. Everyone who's listened to this podcast for a while knows that I've always said, like, man, it'd be cool if God gave us more kids. But it doesn't seem like that's in the cards for us. We thought we were a lot closer to grandparenting than we were to parenting a newborn. But it was like this big wave of shock. And honestly, after the initial shock, it was total joy and elation. We were like, wow. It's kind of this dream that I have in different areas of life where I've thought, man, if you could go redo some phase of life to now, with all the wisdom you have, think about how great you could do it. And that's kind of how we felt about the prospect of a new baby coming. But my wife is an OB gyn. That's her profession. And so she was like, hey, there is a lot of pitfalls here. We shouldn't get too excited. I mean, we were trying to straddle between faith and God, and realistic, there's just chances that this doesn't pan out. And so we kind of walked that line. And as the weeks passed, we got genetic testing done, mainly because we were kind of of the mindset, well, we welcome any kind of life God's bringing, but it'd be cool to know if there's some. Some challenges ahead just because we are older and that's more common. And that all came back great. And my wife finally started to go, oh, man, I think. I think this is really going to happen. Like, we seem to be on the. On the path. We also found out we were having a baby boy, which I have three daughters, so that was really exciting, the prospect of a boy. And then one night, she works kind of part time now, but she happened to be on an overnight shift, and she texted me late at night and said, are you still up? And it was just a strange moment. I'll always remember it.
The offshoot of that was that we had lost our baby.
And, man, I don't know if this is. This is praise God, or just to tell you, like, I haven't had a ton of suffering in my life, and the grief that hit both of us totally blew me away. If a lot of our listeners we've spent time with, you guys know me, I'm not the most emotional guy.
And holy smokes, I was, like, weeping for the first time in my adult life daily. My times with the Lord felt, you know, I just. I identified with David a lot more than I had before. And just this idea of, like, all I can do is give you some tears, Lord. And so the feelings that hit were like, why did this happen? We were totally happy following the Lord, discipling our children and other people.
And then this joy came that we weren't asking for, but, man, we were excited about it, and now it's gone. Like, what was the point of that, God?
There was a little bit of shame, of, like, we feel a little stupid that we told everybody, hey, we're having a baby, and then we're not.
And there was obviously the pain of losing this son, the. The person that God had made, but also then sort of losing a life that we had started to really envision, wow, this life is, like, going to look different than we ever expected.
So that was. I think a lot of those things were common to parents. For us, I think whether it's true or not, one of the things that crossed our mind is, man, we're older, so it doesn't feel like we can just say, let's wait six months and try again.
That certainly possible, but it's. It's less.
Less likely to happen for us than if this had happened when we were earlier in our journey of growing a family. So that. That was something we had to deal with then. There were a lot of lies that I just know for sure are lies that came floating our way. Things like, I felt like it was an isolating experience. Nobody really cares about you guys. My. My guy friends who I think truly wanted to be thoughtful and would say things.
It was often like, I hope your wife's doing okay, or, how's your wife right now? And so the grief, I've found out, could make excellent soil for the enemy to just come in and attack a family.
And so in the midst of all that, one thing that my wife, as she was in the middle of some gnarly pain did is she Went out and she bought me a couple books. And you happen to be the author of those books on how dads should navigate this process. And I told you before we started recording, Eric, I said, that meant so much to me. And honestly, the books are great. We're going to talk about them. It didn't even matter if the books were any good. It was like somebody thought about me and the fact that I'm going through it, and that ministered to my heart. I mean, praise God, it was my wife, she's great.
But, like, it really turned on a light bulb for me. That said, especially as I started to emerge from the kind of the fog of war and just the constant grief into being able to see some perspective, that made me want to go, hey, I just want to alert guys that for sure this is going to happen in your world, whether it's you or someone you know.
And the simple act of saying, hey, I don't. Maybe I don't even have a clue what you're going through, but here, this might be helpful to you because I know that you're going through something, too. This isn't something that happened to your wife exclusively. And so I wanted to bring you on and just talk through some of that. I wanted this to serve our community. This happened now a few months ago, and to be honest to our audience, I couldn't talk about it for the first couple months, two or three months, because I wouldn't have been able to get through anything. I just said probably eight weeks ago. I do want to offer it, though, at this point to the Lord and just say, hopefully, this could be really helpful, my experience. But then also, like I said, someone like you, Eric, who's been through this and has been through it personally many times, and then has also kind of rolled that into figuring out some ministry opportunities to help people who are going through this on a regular basis.
So thank you so much for being here. Is that a fair intro to kind of how we ended up on this particular podcast?
[00:09:43] Eric: Yeah, that's a great intro, Mark.
One of the things I'm really encouraged by just listening to you tell your story is how much of the miscarriage experience you captured just in your summary there. It's obvious you've been reflecting on it really well.
You've been paying attention to what's been going on in your heart and in your mind.
And you really summarized well the. The roller coaster that we can go through when, from finding out that we're pregnant to worrying about whether the pregnancy will continue to the relief to the. To the shock and the grief of losing that pregnancy all the way to the lies that we tell ourselves and the loneliness that we can experience.
I thought that was a great summary of. Of the experience of miscarriage, which is a. Which is a terrible experience.
[00:10:39] Mark: And it is something. I think that's one of the first things I read in your book. It is something that you and your family have walked through.
So would you just kind of give us. How did you end up being an expert, if you will, on miscarriage and especially thinking about how dads navigate this?
[00:11:02] Eric: Yeah, well, it's a club that none of us want to join.
And I didn't think much about miscarriage. You know, I think the first time I ever heard about miscarriage as a young person was probably in my teenage years when a family member had experienced a miscarriage.
And then I really heard nothing about it until maybe in seminary when we had friends who were early into marriage and began getting pregnant and some of our friends were experiencing miscarriage. And one of my seminary professors, who I thank God for, Russell Moore, he spoke openly about he and his wife's three miscarriages and how it affected him as a man and as a father. And so that planted the seed in my mind. But my wife and I had our first three pregnancies resulted in live births of healthy baby boys.
And.
And there was a point at which we just thought, well, maybe this won't affect us. And then we had a pregnancy that my wife started miscarrying the day after we took the pregnancy test. And it was so early, we probably would have thought it was just a late period if we hadn't taken the test.
And that was around a time that another family member was going through an emergency ectopic pregnancy and, you know, very painful, life threatening. And we just chose to say, stay silent and not. Not say anything to anybody else. And part of that was we felt like we didn't want to detract from their suffering, which is an important thing to note and think about as we think about miscarriage, which I think is.
Can be a dilemma for us. And it can actually short circuit our grief when we feel like we can't share our grief because it might compete with somebody else's.
Moving on a few years, we had our daughter, our fourth child, and then we had another pregnancy that went on for several weeks, and then we lost that baby to miscarriage. And that was a really hard experience.
And then we shortly thereafter were pregnant again and had our third miscarriage, which was one that was Late enough into the pregnancy that my wife had the option of being induced after the miscarriage to deliver the baby still very early in the pregnancy. But we went into the hospital for that, and that was a completely different experience.
And actually left the hospital that time on the due date of the previous baby that was miscarried. And so there was just compounded pain in all of that. And it was particularly during those two that I experienced a lot of the things that, that you communicated about feeling very alone, feeling very unsure about whether or not I could speak about miscarriage and how to process my grief, how to act as a. As a husband, as a father, as a. As a man who was grieving the loss of his own children.
And then a year later, we had the birth of our fifth living child, which was a joyful occasion. And like you, we thought we were done. And then it was a few years later where we had a surprise pregnancy. And that was a whole different roller coaster of emotions because pregnancies had become very difficult and painful for my wife. We weren't desiring at that point to have more children. And so there was the roller coaster of finding out we were pregnant, grappling with that, coming to terms with it, and saying, this is a blessing from God and we look forward to raising this baby. And almost as soon as we reached that point, the miscarriage happened. And then we were plunged into grief and mixed with feelings of relief because we didn't have to go through the painful pregnancy, but then guilt over feeling relief over a miscarriage. And it was a very complicated thing. And, and that was a unique miscarriage as well. Not only because of the circumstances, but because we had just moved to a new city, to a new church.
There weren't many people there who knew us very well at all. And so we didn't know who we could share with and what we should share.
And so anyway, those, those four miscarriages happened and we walked through those.
And then at one point, my friend Emily Jensen, who's a co author of Risen Motherhood and co host of that podcast, she invited me to write for her audience to moms an article, a long form article on my experience with miscarriage to help moms understand what was going on in the life of the dads with their husbands.
And so that was the first time I really began to process my own story. I went away and kind of just immersed myself in and the events and tried to really grapple with what I was thinking and feeling through each of those that eventually became that book, Dad's Hurt 2 A Father's Memoir of Miscarriage.
And because of that article, Abby Wedgeworth, who was writing a book called Held, which is a 31 day devotional for women experiencing miscarriage, she asked me to contribute my testimony to that book, which I did. And when I got the book, it was just so well done. I immediately contacted the publisher and said, you need to write a resource like this for fathers because there is nothing out there like you experienced.
[00:16:47] Mark: Mark.
[00:16:48] Eric: There's just. I couldn't find anything explicitly Christian speaking to men on miscarriage.
And so I told them they needed to write it and I told them I wanted to write it and they were gracious enough to invite me to do that. And that's the book Hours Biblical Comfort for Men Grieving Miscarriage and so since then I've had a lot of opportunities to talk with dads like yourself who call and email and say no one else is speaking about this.
I need to talk to someone.
And I'm grateful to God for the opportunity to turn the pain and the loss into a way to help others run to and hope in Jesus in the midst of this.
[00:17:37] Mark: Given that that story kind of, I mean you do have a component of your nine to five day that involves counseling. You told me before we started. And I don't know if a lot of that is around this topic or if it's just something that kind of comes up, but I would assume you've heard from and talked through this with people who are going through it a lot more than I have.
Kind of like I mentioned, I felt like my whole experience was unique. It definitely resonated what you said, which is like, oh, we shouldn't share this as like we're at our home crying like we have never cried in our whole marriage. But then we can think of friends who have been through so much worse. And like I remember like thinking, well, I have this friend who lost a child and I don't want to act sad around him because man, he lost a three year old daughter and stuff like that. But so that I think there are unique components probably to every single miscarriage that ever happens. But I'm curious what you see are kind of the common experiences for dads. Maybe those handles that if this is you that's going through a miscarriage or maybe somebody sent you this podcast because they are trying to say, hey, we know you're going through a miscarriage and these guys were kind of talking about the process.
What are those kind of common experiences for a believing father who experiences this for the first time, maybe.
Sure.
[00:19:09] Eric: I think it's a great question and I want to just affirm something that you just said about the uniqueness of every miscarriage.
Every miscarriage is unique. And so I just want to give fathers the permission to grieve in unique ways because every couple is a unique couple. The circumstances of every miscarriage are unique.
And so we're not all going to experience them in the same way. And so if you don't identify with the things that, you know, we're sharing doesn't mean you're doing something wrong, it doesn't necessarily mean you're doing something right. It's just how you're experiencing your loss at this time. But there are some common elements that come up and I think one of the first ones is what you mentioned, which is how I was tempted to think about miscarriage, is this must be hard for the moms.
And we often think of miscarriage as a women's issue and there's natural reasons for that because obviously the woman is the one who is pregnant with the child. She's carrying the child in her body. Her body's going through all the different ways that the body changes physically and hormonally to be pregnant and get prepared to deliver a baby. And then when she miscarries, miscarries, her body goes through physical and hormonal changes as, as the, as the baby's miscarried. And she returns to a state of, of not being pregnant.
And it comes with it, it can come with a lot of intense physical pain and cramping, those sorts of things. And obviously the mother has been more likely to be thinking every single day because the baby's in her body. She's been thinking about her connection with this baby almost non stop for the endurance of the pregnancy as long as she's known that she's pregnant.
And so we naturally and rightly associate the miscarriage with the mother, but we're wrong to associate it only with the mother because we know it takes two to make a baby. And also you celebrated this pregnancy together and you looked forward to being at the birth together, and you look forward to raising this child in your home together in the state that things ought to be. And we know there's circumstances in a fallen world where things are otherwise, but a baby ought to have a father and a mother, and so we shouldn't remove the father from the experience of miscarriage.
You've rejoiced in this baby together, you should grieve this baby together. And so you as a dad who's walked through miscarriage are a father who has lost a child every bit as much as the mother has lost a child. And you are a couple who has lost a child together.
I think one of the, because of that mindset of thinking about it primarily as a mother's grief, I think one of the things that we can naturally do as a father is we can shift into fix it mode, into a checklist of things we ought to do, particularly if there's other children in the home. But as dads, we can begin to think about who's going to care for the other kids, who's going to make the meals, who's going to run kids to their activities, maybe the mother has prescriptions that need to be picked up from the pharmacy, needs to run and get groceries. There's all sorts of these things. And so the father can sometimes focus on getting the tasks done more than he focuses on his own grief or even on his wife's grief.
And the result of this is that she ends up grieving the miscarriage by herself, very much alone, which can raise the question in her heart, does he even care about this lost baby?
How is he feeling? Is he sad too? Or am I alone in this? And one of the encouragements I would give dads in that state is if you're in a healthy church community, even if you're not, if you have a circle of friends or other family in the area, you probably have people in your life who can do all of those other things.
They can run errands, they can pick up groceries, they can make meals.
But only you can be the husband to your wife. And only you can be the grieving dad who weeps with the grieving mother.
Don't overlook that role in your suffering.
I would encourage you, encourage you to lean into it and grieve together.
[00:24:03] Mark: I think that that resonates. I think that for our experience, again, just kind of bringing my one experience to this, having almost adult child, a 13 year old and a 10 year old, two of the three, certainly of our daughters, this hit them in a way that probably wouldn't have if they were 4 and 6.
And so Stephen, who's usually the co host of this podcast, I remember talking, he was the first person I called when we found out about this baby. And the person who I let know pretty quickly as soon as we found out about the loss, he said, hey, I think you need to just let your family see the grief. I don't know how much that was general advice for every dad and how much of it was him knowing me as like, Mark, I'm not sure your kids have ever seen you cry, but I took it. I took that advice. And as a family, I think.
I think that it was actually a positive for our girls to see that it hit dad and not just Mom.
I think they saw the fact that both mom and dad loved this child that was coming. And honestly, it kind of affirmed that whole.
We've said a lot of things since they've been old enough to kind of track with us about how we view children and family. And, hey, mom and dad had three kids, but you guys should welcome more if the Lord's willing to give you more. Like, we're all four big families. We talk about that a lot on this podcast. And really seeing children as wealth.
And I think it let our kids go. Oh, they weren't just blowing smoke. This is actually something that they were really excited for. So that was a good thing. I do think that one of the questions I started asking maybe a couple weeks into the grief process was, how long does this last? How long is it supposed to last, both for me and for my wife? Because I started, I was like, of course we're going to have an initial wave of grief, but am I supposed to buckle down for a year? Is it two weeks? Is it a month? I don't know what's okay.
Where do I start trying to cheer my wife up versus sitting in mourning? And so maybe that's my.
My next question is just how, as both an experiencer of grief and a family leader, how should a dad think about that initial punch in the gut? And how long does it keep the breath knocked out of you before you move on to maybe a different phase?
[00:26:44] Eric: That's a great question. And I think I just want to say the advice you got was so good. I think it was important for. For you to share the loss with your children and to grieve in front of them for all the reasons that you mentioned. And a big part of our mutual experience is never having seen someone grieve or talk about miscarriage. And so you have three children in your home. I've got five living children.
If one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, if my five children, Lord, wills they all get married and all have a pregnancy, statistically one of those pregnancies will end in a miscarriage. My kids are going to.
Likely one of them will experience miscarriage. And so I get to prepare them and train them through sharing my grief with them now to let them know that this life mattered. And we are sad that this baby is not with us, because life is a good thing and death is a result of the fall.
And it is to be grieved. Just as Jesus stood outside the friend, you know, his friend Lazarus's tomb and wept openly without shame in front of others because he was sad that his friend died.
And he was moved to anger in front of the crowds at Lazarus Tomb because he hated death. He hated what sin had done to this world.
So to your question, how long should I expect this grief to last?
Again, I want to emphasize that every miscarriage is unique and every dad is unique, and how we process grief is very unique. And so the waves of grief that you go through are going to be like any loss. There's going to be really strong moments of the deepest weeping perhaps you've ever done in your life.
And then your kids are going to do something funny and you're going to be laughing and enjoying life again.
And then sometime later, another wave is going to hit you.
And it's different for every man. But one thing I would note is something that you said earlier. You said we began something to the effect of we began to grieve the loss of this life that we began to dream about.
And that's something I like to remind miscarrying parents about, is that a miscarriage is what I call a manifold loss in the sense that it has many dynamics to it. And really the loss unfolds over time because what you have lost is a life.
So miscarriage isn't something that we get through. We tend to think of miscarriage as an event that happened at this point in time, and then we get past it.
But what we've lost is a life that would have endured most likely through the full extent of our lives.
And so the day is going to come when you reach the due date of this baby and you're going to remember we should have been in the hospital rejoicing over a little one. And the grief will hit you, and then you'll hit what would have been the first birthday, and then you'll hit the first day of school and the other couples at church that were pregnant at the same time, as you are now posting first day of school pictures on Instagram.
And you're remembering we're not, because we lost this life. And it can continue like that for you through high school graduation and when other people's kids are getting married, even into old age, where perhaps you're lonely in your old age and you're remembering you know, I had an aunt who lived to be over 100 years old.
And it wasn't until she was in her late 90s, I think, that she told my mom when I was talking about my miscarriages, she told my mom that she had experienced five miscarriages. And I don't believe she'd really ever talked to anybody about those before.
But they didn't have any living children.
And I can imagine that the grief of those five miscarriages maybe 80 years later, were still hitting her as she thought about the children she would have had if they hadn't been lost to miscarriage. Who would have been there with her in her old age?
And so the strength of our grief will rise and fall.
Sometime it'll just be low level and there. Sometimes it'll be absent and sometimes it'll hit us out of the blue and make us really, really sad.
And all of that's okay because we're living on this side of the resurrection where we're still in a world under a curse. We're still grieving, but we grieve with hope that Jesus has overcome sin, death, and he's making all things new.
[00:31:54] Mark: Yeah. The description you gave of the waves of grief, that's all I knew how to explain it as to my kids. I was like, I am standing on the beach and the swell is huge at the moment and I'm getting hit before I can hardly catch my breath.
And then a week later, it was like, the waves are not coming as fast, but they're still.
I mean, we might have gone from every 15 minute wave to an every couple hours wave type of thing.
There did come a point where I kind of felt like I remember very clearly the first day that I was like, I haven't choked cried today at all, and I don't think I'm going to.
And then I looked next to me and I said, and my wife seems to be doing maybe worse.
So I'm curious, like, if you ever get dads who either feel guilty that they're not feeling as bad. I mean, you said it at the start, like, hey, if this is your experience that you're walking through right now and you don't feel like Mark's describing, it's not like an indicator that you're not a good dad or a good Christian man, it's, it's not at all what we're saying. But like, I did feel a bit bad at times when I was feeling a little better and like, I think I might be able to get back optimistic about the world for stretches of time. And yet my wife is still in the thick of it.
How is a dad supposed to navigate that imbalance? It was almost easier when we were both just crushed than when maybe I was feeling a little bit like, I think I can get through today without too much, too much pain. But I know she's not there right now.
[00:33:39] Eric: I think what you're noting is really important again, that we all grieve differently, and that's going to be true of the husband and the wife. And we're going to grieve the miscarriage in different ways at different times. And just thinking back to those initial days after a miscarriage, some dads are hit really, really hard right away with grief.
But as I mentioned, some dads, they shift into caregiver mode. My wife's in pain. This is a medical emergency.
We've got all these household things to take care of, and he's executing, getting things done. And he might not even be at that moment thinking about what he's lost in this baby, whereas the mom is thinking about, we've lost this baby.
As a pastor, when I would walk through miscarriage with couples, one of the things I would notice is sometimes the wife would say, I'm not seeing him cry. He doesn't seem to be grieving what's going on. And he would say, I'm just trying to take care of you.
But then what I would notice is a few weeks after the miscarriage, as her body is returning to its normal, unpregnant state and she's beginning to get out of bed, going back to household duties, going back to work, going back to the normal routine when the need for extra care and attention has disappeared, suddenly the dad has the freedom to begin thinking about this loss. And he realizes he's not going to dance with his daughter, he's not going to play football in the front yard with his son, and it begins to hit him.
And as she's starting to do better, he feels like he's suddenly doing worse. And they're both going, what is going on?
And I think one of the ways we navigate that is just by being aware, by just being aware that sometimes, due to circumstances that we don't even understand, grief hits us hard one day and not the next.
What do we do with that in the middle of that? Like you said, it can feel easier when we're both.
Both totally down or we're both totally free from the grief in the moment because we're on this. We're sort of in the same space. And we can move together.
I think one of the things to remember is what God said before sin and death ever entered the world in the Garden of Eden. He said, it's not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper for him.
That's how we're designed. Before suffering ever enters the world is to need help.
And so let's say that I'm doing better as a dad. I'm having one of those days where I'm not crying.
I actually feel like I'm doing better.
And my wife is on the floor in a fetal position weeping over this loss.
Well, what are we called to do when we're the stronger ones? We're called to bear with those who are weak. And so I think we take that day and say, lord, today you've given me a lot of emotional strength and I'm doing well.
And I'm not going to be disappointed that my wife is on the floor weeping. I'm going to assume right now that you're giving me strength so that I can go and be with her in her sorrow.
And so we fight the temptation to think, man, if she was just doing better like me, we could get on with enjoying life.
But instead, we can take that opportunity to serve, and I think vice versa.
When we're the ones who are with our head on our desk weeping our eyes out and we can't even talk because we're so choked up and our wife's having a great day, the temptation can be, I don't want to leave my study to go tell her how I'm doing because she's finally doing better. I don't want to drag her down.
Assume that the Lord is at work in this and that he's giving her a stronger day so that she can come and be with you in your grief.
I think just taking these as opportunities to, in whatever season we're in, walk together is a good way to navigate this and honor the Lord.
[00:37:51] Mark: Yeah, one of the big light bulb moments for me, because I think once we diverged in our feelings, I'd have to ask my wife if this is 100% how she felt. But I think that there was a part of her that was like, man, I'm supposed to be, you know, I'm enduring suffering, and this is supposed to produce perseverance and build my faith. And I'm supposed to be like, you know, just the leaning into the Lord and feeling closer to him because of trials. You know, consider it pure joy, that type of thing.
But I don't and what I said to her and that as I was like, you've been burning the candle at 5:30 in the morning for the last seven years with the Lord and it's actually okay if you spend some of that money now. Like you've actually been putting deposits into the bank and developing intimacy with the Lord. You're not supposed to necessarily weather this feeling like a champion of the faith through suffering. Like it's okay if you just hurt for a while and don't feel God's presence right now. And, and that was actually really good for me to preach to myself as I looked at my wife. And like I said, the enemy likes to use, I think, disturbance like this in the home to start putting questions. And one of those questions was like, yeah, I heard this lie in my brain. Is your wife gonna turn her back on the Lord through this experience?
And I think the Holy Spirit just reminded me, no, because she is not only like his, and he's not going to lose, lose his grip on her, but also she has been doing a lot of work preparing for this that she had no idea was preparing for this. And like I said at the start of the episode, like, we have not, praise God, gone through a ton of suffering in our lives and Jesus kind of promises us that it's coming.
And I guess I always thought, well, maybe there'll be some great persecution of the church and that's when we'll suffer well for him. But sometimes it's the suffering that's just common to man, that some of those times just kind of, I don't want to say boring, but just the, the daily time with the Lord was kind of building up that foundation so that when the waves start hitting you don't knock over and praise God. That's kind of what I've seen in my wife. I wouldn't say that she would necessarily report today as the closest she's ever been to the Lord, but I do think that truth has borne out that it wasn't like it wasn't for nothing that she had been really building her faith through practice over time. And that was really, I think, helpful for both of us to go.
You don't have to act super strong at the moment.
[00:40:56] Eric: I think that's a really good illustration about putting those deposits in with the Lord.
You know, even if you think financially about a family building up an emergency fund, you know, it might be that you end up spending that whole thing when the engine on the car blows and it goes out, but sometimes it's little $100 here and there that the Lord calls us to use. And I think we often think about suffering in the Christian life as what you said, like a dramatic persecution of the church or martyrdom, where we write the whole check at once, you know, for the whole bank account.
But often suffering for the Lord is 75 cents here and $100 here and $10 there.
What Eugene Peterson called, you know, a long obedience in. In the same direction, a perseverance in the faith.
And I think just going back to what you said about, you know, even the idea of what James says about counting it as all joy.
I remember how Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness. You know, he came to him with. With half truths.
Satan loves to twist the Scripture, and he'll do that in our mind that if you were a good Christian, then you'd be walking through miscarriage with happiness because you'd be counting as all joy.
But again, to look back at Jesus, who at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, is weeping.
He is emotionally disturbed.
And think of him in the garden of Gethsemane where he is. His disciples observe him being troubled and anxious. And then he says, I'm sorrowful even to the point of death. I'm so sad that I could die.
And his agony becomes so great that he begins to sweat blood, which is probably hematidrosis, a condition where the stress, fight or flight response is triggered. And it's basically a panic attack. It's so severe that the blood vessels that supply the sweat ducts hemorrhage blood.
And this is the strain that Jesus suffering is having on his physical body.
And it's not because he was sinning, because he's sinless. And it's not because he wasn't trusting his Father, because he's the perfecter of faith. He's the perfect believer.
And so it's not sin. It's not a failure of faith to be on the floor of your bedroom weeping your eyes out in sadness.
That might actually be what faith looks like, because you are able to take that sorrow in all of its raw honesty before a throne of grace and trust. It's safe to weep in front of your Savior.
[00:43:44] Mark: Yeah, that's really good. You know, I'm out here in Mormon land in Utah, and one of the kind of things that you come to know about this place is that putting on the face of everything's great is like a core value in that community.
And it really damages people over time.
But I think that there's been kind of this whole whatever you want to call it deconstructionist movement that says all we should focus on is our doubts and our questions and our fears. I think there's a ditch on that side of the road too. But for the most part, like, Jesus is not afraid of our pain. He's not afraid of our anger, frustrations. I think it's okay to just be like, wildly emotional with him.
And in some sense, maybe the last thing I wanted to throw at you before I give you a chance to kind of see us out is what do you do if this isn't you?
Because I think one thing that was, like I said at the start, really hard is that most people, especially my guys who were really well meaning, their constant check in was, how's, how's your wife doing?
And that's good. I think their heart was there. And I did not.
If you're listening to this and you're one of those guys that checked in on me, it was received as, like, care for sure. But the few people that grabbed me by the shoulders and said, how are you doing, man? Like, what's going on in you? That was super, super meaningful. So I think that's one thing that if you're listening to this and you're like, I've never experienced that. And like I said, maybe you're a grandpa and you're just thinking, I've got a crew of younger guys at the local church that I get to have a coffee with once in a while, but what are the things that you would say as a body of Christ we can come around and do when this is, is occurring to guys that are in our circle?
[00:45:49] Eric: That is a really important question.
And I think it's so important because we're, we're all called to comfort each other with the hope of the gospel in all of our afflictions, whether we have personally experienced those afflictions or not. I, I don't get a pass on ministering to my neighbor because I haven't stood in their shoes.
And these are shoes that a lot of people are going to stand in. Miscarriage is unfortunately, fairly common. That doesn't make it easy.
And so one of the things that you can do to prepare yourself to be a good friend is to learn about the experience of miscarriage. So listening to this podcast has been a great starting point.
And, you know, my aim is not to sell books. It's to help people process miscarriage with the hope of the gospel.
That said, I would encourage men to grab these books, ours and dad's hurt too, for the sake of Just familiarizing yourself with the experience of miscarriage from someone else's perspective and to learn about the questions that men ask and how the Bible speaks to those questions.
That way you know how to be a curious friend.
I think what you don't do is you don't read the books and then run into the situation and go, I've read two books. I know exactly what you're experiencing and.
And begin to assume those things. But I think it prepares us for what I would call curious, benevolent curiosity, loving curiosity, where you can begin to ask some questions or at least open some doors for your friend to share.
And you won't be surprised by what they're walking through because you'll have seen them the landscape so far.
And perhaps the Lord will give you wisdom then to know how to navigate it. But I think to your point, just saying to them, I see you.
How are you doing?
You're a dad who's lost a baby.
Do you want to talk about it? And if not, I'm here when you do.
I want to hear what you're thinking. What are you feeling? What are you desiring right now?
I'm a safe space for you to share those things, even to say, I would love to listen with the promise that I'm not going to say anything in response.
Because sometimes the thing that hurts is when we share and then there's a trite or cliche reply. And what we really wanted was someone to listen and say, I'm sorry.
And so even, even saying, I'm open to you sharing with me what you're experiencing, I'm not going to argue with you. I'm not even going to respond unless you want me to. And that I'm glad to talk.
[00:49:00] Mark: Yeah, I think that's great. And for me, there were guys who I just talked to in passing or got a text from.
Some of the best conversations I had.
One guy was like, let's just go play some golf. And he's a guy who had told me some just horrible stuff he was going through just a few months before. And it was the same situation in reverse. It was just like being shoulder to shoulder. We say it a lot on the podcast, and I think it's almost like a cliche now. But, like, guys often do better shoulder to shoulder than face to face. I think this is a time where just presence can be really helpful. And if you're not in a relationship with a guy where sitting down and just having a long talk even is natural, I think going for a run and saying, hey, I know that you're going through something right now. Can I take you out for a run or can I.
Whatever, fill in the blank. It doesn't really matter.
And just to echo what you said, we'll put links to your books, Eric, in the show notes of this podcast.
I have a.
I mean, guys, you can do what you want.
I would say if you had a copy of this book and you read it, and even if you're like, okay, I read it, I got. I get it. But just having it in your home, there's a very good chance that this issue is going to pop up in your world. And just having it handy to say, hey, I was thinking about you, and I thought this might be helpful.
Like I said, I think that there was a part of me that was just so ministered to when my wife handed me any book. If it had been terrible, which it isn't, but if it had been terrible, I still would have been like, gosh, thanks for thinking about me while you're going through all this pain. And so I think that that's just an awesome resource to have at hand and will minister to a guy who. This is impacting them, like I said, almost regardless of whether they suck the marrow out of every page or just kind of skim it. I think the shorter book, Dad's Hurt, too, like I told you before we started, I think I read the whole book in a soccer practice. So my daughter was just in a practice, and I was sitting in a lawn chair with a pair of dark sunglasses on, so people couldn't see that I was maybe struggling through a book. But that one, very, very easy. So even if a guy's not a reader, very easy to get through. And then the book, ours is a devotional that's kind of designed for one little passage per day focused around the life of Jesus.
But I endorse both of those to our audience, both personally for you, but also to maybe have one or two on hand and stick him in a guy's hand. I promise you, you will bless a guy that is going through this. So before I take us home, Eric, anything that we missed that you'd like to communicate or places where people can find what you're up to, just what
[00:52:14] Eric: you just said is such a good point, Mark, that I think having a copy of these books and held by Abby Wedgeworth on hand in your home,
[00:52:25] Mark: just even standing, actually, she went through that one while I was going through your book. So they were both. They can definitely be companions.
[00:52:33] Eric: Yeah, I think having them just in your home somewhere. So that when a friend goes through a miscarriage, you know, often when we show up, they're not in a place where they want to talk.
We often don't know what to say, but to show up with a meal or a gift card and a couple books to say, hey, we wanted to drop these off and just let you know that we're praying for you.
The fact that these books are written like you said, immediately communicates to them other people have walked this path.
We can navigate it.
There is hope here.
And I think what you're doing, Mark, just, even in having this conversation is just such important work that we would be prepared to be able to go and minister to people when this strikes is such a good thing. So thank you, Mark, for doing this.
[00:53:32] Mark: Yeah, well, thank you for being here. Like I said, if you want to learn more about Eric's writing or his ministry work, we'll put some places where you can find him in the show notes. And yeah, guys, if this is an issue that has hit you, I promise you this issue has been in your orbit somewhere, whether you knew it or not. But just know that, like you said, Eric, Jesus is not unfamiliar with deep grief. And I think he knows this is part of the. The fact that our God became a man and experienced the things we experience.
And I just want to say that there's hope on. On the other side of this. And as much as your experience here is unique, which we. We kind of talked about, it's also something that is sadly common in this. This time before the return of Christ that we're in. And so I just want to encourage you guys that virtually at the Abraham's Walt podcast, we're here to equip you dads to run your homes. In this case, I do need to throw Eric, like, a cash bonus for somehow working money management into this episode. Good job there with the emergency fund metaphor. But we want you to run not just your dough, but also your homes like a biblical boss, which is kind of our tagline here. And this episode was maybe a little bit more somber than we are normally, but I felt like it was an important thing to share with you, and I hope it's blessed you. We will see you guys again next week here at the Abraham's Wallet podcast.
