Nothing Is Wasted: Part 1 - Davey Blackburn

A random, shuffled worship song becomes a turning point in a story no family ever wants to live. We sit down with pastor and author Davey Blackburn to talk about the murder of his wife Amanda and their unborn child during a home invasion, and the complicated road that followed. This conversation includes details that may be hard to hear, but it also holds steady focus on grief, faith, and the long work of healing.

Davey opens up about the kind of shock that scrambles your senses, your expectations, and even your beliefs about how the world works. We talk about the questions that show up after traumatic loss, especially the ones that don’t resolve with a neat answer: Why didn’t God protect her? Can I still trust God’s goodness? Instead of pushing those questions down, we explore lament and what Davey calls “wrestling with God,” a practice that makes room for honesty without walking away.

We also get deeply practical about parenting through loss. How do you keep a parent’s memory alive for a child without forcing your grief onto them? What do you do when questions come out of nowhere in the car ride to school? Davey shares tools shaped by lived experience and widower support work, including a simple “yellow card” idea that gives kids a concrete way to ask for time and attention when words feel too big.

If you’re looking for grief support, child bereavement resources, and trauma-informed guidance that respects both pain and hope, press play. Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and please rate and review so more grieving families can find the show.

Nothing is Wasted: https://www.nothingiswasted.com/

Order the book When Grief Comes Home: https://a.co/d/ijaiP5L

Jessica's House Resources: https://www.jessicashouse.org/resources

For more information on Jessica’s House or for additional resources, please go to jessicashouse.org 

Transcript

Welcome And Team Introductions

Gary Shriver 0:00

Hello, and welcome to When Grief Comes Home, a podcast dedicated to parents living through loss while supporting their child. Let's meet the team.

Erin Nelson 0:10

I'm Erin Nelson, founding executive director of Jessica's House.

Colleen Montague 0:14

Hi, I'm Colleen Montague, Program Director for Jessica's House and a licensed marriage and family therapist.

Brad Quillen 0:21

Hi, I'm Brad Quillen, and I'm the host of When Grief Comes Home.

Meet Davey Blackburn And Warning

Gary Shriver 0:25

This podcast goes along with the book of the same name, When Grief Comes Home, a gentle guide for parents who are grieving a parent or child while helping their children through the loss of their parent or sibling. And it's available at all major book retailers. Today, our guest is Davey Blackburn, author, pastor, speaker, and someone who's lived through unimaginable loss and found a way forward that honors both the pain and the possibility of healing. Davey's book, Nothing Is Wasted, How God Remedies What Is Lost, was born from his personal experience of tragedy when his wife Amanda was killed back in 2015 along with her unborn child. Since then, he's remarried, become a father again, and dedicated himself to helping others find hope after devastating loss. Now, for those of you listening today, this episode comes with a warning because parts of Davy's story are hard to hear as it revolves around the homicide of his wife and unborn child. But in the midst of it all, he found hope and healing and restoration. So let's go to the team now for part one of this two-part series: Nothing is Wasted. How God Remedies What is Lost.

Brad Quillen 1:42

Davey, welcome to When Grief Comes Home. Thank you for being here today with us. And let's start with the book title. Nothing Wasted. That's such a powerful statement. Especially when you're talking about loss and grief. Can you share some of your story and what led you to that perspective?

The Home Invasion And Shock

The Song That Became A Mantra

Davey Blackburn 1:59

Yeah, thanks, guys. It's an honor to be with you. And this that's such a great question because the it does the book title itself kind of grips you. Before it was a book title, it was more of a message that our family held on to immediately after I lost my wife in 2015 and our unborn baby in a home invasion. We were pastors and church planters in Indianapolis. And on Tuesday morning, November 10th, 2015, I left to go to the gym. And there were three men who were on a random crime spree through Indianapolis, had broken into several homes that morning and broke into the home three doors down from us, saw me leave for the gym that morning and decided to break into our home. And my wife was caught up in that. We had a 15-month-old at the time, and he was in his crib, untouched and unharmed. But when I came home from the gym, I found Amanda on our living room floor. And she was um, she was unconscious, she was unresponsive, she was still breathing. But uh, and I didn't realize it till we got her to the hospital that she had three bullet wounds. Um, and some people ask, like, how did you not realize that? There when you're in a moment like that that's so traumatic and it's so disorienting and dissonant from what you ex what you expect life to be when you're walking into your house. It just is I mean, everything goes in fast motion and slow motion at the same time. It's like your senses begin to pick up on really acute things, and then everything else fades into the background. And so then coupled with that, I was living with a little bit of a functional theology that would say, uh, now I would never have preached this, I would have never have told anybody this out loud, and I didn't realize it until I experienced it. But the theology I was living with was as long as we're following after God, as long as we're in the middle of his mission on the front rows of the kingdom of God, we're gonna be okay. Nothing bad's gonna happen. And uh sure, we might go through hard. We're planting a church, so of course this is gonna be tough, but tragedy will evade us. And that was uh that was a very stark confrontation. And so all of that just put me in a major shock. And then when I got her to the hospital and I and I heard from doctors and investigators that she she had three bullet wounds, it was just a it I didn't know how to process it. There was no, I didn't have a category for that. But you asked about the book title. We were in the hospital waiting for test results to come back. Uh, family, friends, everybody was coming in. One of the first people that showed up at the hospital was her sister. Her sister, they her sister and brother-in-law lived three hours north of us, but she just happened to be in town. She was actually flying back from a family vacation in California, flew back early, happened to spend the day before that with Amanda. And she just happened to be in town when all this happened. So she's immediately at the hospital. And after kind of the initial, you know, getting they got Amanda settled in, they're keeping her alive on life support, friends and family coming in, and all that, there was a moment, probably in the middle of the night, where it's me and Amber sitting on either side of the hospital bed, the same sides of the hospital bed, incidentally, that 15 months earlier, she and I were sitting on as we were holding Amanda's hands, and she's bringing Wesson into the world. So we're in a very different situation, but a very familiar setting. And I knew that if Amanda could hear anything, you know, we were kind of just in a in a place of just helplessness. We're going, God would believe that you can perform miracles and and you're gonna, and Amanda's gonna pull through here, and you're gonna, you're setting up our family for a miracle, like all of these things that this functional theology is living out right now, and I'm faith and denial and all this stuff converging. And I just had this moment where I said, I know if Amanda could hear anything right now, I'd know she'd want to listen to worship music, and specifically elevation worship, because that's what she used to, she used to listen to elevation worship and she'd go for runs. So I put on my phone on Pandora Radio Station, Elevation Worship Radio Station, put it at the foot of the bed, and it started playing. Well, Pandora is randomized, so you don't get to choose the first song that comes up. And the first song that came up was the song Nothing Is Wasted by Elevation Worship. And it was one of those moments I looked at Amber, she looked at me, tears in our eyes. There were no words that were necessary, but we knew what was happening. It was like one of those moments where heaven touches earth, and like this the spirit and the presence of God was in the room. But the message that he had for us was guys, I know that this is not going to turn out the way that you want it to, but I promise I will not waste it. And what it ended up later that week, so after everything happened, she's test results come back, there's no brain activity, she's pronounced officially deceased. We're all kind of left in the aftermath of this. All of our families descended on Indianapolis. We're sitting in kind of like our headquarters at my grandparents' house, my church staff, everybody, and we're faced with this impossible reality of planning the funeral after this thing has happened. And we're sitting around and we knew Amanda's heart, we knew what she stood for, we knew what she would have wanted her life to be about. 28 years old, this woman had an unbelievable walk with the Lord, an unbelievable faith. In the book, I thread some of her journal entries in there, and one of the biggest responses that people have said is her faith and what she has pinned in these journal entries has inspired me and my faith. And um, man, her legacy at 28 years old lives on beyond what many 88-year-olds would because of how just I believe faithful and steadfast she was with the Lord. So we're sitting around, we're going, okay, we don't, incidentally, we don't want to waste this moment because we want to commemorate what Amanda's life would have been about, as hurting as all of us are. And I know this is a grief podcast. We all know this feeling if we've experienced. We're like, how do you live in those two realities at one time? And we're sitting around the table and we just it came to our recollection, wait a minute, she has been spending the last three years building a business out of a hobby where she refinished furniture, and she would have me go pick up a dresser someone had thrown off on the side of the road, like American Pickers, you know, and just I'd be on the way home from work. She'd be like, Oh, there's this dresser off of there's this huge mansion now. They just threw a dresser. Can you pick that up? You know, I'm like, and I remember the first time I brought something home to her. I said, What are you gonna do with this? This is garbage. Someone literally threw this out. This is, and she looked at me and she said, Davey, trust me, give me a little time and I'm gonna turn this into something beautiful. And she did. She took this like free piece of furniture and she turned it for a profit at an antique show for like $450 or something. I'm like, whoa. So all of a sudden, my entrepreneurial brain's going, How do we scale this? How do we do this? You know, and she's like, Stop, you're taking the fun out of it. Like, this is an art, this is a craft. This is, and that's who Amanda was. Like, she just saw beauty in the things that nobody else saw beauty in. And that went for furniture, that went for people, that everything about her, that was her. She believed nothing was wasted. And so that week we're sitting there, and it just it was like another one of those moments where we felt like the Holy Spirit said, guys, trust me, give me a little time, and I'm gonna turn this into something beautiful. And so it became a mantra that our family held on to. That, you know, I've got a really rich legacy and heritage of faith, both on Amanda's side, my side, lots of pastors, lots of missionaries, none of us had experienced anything to this extent. And so there was just this collective like we're holding on to the fact that we know that God is a Romans 8.28 God, that He works all things together for the good of those who love him, who've been called according to His purposes. And when we can't see it, we are still gonna believe in that. So written on Amanda's tombstone is nothing is wasted in Romans 8.28. And over the last 10 years, I can say that I have seen God's hand at work and not wasting Amanda's life and and and not wasting our pain.

Erin Nelson 9:50

Well, thank you for sharing um especially about Amanda and who she was and the impact that she had on you, your family, and the world. And I just even just to share your story, Davey, and just the gravity of the story and how you never imagined that God would allow you to face something like that and to be in this moment of wondering, just knowing that you trusted that nothing would be wasted. And I'm wondering, were there times where, because I know when we talk to families in at Jessica's house and they're coming in right after a tragedy, um, they're seeing, they're asking that just classic question of why. And were there times that you had questions for the unanswerable?

Davey Blackburn 10:50

Yeah, absolutely. I think inevitably any kind of tragedy is going to cause questions to emerge that are that feel impossible because tragedy, trauma, all of that stuff, it disorients our perspective of who God is or who we thought he was, who we are, who we thought we were, what this world was like, what we thought the world was like. Yeah. And it causes us to come to these um kind of wrestling grounds where we go, wait a minute, and we're having to try to reconcile what we believed and what our lived experience is.

Erin Nelson 11:25

Yes.

Learning To Wrestle Instead Of Bypass

Davey Blackburn 11:26

And that is um, that is probably most prominent in times of loss, in times of grief. And so because I had such a rich heritage of faith, I didn't in the immediate aftermath of it, and I just explained, you know, share with you a story of how it felt like God stepped in in the middle of our pain, right? In the middle of our questions, I didn't question God's existence. I he had He had shown up so much in my life prior to this, and in our journey, even in our calling story to move to Indianapolis to plant a church, like God was very evident. The problem was is I began to question his goodness. Yeah, I began to question his motivation, I began to wrestle with this question of like, wait a minute, you called us here. Like we we left this unbelievably comfortable and convenient job. Like we were loving life as youth pastors at a really large, fast-growing church in South Carolina in what I believe is one of the greatest cities in the country, a hidden gym, Greenville, South Carolina. I'm like, this is this was the the ideal, 22 to 25 years old. There's no way, like, come out of college and this is the dream right here. And you called us out of that to go into this space and plant a church, and then this is what happens. And that was a deep, deep wrestling to go, what are who are you, God? What's your motivation in this? Like, why would you allow or cause or and I wasn't sure at that point, yeah. And so what I found though is that I found the I don't know if I would say I would I've found answers specifically. Sure, some of my questions have been answered or resolved. I haven't found the fullness of those answers, but I found something even sweeter in the wrestling, and that is the mysteries of God's character, his nature, and in ways that can only be revealed through suffering. And so what I tell people now is this, and it's only through like learning this that I had to begin to wrestle with God instead of buying into this idea that often Christendom can tell us, like, don't question God, you know, just just like you know, believe his promises and his praise, you know, shout, shout your praises in the middle of your problems and all of these things that cause like spiritual bypassing to happen. I begin to realize, no, if I wrestle with God, if I take these really difficult questions to God, instead of tucking them out in my back pocket and walking away from God, which is what often people do, which is what often leads to what we have termed deconstructionism in the church now, where people go, I have these really big questions, I don't know what to do with them, and it doesn't look like the church is a safe place to ask these questions. So I'm just gonna walk away from the church and I'm gonna walk away from God. God's inviting us to wrestle with him in these questions. We see this most notably in the story of Jacob. Jacob is wanting something, his entire life is oriented around deceiving, manipulating to get the blessing that he wants. His name is heel grabber, supplanter, deceiver. And yet God meets him at the fort of Jabak before he can step into the next season of his life, before he can reconcile with his brother, before he can step into the land that God has given him. And God goes, We're gonna confront this right here. We're gonna wrestle this down. He wrestles with him all night, and what he does is four things. He breaks his hip, he heals him, he changes his name, and then he blesses him. And I believe that when we wrestle with God, we experience the same thing. By the way, he changed his name from Jacob to Israel, which became the moniker for God's people. They call themselves the Israelites, and that means it means one who wrestles with God. So they like define themselves by we are a people who wrestle with God. In Western American Christianity, we have not defined ourselves that way. We have missed out on the art and the beauty of wrestling with God and in lament and bringing these really deep grievances, even toward God, to God.

Erin Nelson 15:22

Yeah.

Davey Blackburn 15:23

And I think because of that, we're missing out on the beauty and the essence of who God is, and we're missing out on the change and transformation that He wants to bring into our lives. And so the what's beautiful about a Jewish name is there's always two sides of the same coin. So it doesn't just mean one who wrestles with God, it also means Israel means one on whose behalf God wrestles. So what that means is when we wrestle with God, he wrestles on our behalf. When we bring him these deep grievances, when we bring him our grief, our pain, our sorrow, our hurt, then he does the work that only he can do. And he begins to mend and he begins to heal and he begins to repair and he begins to restore and he begins to build back. And 1 Peter uh chapter 5 tells us that he himself, after we have suffered a little while, he himself, he doesn't send an emissary or an ambassador on his behalf. He himself will restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish our feet. And I I have found that. If you were to summarize my story, I have found that in the middle of the wrestling because he he breaks us, which is what all of us end up going through when we begin to wrestle with God. We begin to, there's a humility that comes in where we go, Oh, I'm not the point of the story. And yet God has chosen me in a unique and beautiful specific way, in this little point of history, the whole arc of history. It's like when he told Job, Hey, were you around when I hung Orion in the sky? Were you there? And Job's like, and even in the midst of Job's Job's grief, there was something sobering and restoring to realize how small he was in the whole story arc of all of history, and how important he was in it that God would talk to him personally.

Erin Nelson 17:08

Yes.

Davey Blackburn 17:09

And then God heals him in that, and God changes Jacob, which he does for us too, and then he blesses us. And so now we walk out of grief or we walk out into this next season with a limp, but it's a limp that tells a story and that ultimately ministers to others.

Erin Nelson 17:27

Yes, it's such an honest process, right? And that process is so big. I know after my son Carter died, just kind of saying to God, like, I don't know if I can trust you because I've always believed in your protection. And I really don't know, but I did feel like just that wrestling and that honesty, it was transformative. And also I just felt and I remember one morning just feeling like God just leaned in and just said, It's okay. Like you don't feel like you can trust me, but my faith comes from, you know, your faith comes from me. And to trust that he does restore that. And but it really can only happen in the wrestling and in the openness and in as he welcomes that with us and knowing it's a safe place to be and just to be in it with him.

Davey Blackburn 18:21

And we we have an aversion to that.

Erin Nelson 18:23

Yes.

Davey Blackburn 18:23

I think just in general, and again, we can go back to lament, right? But grieving is painful.

Erin Nelson 18:31

Yeah.

Running Toward Triggers For Healing

Davey Blackburn 18:32

And the the propaganda that Western American culture tells us is head your life with comfort, convenience, safety, and security. And so uh we feel really disoriented and almost even morally debased for feeling deep feelings of sorrow. Yes. Like, what's wrong with me for feeling this? Nothing, nothing's wrong. You're human, you're experiencing the human experience. And this is actually the pathway to finding God and to healing. And instead, people try to kind of bottle it up, kind of box it up, push it away because it's just too painful to confront. And God's going, No, hey, let me, I want you to experience healing. So I want you to enter into these emotions. I want you to almost befriend these emotions and bring all of these things to me. And in that, you're gonna find me. I I had a similar experience where I remember a friend of mine advising me, you need to run toward all of your triggers. Don't run away from them. That's where you'll find God. It will be excruciating, but if you run toward them, if you lean into them, God's gonna meet you there, he's gonna heal you. And one of those triggers was I had going back into my house. And three months after Amanda passed, I'd not gone back into my house. For one, it was a crime scene until the arrests were made, and then I just couldn't pallet the idea of going back and living there. And, you know, but at some point I knew I had to go back and confront it. So I arranged for her family to meet me there. My dad dropped me off. I said, I need an hour by myself before we can go in and start sorting through her stuff because it was haunting me.

Erin Nelson 20:04

Yes.

Davey Blackburn 20:05

House was I was waking up with cold sweats and nightmares. Even though this house was a house that was dedicated to ministry, we started our church in that living room. We saw people come to know Christ in that house. We brought Weston home to that house. Like we shared so many beautiful memories. The last thing that happened in that house was haunting me now. And so I knew that that this was a trigger that needed to be confronted and that somehow God was going to meet me in this. So I walked through the threshold of the house, retraced my steps that morning, and I lay down the spot that I found her, and I just wept. And just for the next 45 minutes, just wept. I had worship music in my earbuds. I'm playing the first song, by the way, that I put on that worship playlist was nothing is wasted. And I'm just weeping and weeping. And there was something so powerful that happened where God, His Spirit met me there. And I remember having an experience where the biggest question I was wrestling with was like, Why did you not protect her? Yes. Why was I not here to protect her? Like as a husband, I felt like that was my job. That was my there was nothing else I do. I need to protect. I felt that's obligation to her dad. Like, I'm supposed to be here to why was it not me? And I remember looking up, so our ceilings were vaulted ceilings, but there was like a half-loft upstairs, and Weston's room was right on where the railing is of this half half-loft. And I remember like looking up, and I can't say I had a vision, but I it was the closest thing I could probably have to a vision. I remember uh kind of in my mind's eye, seeing Jesus standing outside of the his room and looking down. If you were to stand there on that railing, you could look down the living room and see everything that was happening that morning. And immediately Acts chapter seven comes to mind where Stephen is being martyred for his faith, first martyr. And Luke, who writes the book of Acts, also wrote obviously the book of Luke. And as a physician, he was the most explicit. About Jesus' suffering. He explained the suffering of Christ more than any other synoptic gospel. But when it comes to Stephen's martyrdom, it's the language is strange. There is no suffering described. And what it says is that the men drug him out, began to throw stones at him, and Stephen looked up and his face was glowing. And he saw Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father. Which, when Jesus stands at the right hand of the Father in Scripture, there's only a couple of times that we see this. Most times we see him seated. What it means is it means there's an injustice that's happening, and Jesus is going to make it right. He's like, I'm not, I'm not, ironically, I'm not standing for this, right? I'm standing for this. And so then he says, Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing. And I just had this image of Amanda looking up and seeing Jesus. And scripture tells us, where o death is your sting. Where is your victory? On the other side of the resurrection, because Jesus is raised from the dead, there is no sting in death. Now it feels like it stings on this side of eternity.

Erin Nelson 23:05

Yes.

Davey Blackburn 23:06

But but precious in the sight of the Lord are the death of his saints. And all of these things are converging at one time. And it's like the Lord was, for me, beginning to reconcile Davy. I protected her in ways you could never protect her. And that question right there was resolved in that moment. My point is this the only way it was resolved, it was not because I read it from some book, it's not because I listened to it from some podcast. It's because I took that question and I brought it to the feet of Jesus. And I said, Where were you? And Jesus goes, Here's where I was.

Helping A Child Grieve With Care

Erin Nelson 23:39

That's so profound. And I really believe that in a very deep way, that God is with those who die and who are suffering, that we can't imagine how he's with them. And but I just know it. You know, I just know he's there and that he is protecting them and taking care of them. And we just we don't we probably don't we don't know because we haven't experienced it, but he he's doing it. And thank you for talking about Weston and the protection over him as well. And as you were left as a solo dad, can you talk about just how you've been able over these years to keep um Amanda's memory alive for him?

Davey Blackburn 24:27

Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, it's um it's challenging because everybody has their own journey. And one of the things we were advised early on, whether this is right or wrong, was to try to find the balance of keeping her memory alive for him, but not making memories for him until he's ready for those memories. So it's a little bit of like early childhood development psychology, as well as like, hey, we're trying to help paint a picture for you, but we don't want to paint this other this kind of fantasy world that would cause you to uh almost disassociate from so it was like we're we're all like we were so confused, like, what do we do? He was 15 months old, so he didn't he doesn't really have any of his own cognitive recollection from a developmental standpoint of his mom. But one of the things that we were advised to do and was as he begins to ask questions, just share. Yeah, kind of taking cues from him. I think sometimes in our effort to grieve, we can be guilty of grieving on our kids and kind of imposing some of our own grief on them in ways that they're not able to metabolize.

Erin Nelson 25:44

Yeah.

Davey Blackburn 25:45

And because we're looking for some kind of connection from like what we or who we lost, and we're going, oh, well, this, you know, he's our connection to her. So we use him as a soothing kind of and that can be really troubling for a child early on. They're trying it's trying to experience their body. I'm reading a book right now by Peter Levine, who's the founder of somatic therapy called uh trauma through a child's eyes. And it's just really eye-opening, right? To to see how trauma loss stays inside of a child's body, even when cognitively they're not really able to understand it. We all know the book, The Body Keeps the Score. So we kind of get an understanding of that. But I think that um trying to help them metabolize it at a space that is that is appropriate for their development is probably one of the most difficult things to do and one of the most important things to do. So we just try to take cues from him. And there are certainly different like memories that we share. So there's certain moments where it's like, okay, if it's on her birthday, we try not to make a big deal about some people make big deals about the anniversary of their death. We we choose to, and that's fine. That's it, it is it every person has to kind of do what they need to do to process through stuff. Grief, there's no one way right way to do it. There's a thousand wrong ways to do grief, but there's no one right way to do it. And so we just try to emphasize, hey, let's let's bring memories of her, you know, when when it's her birthday, let's visit her grave on like Mother's Day or birthday if we're gonna do stuff like that. And bring life and light into all of it because that's the story, that's the worldview that we want to impress upon our kids is that death is not the final word.

Erin Nelson 27:27

Yeah, and just making it natural, right? Just I really like what you're saying. You're just responding to him, you're keeping it natural, you're having those conversations, and if you have thoughts, you can talk about it. And my son was three when um when his dad died, my husband Tyler, and he just asks it's still going on that conversation. He's a a grown man now, and those conversations still happen, and I still take my cues from him. And you know, sometimes, you know, I'll bring something up that I'm thinking about his dad, but it just becomes kind of part of your life, and you're bringing them along with you. And so, but I really like what you're saying about not projecting your own grief onto your kids, that feels really healthy. Thank you.

Davey Blackburn 28:13

Well, and you'll find like, and I think the important part about that is if you are going to take cues from them, you better be ready to stop whatever you're doing when they do have a question.

Erin Nelson 28:22

Yeah.

Davey Blackburn 28:23

Because they'll they'll come up at the most seemingly inopportune times.

Erin Nelson 28:26

Yes.

Davey Blackburn 28:27

It's like, whoa, where did this come from? Right. And if we then what we teach them, if we like try to dismiss it, then we teach them that that is not okay to bring up and you have to just shove that down or stuff it, which is the exact opposite that we want. We want them to bring it out into the open. We want cognitive behavioral therapy to be facilitated right there. We want them to talk about. We want to talk about it with them. How's that making you feel? What is that? I remember driving the car to drop Weston off at school one time, and he asked the question, Does it hurt when you get shot in the head? And I'm like, Oh dear Lord. Like, please. I don't have I don't know what to say right here. I don't know what to do right here. You know, of course, we have scripture that tells us when you're interrogated, Jesus told his disciples, Don't worry, the Holy Spirit will give you words to say right there. So fortunately, the Lord gave me some really great words to say, but that was a moment where you're going, This is deeper than just him asking this question. Yes, he's processing some things right now. Yeah, he's trying to understand some things.

Erin Nelson 29:19

Absolutely.

Davey Blackburn 29:19

And this is part of his grief.

Erin Nelson 29:21

And just to feel comfortable, we talk a lot um with the parents at Juskis House about answering their kids' questions honestly, as honestly as you can, because you know what you're doing is establishing that trust. So Weston knows that he can come to you with anything, anything that's in his mind, anything he's thinking about, and he could just talk to you about it. And you will in that moment stop and be present to that.

The Yellow Card Tool For Kids

Davey Blackburn 29:48

Yeah. We lead a widower retreat a couple of times a year with a friend of mine, actually, Refuge Widowers is the name of it. So it's my friend's ministry, but I always go and help him with it. And we, one of the other like uh presenters who's a widower, he came up with this idea, which is brilliant. It's very simple. And he passes out these stacks of yellow cards to all the widowers. And it's around this topic, he says, Hey, listen, you got a lot of life, you're trying to live that your busyness, you're trying to just like hold life together, but your kids need spaces to process this, and it's always on their time, it's never in a convenient time. So give each one of your kids one of these yellow cards and let this be kind of a trump card that at any moment they can come to you and hand this yellow card because sometimes they can't verbally even say that in a way that but they can hand it to you, and that's their indicator to say, Hey, I need a moment with you to talk about something or to try to process something. And that has been just a brilliant, I think, uh parenting move on that on that side of things.

Erin Nelson 30:46

So I love that. That would we're gonna put that in our toolbox. Yeah, that's good.

Gary Shriver 30:51

This has been so good, but unfortunately, we're out of time for today's episode. But we'll be back next time for episode two of Nothing Is Wasted, how God remedies what is lost. Erin?

Erin Nelson 31:04

For our listeners, Davey's book, Nothing Is Wasted, is available wherever books are sold, and you can learn more about his work at nothingiswasted.com. We'll include links in our show notes.

Colleen Montague 31:15

Hey listeners, if today's conversation brought up feelings or questions about your own grief, please know you're not alone. We encourage you to reach out to a grief support organization in your community. If you go to nacg.org, there is a search engine there to look up resources near you. And as always, you can access resources on our website at jessicashouse.org.

Resources And How To Get Help

Brad Quillen 31:38

Erin, I know there's something you wanted to share with our listeners today as we wrap up this podcast. Why don't you go ahead and take a moment?

Erin Nelson 31:45

Just as our listeners have given us really great feedback, I just want to say if you could just take a moment to rate our podcast and also write a review. It helps get it into the hands of those who need it most. And so every time you review a podcast, it goes up a little bit into ratings. And so if somebody just types in grief in a podcast search, they can find this podcast. And as we know that it's been so helpful for parents who are grieving, we want to get it into more hands. So please rate and review.

Brad Quillen 32:23

Thanks, Erin. And let me remind you, be sure to visit jesscashouse.org for more grief resources. And if you have any other topics or questions you'd like us to cover on this podcast, we welcome your email at info@jessicashouse.org. Be sure to join us for the next episode of When Grief Comes Home. Until then, we wish you well.

Gary Shriver 32:45

Jessica's House is a children's bereavement center located in California's Central Valley since 2012. We provide free peer support for children, teens, young adults, and their families grieving a loss. The When Grief Comes Home podcast goes along with the book of the same name. The book When Grief Comes Home is a gentle guide for parents who are grieving a partner or child while helping their children through the loss of their parent or sibling. When Grief Comes Home is now available at all major book retailers. And if you need grief-related support, please visit jessicashouse.org to download our free resources and be sure to follow Jessica's House on social media. If you have any questions or topics that you'd like us to explore in a future episode, just send us an email to info@jessicashouse.org. Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time for When Grief Comes Home.