How To Lead Your Family Through The Unthinkable with Jim Bob Haggerton

When life breaks you, how do you lead your family?

In this episode, Whitney Sewell sits down with Jim Bob Haggerton to talk about the loss of his newborn son - and how that season became both the hardest test of his faith and a powerful encounter with God.

Jim Bob shares what it looks like to lead a wife through grief, guide children through loss, and stay grounded in Christ when everything feels uncertain.

This is a raw and deeply practical conversation for any man facing hardship and wanting to lead with strength and humility.

Watch on YouTube:
 https://www.youtube.com/@TheWhitneySewell

Instagram:
 https://www.instagram.com/whitneysewell

Download Whitney’s Personal Operating System:
 https://courageousmen.com/personal-operating-system

Learn more:
 https://www.whitneysewell.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

That says, hey, baby's here. It's not good. Hurry up. No matter if the baby makes it or not, no matter if Cindy makes it or not, I'm like, we're going to trust you no matter what. The starting point for men in any situation in the lead is understanding what your priority is and what your main mission is. My number one call, period, is to serve my wife.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to the Courageous Men Podcast, where we help Christian men follow God faithfully, love their families well, and build a legacy that lasts. And now your host, Whitney Sewell.

SPEAKER_02 0:35

Welcome back to the Courageous Men Podcast. Thank you for being here. Thank you for striving to be courageous in how you lead in your business or as a husband and as a father or in your community. Man, keep pushing forward. I hope you'll go to WhitneySowell.com and sign up for my newsletter. I want to inspire you every day to lead as Christ wants you to lead and how he is equipping you as a man to do just that. Will you do that? Will you go there and sign up? I want to connect with you and help you and inspire you. Today, our guest is Jim Bob Haggerton. Jim Bob is a friend of mine. I've known him for a few years now. And he is someone who lives on purpose. And he also lives out loud. I love his energy and his desire to serve in so many capacities. And you're going to hear that today. He and his wife went through a super difficult season. And he's going to share many details about that with you. He's so transparent about it. It just hurts me to think about it. But he is so transparent in wanting to help you and me go through difficult seasons. We talk about how he led his wife through this season, how he led his children and so many details around that. And I hope that you'll listen because you know you're going to be challenged. You know you're going to receive, you know, have difficult seasons in front of you. And I want you to be prepared as best you possibly can. And Jim Bob is going to help us in a big way to do that today. Jim Bob, welcome to the Courageous Men podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Hey, thanks, Whitney. I appreciate you having me on.

SPEAKER_02 2:15

I am honored to have you on. The more I've gotten to know you, just and just more I'm inspired by you. I mean, your your desire to live on purpose. It's it's obvious. I mean, uh, in your family, your work, your businesses. Uh I just I love how you love the Lord. And it just it comes out in all those ways, which is is so good. And and so, and we're trying to help the men listening to do just that as well. And so I I love diving into hard things, right? With men. And and I know that you've had a season at one time that was uh one of your hardest. And but I love how you you talked about you talk about how it was the hardest test of faith, but at the same time some of the sweetest. And so I want to help men to see that because I know men listening are I mean, we all have seasons, right? And there's going to be seasons of challenge, whether you like it or know it or not. It's gonna happen. And so I I want to help prepare them for that or help them in the moment of that. And I know you've had some of that. And so I would love to dive into that, some of that time period. Maybe you can highlight some of that, a little bit about what was happening, and you know, let's start there.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

So in 2014, we had actually just come out of probably our hardest season in our marriage ever to that point. I think we've been married like 10 years. We had two kiddos at the time. I think we only had two or three businesses at the time. You know, you know, people are like, man, how do you live on purpose? Well, just have enough kids and start enough businesses, and you don't have time to do anything else, and you're just constantly doing things, right? But at the time, I think we had three businesses, two kids. And we thought that the season we had just walked out was it. We're like, dude, we did it. Like we made it. We made it through this hard season of our marriage, we're done. That's our one check mark with the Lord that we're there, we finished this hard part, and now we're golden, right? And that's not what scripture says. I mean, it just says uh take card because you're gonna have trouble. It doesn't say you're gonna have a trouble, you know, one. And in 2014, we found out, well, I guess at the end of 2013, but moving into 2014, we found out we were pregnant with our third baby, second son, and we're pumped, right? We're like, dude, this is a rainbow baby. We're excited about this. This is like redemption because we did all the work to get through all the heart, right? And we get to about 33 weeks into pregnancy. My dad, my mom and dad had had a vacation home that they were retiring in in Colorado, and they were going back and forth. Well, he ends up in the hospital with this septic blood infection in New Mexico. So I fly out. Cindy wasn't feeling great, but I thought it's just like we, there was a couple we were like, oh, she's stressed out. We were in the transition of moving out of one house into another. So we had been staying with our in-laws a little bit. We're like, probably just my in-laws stressing her out. And so I'm in New Mexico and she calls me. And, you know, and it's the we laughed because, but it's all the ways that we just kind of like brush off, oh, it can't be anything major. It's got to be this, it's got to be the breakfast you ate or whatever. She calls me. I remember that Saturday morning on uh June 14th in 2014, and she's I could tell it's like she's not feeling right. And I could tell that she was only 33 weeks at this point. We were scheduled to have a home birth. We'd had home births for their other two kids, but it just didn't feel right. And I had this like real and subtle feeling. So I hang up, I call our midwife. She was at the movies with her husband, who is a retired firefighter. I said, I don't think she's doing it. I think something's going on. I need you to go check her. So they go over to the house. Well, come to find out Cindy was starting into labor, you know, way early, which wasn't right. And so this midwife calls me. She said, Hey, something's wrong. She's going into labor early. You need to get home. Well, I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She goes, You need to get home, like now. So I call the airline and I'm there with my mom in the hospital. My dad's like literally like, you know, life support. He made it, you know, he was fine afterwards, but he's like on all this stuff. And I'm like, oh my gosh. I'm like, I gotta get home. And I called the airport. There was one flight that was leaving in like 30 minutes, and I'm across town. And my mom, to her credit, she's amazing in emergency. She's like, we can make it. Let's go. And so we took off running, grabbed my stuff. And I mean, just, you know, burn the engine up in that car, get across town. All the miracles happen for me to get on the flight, get on the front seat, get back to the FW. And in the middle of the air, like we're halfway back from Santa Fe. I remember just praying like so hard. I'm listening to worship music, and I get this one text that comes through, like the random one text comes through, and the midwife it says, Hey, baby's here. It's not good. Hurry up. That's all she said. And I'm like, and then nothing, like the rest of the flight, man. I'm like, what's not good? Cindy's not good, the baby's not good, the food at the hospital's not good. I'm like, where are we at? Like, nothing. Nothing else come through. My text won't go through. And so I'm freaking out, like in the front of the flight. And I remember the Lord reminding me, and this thing just came up in me months before this had happened. We had been at church, and the pastor was talking about two daughters, his daughter and his daughter-in-law, on stage, and both of them calling him with emergent situations at this, like within five minutes. And he was telling us all about what he told him in the moment. This is what the whole sermon was about. And I think they were both pregnant, and both of them were having complications with pregnancy at the time is the story. And I remember him saying, he goes, Yeah, this daughter, you know, over here called and she, he's like, Man, babe, I know you're scared. I'm gonna pray and look, we're gonna trust the Lord no matter what. We're gonna trust him no matter what. And then he hangs up and he said, five minutes later, his daughter-in-law calls and similar thing, da-da-da-da. And he's like, Man, I know you're scared. I'm gonna play and we're gonna trust him no matter what. We're gonna trust the Lord no matter what. And he hangs up, and one of them kept the baby, one of them lost the baby, but he's like, no matter in the good or the bad, we're gonna trust him no matter what. And that was the premise of the sermon. I haven't felt the Lord slap me hard like that a lot in life, but I just got this boom like this, like someone hit me in the chest. Like, like, you need to hear that. Like, this is for you. So I'm on that flight coming back, and my midwife's text is like, baby's here, it's not good. And as I'm like starting to panic, this is the thing that comes up like, are you gonna trust me no matter what? And so I'm like, No, I am like, we're gonna trust you no matter what, whether it's good or bad, no matter if the baby makes it or not, no matter if Cindy makes it or not. I'm like, we're gonna trust you no matter what. And then I calm down, get there. My friend picks me up at the airport, which was bizarre. He shouldn't have. My father-in-law was supposed to get me. So I immediately knew it was bad if my father-in-law wasn't there already. We raced across town. I get to the hospital, and unbeknownst to me, Cindy had found all this out without me because she had delivered Evans with me in the in the air. And so her grief journey was a completely different thing because when when she was delivered, when he when she delivered him, he couldn't breathe. Like they were the doctors were like, Well, he's not breathing good. So they did testing on him, took him back, and they realized he only had one partially developed lung and the other hadn't developed because he had a genetic condition called Potter syndrome. We had no idea. We didn't do any, you know, ultrasounds or any testing before, which honestly, thank God, because we enjoyed the whole pregnancy. We didn't know anything about it. There was no stress during the pregnancy, and the pregnancy was really good. And, you know, other blessing of it in Potter's syndrome, when usually the babies don't even make it to turn. Usually moms are delivering stillborn babies because they don't make it through the entire pregnancy. And Evans made it and lived, and they had him on, they put him on a ventilator. He lived for two hours until I got there. And we came in. Friends were already there waiting on me. Everybody was just waiting on me to get there to be able to again lead them through this process. And I remember this friend of mine who had lost his son two years before, and we had walked through that with them. I remember being on the phone with him on the way into the hospital. And I was like, dude, I can't do this. I'm like, I'm not gonna be able to make this happen. And he goes, Yeah, you will. He goes, look, he goes, you're gonna walk in there and you're gonna teach them how to grieve. You're gonna teach them how to walk this out. And I'm like, okay. So I walk in and we had to bring our kids in, our two at the time, and you know, explain to them that we weren't gonna get to go home with him. And we turned it, we took him off the ventilator, had him until he passed away there in the room. And then we drove home with an empty car, you know, and those same friends that that guy I talked to that had lost kids a couple years before were waiting on us in our driveway. So we get home at like 2 a.m., empty car seat, mom with no baby to nurse, you know, Cindy, and we get there, and they literally stayed in our master bedroom, sat in the floor with us all night that first night. And then we moved into this, you know, really insane grieving season. But again, like you said earlier, like like everybody grieves differently. And so, like the kids grieved differently than Cindy, grieved differently than me, and the way that she handles pain and disappointment is completely different. And for me, it was this kind of an out-of-body ethereal experience of despair mixed with the most peace and joy I could really ever imagine over the last few the next few days because you know there was nothing else. I mean, I honestly have no idea how families deal with child loss outside of have of the Lord because it was literally this thing of I had nothing. I remember getting up at four in the morning the next day and mowing the grass. Like I didn't know what else to do. Like I it didn't even need mowing. You know, I like get up and I'm out there and Cindy's like, she gets up, she's like, What are you doing? I was like, anything, like anything to just have something to do that I can control. And I was just mowing dead grass, like outside my neighbors, you know, were like, what is going on? And you know, and we kind of started this whole process, and that was back in 2014. So this year he would have been 12 years old. We commemorate his birthday every year. Our older two kids are 17 and 15 now, our son and daughter. And, you know, they obviously remember every single detail and we've walked out stuff with them, and it's really marked them. It's marked, you know, their faith, how they really look at, you know, the scriptures different. I mean, like, like we talk to people all the time, you know, now on the other side of it. We're still in it. We tell parents and family all the time this isn't something to get over. It's something you're gonna go through forever, right? It's not like when people go, oh yeah, you're good, like you're good, right? I'm like, no, I hope I'm never good. I hope I'm never over my son, right? And like, you know, you get over a sickness or you get over an injury. That's kind of how they, oh, are you over your knee pain, you know, or are you over it? I'm like, no, I'll never get over it. Now we're working through it and we've got new, new perspective, and God's teaching us new things in every season and every year. And on this side of it, we get to pour into families, we get to love on couples that go through it. Cindy speaks and works with a couple of moms groups of moms who've lost babies. We have stuff that we do for families, you know, when we know families that have lost or are in the middle of losing babies, we literally send giant care packages to their other kids, like, you know,$1,000 worth of toys and stuff, just like drop like Christmas on their kids that are going through it. And then now I'm on the board for a nonprofit called the Beacon Project, which a guy started who also lost a kid the same way, lost a baby, and they stayed in a house we owned. We own a couple of vacation homes now. And one of the visions we had after this fact was someone had given us a word that we would be able to provide escape for other families in relief, right? So we had a vision for having vacation homes as escape homes and these safe homes for families that are going through grief and stuff like that. Well, this one family state, we gave it as a donation, like nights in this one home in this vacation town, uh, to this nonprofit that was doing an auction for families who had lost children. And they won it, stayed in the home, realized that their baby died of the same thing that Evans died from, which was completely rare. And we ended up connecting, they found us on social media, and he started a nonprofit for taking and supporting men going through grief, right? Wow. And so we helped build that together. And I'm on his board and kind of helping him morph a lot of that stuff out, which is really cool, right?

SPEAKER_02 14:18

Yeah, Jim, I I I wanna I appreciate your just your courage to just be so transparent about such a difficult time because that's I mean, like and I agree with you, like without the Lord, how I don't know how people get through stuff like that. I I really don't, it's still the Lord, right? Whether they know it or not, it's still the Lord helping them. Otherwise, I just I mean it it it aches me just hearing your story, you know, uh and just thinking obviously about my own kids and oh my goodness, I just kills me. So just thinking about it and and the grief that you all must have experienced and are still you know, you still experience, but and and I I want to walk back into that moment a little bit. And you said too, you know, how you know you, Cindy, the kids, everybody's experiencing and and grieving this differently. And you also talked about how hey, you're gonna come into the hospital and really lead that, right? Lead through grief. And because your your wife in that moment, my goodness, and probably you know, probably the hardest moment of her life and your children that they've ever experienced, they need that leadership, right? And I know you are a leader, and but I want I want you to be able to speak to that a little bit. What does that look like to help uh and maybe separate them a little bit so we're super focused on like Cindy in that moment? How'd you lead her in that moment, you know, maybe in the in the thick of it, but then even over the weeks after, what did that look like? Uh, because I know men want to be just like Mr. Fix It, right? And and that's often not what's needed, you know. But but what did that look like uh to help maybe the man listening who's experiencing something similar or maybe will in the future?

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Right. Yeah, you know, I talk about I wrote a book last fall called I Wanna Be Me, and it's all about identity, but it was things that we learned along a bunch of our journeys and different chapters in our family, and I talk about this in the book. But really, honestly, Whitney, I think that the starting point for men in any situation to lead, but especially in this, right? Like a tragic personal family bomb that goes off, right? Is understanding what your priority is and what your main mission is, right? Like, so as a guy, as a husband, my number one call, period, is to serve my wife in any possible way. Now, there were seasons, again, right before we lost Evans, and I did not do that. I was torching it all. We can talk about that on a whole nother day. I was torching it, I was literally throwing grenades, trying to get her to follow me. It was literally that that insane. And watching her stand in the middle of that and never wavering and never coming off and going, literally, I don't care. One comment she made, I remember I'll never forget this. While I'm wrecking her world with two little kids, was she looks me in the face and she goes, I don't know if you've got a brain tumor or you're this or that because I don't know what's going on with you. And she goes, and if I have to live in a loveless marriage the rest of my life to be able to show my kids what it means to stand where they're supposed to be, I'll do it. She goes, So you're never gonna get me to leave. Wow. Because I don't she'll and I was like, and at first I was like, yeah, right. And then I realized, like, oh my gosh, like this woman is insane for one and amazing, right? Like, I'm like, no other woman would have put up with me at that point. You need to interview Cindy. I'm like, she's actually that's really the key. Just marry an amazing woman and just know she's amazing and then just get out of the way. But after that, it's like I had realized and I had this resnap back of like, hold on, my kids aren't my number one focus. They are part of my central focus, but they're not my number one. And so I think the number one thing I I would tell guys is just to slow down and intentionally focus on her. And every wife is totally different. So for Cindy, Cindy doesn't need to be coddled. She doesn't want me to sit there and like pat her head. She's stronger than I am on a ton of stuff. She's more black and white than I am. She also just needs time. She needed me to block and tackle for her. And she needed me to clear space from schedule, from the kids, from friends, for everything else. And she needed me to protect space for her to work through all of this stuff and to be there when she was ready for it. And the number one thing she needed for me was zero judgment and 100% grace in how she did it, which I was not great at all the time. I'm not gonna act like, and then I stood and put on my amazing cape of awesomeness and I was the best husband ever. That didn't happen. But we did, I mean, overall, because I always told it like this. I'm like, you know, Cindy's grieving style and how she goes through pain in mine and go through hard situations are like completely different. And if and I always describe it like if there was a puddle right here of pain, and Cindy and I each had to figure out how to get through it. I'm diving in the middle of the puddle and I'm rolling all in it and I'm splashing the puddle all on me because I want to experience it all. I want to understand what I got to know and I want to get it over with. I want to get through it now. I'm gonna rip it off. Cindy is like, touch it, jerk back, and get mad that she's got to go through the puddle. And it's a totally different, slow process, and it's okay. Like it, it's okay. Like, like her process of grief and mine were completely different, and it's okay. And I think for men, understanding that your wife gets to feel what they feel in any situation, and how they talk to you may not be okay long term, how it responds may not be okay. You can work through that stuff, but they're okay, and you're okay, and you gotta let them have their space, you know what I mean? And you're their husband, not their dead. And it's just leading them through that and being available for whatever she needed and not making it what I thought it should be for her. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 19:46

Like, yes, not making it what you thought it should be for her.

SPEAKER_00 19:49

That's it. It was like, hey, this is, I mean, I remember writing a whole blog about the time period to like let people know what had happened back when we blogged all the time. And I wrote a whole blog about it. And as I'm blogging, she's sobbing in her office. Like, like it was pretty fresh after. I mean, I'm in the dining room of this new house that we moved into. We literally he dies in the middle of moving from one house to the other. So we're like, all our stuff's in storage, people are coming to get all our stuff. And like two days after he dies, moving trucks show up at our house. She's sitting on the couch, bawling, and they're carting all our stuff up into a storage. It was it was insanity. It was really insanity. A friend of mine comes over, he was a patient of mine, and he's packing up our surround sound. You know, he's pulling the TVs off and he's like, What happened, bro? Like, he had no idea. And we go out. I'll never forget. And this was funny, like, so one thing, like, take things, like be able to laugh in the middle of tragedy. Like, it this is a gift I have finding humor in anything and being able to find levity in the worst situations. It is, it is a gift. So, this guy, his name was Kevin, packs up all of our stuff and we're walking out. And I just told him, I was like, hey man, you know, we had we had our baby on Saturday, he didn't make it, he passed away. Kevin goes, I'll never forget this. I like, and I never saw him again. I thought it was funny, it's like everything's happened in the office. I think him and his family moved. Oh, it was a weird thing. Like, this is the last thing he ever said to me. He goes, Wow, man. You know, I lost a dog once, a dog died. Oh my goodness. And that was what he said, you know what I mean? Because he didn't know what to say. He had zero idea what to say. Because he was just like, Oh my gosh, he had two little kids. He was just like dumbfounded. And he goes, You know, a dog I had died once. And I go, Yeah, man, it's pretty close to the same. And I just started laughing. I was like, I didn't know what to say. We just laughed. Because we were like, you know what? And he goes, I don't know what to say. I was like, I don't, man. I was like, I don't either. And we laughed, and it became like this funny joke, like between Cindy and we would literally, like, for years go, Well, a dog died once, you know. And it was like this thing when things got bad. But it really was that when he it's like, You know, my oh, and I will say this too about that piece of it. It's also helping her go through her journey of parenting, grief, loss, whatever the thing is, also does not mean sacrificing myself. I'm like slicing my own throat and having no healing at the sake of her, right? Like so one thing that was really important is I had to get real intentional. And it was normally way late at night when she was already in bed, and going and setting up specific time for me to journal and grieve myself. I couldn't just like randomly let myself grieve because I didn't have time. I had two kids, business to run that was floundering because we were going through hell and I didn't couldn't be there all the time. And it required me being there. And a wife that was like, you know, fragile. Like she was like barely after birth. She didn't have a baby to nurse, so her hormones were all crazy. Like she's literally her milk's coming in as we're out of state, zero baby, you know, all the things. But it was also like, okay, I was like, if I don't work through this and let the Lord really heal me and grieve myself and talk to guys that I need for me, and it's the whole like auction in the plane now. I'm like, we gotta have a real problem because then what are we gonna do? And so it was the intentional time for that. So that's a little long-winded, but it really was just a lot of that.

SPEAKER_02 23:13

Yeah, man. I I I love how you you focused on her. I love how you talked about hey, it wasn't like uh you didn't try to just uh do what you thought she needed, right? Yeah, this is what she should do, so she's like, okay. That's crucial because that's what a lot of us want to do, right? You know, in a hard time for our spouses, and and even earlier in the conversation, you mentioned like she you needed to just block on tackle for her or block and tackle, you know, where just take care of whatever's coming at her so it doesn't hit her, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:41

Yeah, to the point of like I took every decision off her plate for I mean for three months. Like if she wanted to like show up and make a decision, boom, I'm there. But I like even to the point for his burial and funeral decisions, I didn't take her with me. She couldn't do it. I brought a counselor friend of ours and she came with me to the funeral home. She came with me to you know decide all of the the funeral decisions. She came with me to prep it all. She came with me to decorate all like the our counselor friend did all of that so that Cindy could show up and be a hundred percent for her and the kids. Yeah, like I was like, hey, don't worry about me. I got this, I got all this stuff. You focus on you and Harper and Ellie are two that we had at the time because Harper was five when Evans passed away, almost five, and Ellie was three. So, I mean, they're very aware of what's happening, but again, it maturity-wise, totally different spaces of how they could even handle it. And a lot of it we didn't even handle with them until years later when it came back up. And then it was like, oh, okay, yeah, you know, we dealt with it again.

SPEAKER_02 24:51

I would love to jump into to that now as as well, like leading your children, you know, through that. And even, and you mentioned it there, it's like what's age appropriate for them? What can they even understand at those ages? And then even you know, you just mentioned I think a crucial crucial piece as well. It's like, well, you know, you're still helping them work through it years later, right? As they can understand more, as they, you know, as you're talking about more, probably more details than they even remember, you know, and they're working through that, grieving, still grieving, right? Right. Uh and and I so speak to that in the moment. How did you lead them through that? What does that look like? And then as we progress years later as well.

SPEAKER_00 25:28

You know, for the guys that listen to this, I think one thing I'll tell you is that as a dad, period, the number one thing that your kids need is a safe space to come to whenever they want to, right? So it's like if you're not safe to them to say anything, then good luck getting them to open up to you about anything. And when it goes to something hard like this, and especially like I've done a ton of research on millennial Gen Z, Gen X, like the IGen. I mean, because I it fascinates me. If you aren't safe for them, they will not talk to you. They can't because they just won't open up. So, you know, I had started when they were really young, just I love kids, period. I mean, our number one office population was kids. I would wear costumes in the office the whole time. I mean, I'm basically, Whitney knows I'm a giant immature kid. And so creating a safe space for them was important for me. And again, not judging what they said and how they acted, and knowing, like, you know, like when counseling, we always did this thing. When we were coming through marriage counseling, one counselor taught us this acronym. Like if Cindy said something to me and I was like, oh, what was that? Like, and I started to about what she said to me. Then I had to, I had to go through this thing called HALT. I was like, and I would in my mind, I would go, okay, hold on. Before I responded, I had to go, is she hungry, angry, lonely, or tired? And then after this, I had to go, is she hungry, angry, lonely, tired, or grieving? I had I had an extra halt F is what literally what I changed it to. And if any of those things were true, she got a pass. I was like, and I would like give it to her, I would like, hey, you know, and I'd be like, we're on the same team, I do this thing, we're on the same team, and I back off, right? I had to do the same thing with the kids. Like as little kids, I'm like, they pop up and do something crazy or act like, you know, psychopaths. And I'm like, hold on. Are they hungry, angry, lonely, tired, or are they grievy? You know, and I remember there's two, two, like to show you the difference on each of them. Ellie has always been a worshiper. She's always saying, she she plays three or four instruments now. She sings, she performs on stuff, she does musical theater, all the things, and is always worshiped. So in the middle of the hospital, Evans is in our laps, dying in the bed with us, literally, in the moment. Ellie starts worshiping. She just sings over him. She's singing and she's just singing. Like she's just the most innocent. We got it on video, and it's like the craziest thing, and it wrecks us every time. Like she's just singing. And she's more my personality. So she's like, Where's the good? She's just like begging for this silver lining. She's like quivery lips singing, right? Singing this worship song at three. Harper on the other side of the bed is seething. He's pissed. I mean, he's like, Hold up. I prayed for a brother. I wanted a little brother. I got a little brother, and now God's taking him away. Screw him. Like he literally, at five years old, had this whole different response. Then, you know, we get out of the hospital, and I remember, because again, remember, we're staying at my in-laws' house upstairs in the spare bedroom. Wow, right after this happened. It was a crazy time period. We're swimming in their pool, right? Me and the two little kids, and then the friends of ours that had been at our house late after that night. Ellie's on the other end on the steps. Harper's jumping to me, and we're like throwing him in. And I like, and he's like, and he got really rough. Like, like he was like like mad, like really rough on me. And he's five, right? And I finally I grabbed him, I had to peel him off my head. And I remember like throwing him across, and he could swim good. Threw him across the deep end of the pool towards this like ledge thing, and he hits, he climbs up to the edge of the pool. And this, I swear, this is exactly what he said. And he gets up and he's mad. He goes, Hey, and he yells at me in the pool. He's standing on the edge of the pool. He's five. And I go, I go, what? I'm in the pool. He goes, hey, he goes, be careful. He goes, I'm the only son you've got left. And it shocked me. Like it was like he hit me in the gut so hard that I sat back and my buddy grabbed me and he goes, I got him, you go. I mean, he just like grabbed my chest in the pool because I wasn't coming in like I was mad, but it just like, I mean, nothing. I was like, oh my gosh. So I walked out. I went out, got out of the pool, got a towel and I had to walk off like for a minute. And Jason, this buddy of mine, played with him, just totally doesn't think, rolled on. And there were different things like that, like different stuff where Ellie would respond in questions and seclusion. Like she wanted to write songs and she wanted to do this, and things, different things would come up. She was like, maybe heavens isn't coming back. He gets to go and be in in heaven right now. And we're like, Yeah. And she goes, Well, lucky him. I don't know what she said. She goes, lucky him. And I'm like, Yes. Lucky him, little pastor. Like, you know, stop being so smart. But like just the thing of kids, right? Yeah. And so there was like this dichotomy. And and but but I, you know, for guys that would tell you, you know, one of one of the greatest journeys I think as a man is learning to control yourself, right? I tell my kids all the time, what's the greatest fruit of the spirit? And they're like, Love. I'm like, no, like, I don't think so. I mean, I'm probably theologically wrong on this, but I tell my kids all the time, the greatest fruit of the spirit is self-control. They always say this. So now I'm like, they're like, oh, we're talking about the fruit of the spirit. I go, what's the greatest one? And they're like, self-control. I go, that's right. Because if we can't control ourselves, we can't choose to love, we can't choose to for kid, we can't choose to be gentle, we can't choose to do any of these things. We can't choose to be patient. And it takes us controlling ourselves. And most men, you know this, and guys, listen to this, you know this is true for yourself and other people. Most men are grown teenagers that have never been taught or been led to control our own emotion, control our own space, control everything else. We've been raised in a society. I think we're the last generation, Whitney, that didn't have a computer in her hand, we didn't have the world at our fingertips, that couldn't hit a button and perfect coffee come out, that didn't have dissolvable electrolytes that was just boom. You know what I'm saying? Like it's it's like this insane world where you go, hey Siri, and stuff happens. Like if I hadn't gone through and had men in my corner that held me accountable, had good mentors, like it was really a huge thing, and guys beside me to call me out because I've always been a really strong personality and I could overpower most people with my personality. So it took a bunch of strong men around me all the time to go, I know you think that's right, but you're wrong, bro. Like that's not okay. So that I understood more how to control myself to where when we got to that space, if I hadn't have, I probably would have been a verbally abusive dad to my own kids and their grief because it hurt. Like their grief hurt, man. Like their grief was painful, but it was their grief. But they had to take it out on somebody and they didn't understand. And I wouldn't let them take it out on Cindy. That was part of the blocking attack. I was like, you don't get to talk to her. If you're in a mode, I will, I'm gonna pull you out in the yard. We're gonna go for a walk and you can yell at me and throw a fit and say insane things to me all you want. You don't get to say it to her, right? And so we let them throw it. And then later on, you know, again, every year on his birthday, we we celebrate his birthday. We'll do it again this June. We get a balloons, we get a cake, we tell the story to our other kids. We got four other kids now. None of them met him, none of them were there. And so it's just Cindy and I, Harper Nelly, and so we talk about him all the time. We have pictures of us with Evans that we keep up in the house. We talk about it online. And it's it's part of a thing of like, even when it hurts, it's important for the men of the family to talk about the hard pain, to talk about the grief or to talk about your granddad that passed away or your wife. I mean, I just met with a guy yesterday, literally, a man that I was in ministry school with a few years ago, and I was his small group leader, and we did these cadres. And last July, this guy's younger than us, and his wife was like mid-30s, died tragically last July of liver failure. Like this, they have three little kids. They have a 17-year-old, 11-year-old, and a three-year-old. And his wife dies, like, like gets like a gallbladder, normal gallbladder thing that goes to like pancreatitis, liver failure, dies in like three weeks. And I didn't know anything about it until because I hadn't talked to him in a little while, until a few weeks ago. And I'm like, dude, let's get together. And so we met and hung out, and I just got to point to him, and I'm like, hey. And one of the things he said, I was like, yes, man, he's like, hey, we talk about her all the time. I talk to the kids. Hey, your mom would have thought that was funny. Hey, dude, do you remember when your mom, blah, blah, blah? And I said, he goes, even when it's hard, he goes, I mean, like, it's not like she wasn't real. I'm like, exactly. And people around us, like, when, you know, even we started, you're like, Are you okay with talking about this? I was like, Yeah, because talking about a person you lose for the people going through grief keeps their memory fresh and alive. It makes it matter, right?

SPEAKER_02 34:05

You want to shelter them by not talking about her. Yeah, you take your help at all. Yeah, you need to talk about it. They need to talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 34:13

Yeah, yeah. They need it, they need someone to talk about it. And they don't need you to tell them how to think about it. They just need you to go, man, tell me about blah, blah, blah, or or what was your favorite thing about your wife? Like, I just asked him about I knew his wife. And so I was like, bro. And so I talked about my memories whatever, like to him. And he's like laughing, and we're like, yeah. And then I was like, tell me what you missed about her, you know? And he's like, Oh, bro, this and that. And we just had coffee and talked about grief journeys. And I told him, I was like, you know, I talk about grief like you're playing in these massive waves off the beach with 18 wheelers hitting you in the middle of the waves while you're surfing on a surfboard wrapped in barbed wire. He's like, That's exactly it. I said, That's he goes, that's exactly what it's like. I go, Yeah. I said, sometime you'll catch a wave and it wraps you in barbed wire and you think you're having fun, you're bleeding everywhere. He's like, Yeah. And then you get up and it was exhilarating, and then an 18-wheeler hits you, and he goes, Exactly. And I was like, but people don't understand. They want it to be this like perfect, you know, five-step process of like, now I'm going through acceptance. I'm like, no, bro, now you're just going through another wave, and the waves get smaller and you get to a new space, but then all of a sudden you trip over a wave and fall on your face 10 years in. It's another opportunity, though, as a man, as a dad, of when there's something else that comes up for your kids, your wife, yourself, it's not like, oh my gosh, we're doing bad. Look at us, we should go back to counseling. That may be necessary, obviously, but it's an opportunity for more healing and more growth. And so every time like Harper would like have a thing, our oldest son, he's 17 now. I remember at one point, he just like, he was probably 12. And uh, so this is like seven years later, all of a sudden he would just like was ragey, like treating his sister crazy was awful to Cindy. And I was like, what is this? Like, completely not like him. And I mean, just went ragy. So I canceled these events. I was going to speak at these big conferences, sent Cindy without me, canceled trips, brought in people for, you know, to keep the other kids. And I literally stayed one-on-one with him and then took him to counseling to a guy I knew, and we worked through it, and that counselor figured out it was all grief coming back out. We never even brought up what happened. We just like started talking about who he was. We talked about identity. And this counselor was like, hey, he's like, you know what? With boys, teens, and men, and I'll never forget this with me. He he gets on the wall, he had a chalkboard wall in his office, and he took a piece of chalk and he drew a line all the way across the wall. Like we're sitting there. And he said, you know, he said, and Harper's out in the waiting room. He goes, I probably won't even bring up Evans. He said, he might. He goes, if he does, we'll talk about it. He goes, he might. He said, I'm sure it's the grief. He goes, I'm positive. He said, because anger comes from pain. This is like he's like the anger emotion always comes from pain. And he said, no matter what it was, but pain of betrayal, pain of loss, something. He said, so if someone's angry, it's because they're in pain. You just gotta figure out what the pain is. He goes, and he draws a sign, he goes, but you know what? He goes, this line right here, he goes, this line is just identity. He said, all I talk to boys about is who they are in Christ. That's it. He said, because if they get their identity, and then as teens and then as men, he goes, if they get who they are, everything else goes back to the line on the background.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

That is that's incredible.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

And I was like, as a father, and so look, oh yeah, I was like, oh my gosh, I go, you're right. And it changed everything about how I disciplined and communicated to every to them two and every kid after that that we've had, all my kids, because I was like, You're right. I'm like, it nothing else matters. If I'm pointing them back to their identity, no matter where they kind of go all over the wall, they're gonna come right back to it because they know who they are. Wow, that's who they are, you know, which is not a part of the thing that I wrote the book on and it inspired me to write it. That was some other stuff, and I was like, dude, that's it. And all the things that come out, you know, as guys, we have good friends that are men that have gone off and done insane things. It's because they forgot who they were. That's it. Like they forgot their identity and what who they're called to be as men, as a son of God, not as well, I'm a dad and a husband and all that stuff. Yeah, bro, that those are all roles that you do, it's all important. Whitney is the husband, he's a dad of a lot, he's an adopted dad, blah, blah, blah, blah. He's a real estate guy. Who cares? All that's secondary to you being a son of God, period. And then everything else comes off of that. You still say a lot.

SPEAKER_02 38:34

I could not agree more. We want our sons to know that too, right?

SPEAKER_00 38:37

Yeah, yeah. And that's it. Like, it took me so long, and I'm still working through getting performance off of me. Like, then who I am depends on what I've done or what I produce or what I make, or yeah, all that stuff. But still, and I probably always will fight it, right? Yeah, but to give my kids that, like, I don't care what you do, this is who you are. Love that.

SPEAKER_02 38:57

Well, you do, what you do matters, obviously, but who you are is that you know, I mean, so you mentioned earlier, and we're running low on time, but I wanted you to be able to speak to this as well. You mentioned like mentors, and I wanted to ask about you know, your church family and community at that time, because you know, you you said hey, I mean, there's people in your bedroom floor staying just with you all during this time. I mean, that's just precious, right? It's just wow, the Lord supporting you all help, you know, through this time. Speak to what that church family and community looked like maybe beforehand, the importance of that.

SPEAKER_00 39:31

You know, I think community is as strong as you build it and as strong as you put yourself out there for. I think uh the people that I talk to that are like, I need more people around me and I don't have as many friends and no one supports me. Well, it's because you're sitting there like waiting on people to show up, right? Like, like you're waiting on people to come there. We were really intentional in 2000, starting in like 2007, eight, nine. Now, this is before we even went through marriage insanity. Starting in 2008, we realized we needed to build community ourselves and be intentional about it. We had started at a church in 2003 and got really involved. It was a mega church. We led small groups, we built community. It wasn't like we had great, like the the grief department, like the that part of the church was amazing. Like they were great, but they weren't the ones that were sitting in our bedroom in the middle of the night after we lost our son. It was our close friends who we had built leading small groups, being there for them for six years before we had been in close relationship with them for nine years before that day happened, had sewn into each other's lives and had poured into them and been there for them. And so, my thing I would just say is like people can't support you if they don't know you, and people can't be there for you if they don't know who you are. And in order to be known, you've got to be there and be with them. You know what I mean? You got to be around them and you got to be in their world and you've got to like love on them, right? So it's this reciprocal thing. It's the old thing we always talk about, like in order to have good friends, you got to be a good friend. But it's really true. Like, we have a ton of good friends because we have been intentional, not perfect as this, but we've been intentional about showing up for people, no matter what, like showing up and helping them and doing all this stuff anytime they need it. So when we've gone through our hardest seasons, people are just there. Like they just showed up and we're like, oh my gosh, you know, so that's been really important. Church was important, the church family was helpful in in any church. That was three churches ago, too, which is important. Like we're God called us to different churches and called us away from our church last year, and we're we're you know doing some new stuff this year. Those seasons will change, but it's the tight relationships of friends you make that are gonna be fit through any of them. So it's just intentionality.

SPEAKER_02 41:47

No, that's awesome because you do have to be intentional for friendships, right? We're also busy, we're also self-setting.

SPEAKER_00 41:52

More than ever with technology, more than ever, we got to be intentional with connecting.

SPEAKER_02 41:56

If you could uh challenge men in one way today, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 42:00

You know, I tell every one of my kids, hey, worry about yourself. There's plenty there to worry about instead of their other siblings. Like, Sansa did this, and so did that. I'm like, hey, let's worry about you so that you can care for everybody else. Like, build you, make sure you're good and that you, you know, are controlling yourself and you know who you are because everybody else is gonna need you and they need you to be all that you can be, you know.

SPEAKER_02 42:21

Jim Bob, so grateful for your just courage and being so transparent through a very uh just super difficult season, I cannot imagine. So thank you so much for how just you're allowing the Lord to just use that in so many ways and to really bless other families who are gonna experience challenges as well, right? Or in men that are trying to lead their their wives and their children through hard times. So thank you so much for that. Uh, how can the listeners learn more about you? I know you do some coaching, you have a book, yeah, and lots of things that you are on purpose, like I said in the beginning, uh, in so many ways.

SPEAKER_00 42:55

They just be very ADD. I think I'm ADD. I don't know that I'm on purpose. I think I'm scattered. How can they learn more about you? The two best places, Instagram is kind of a happy place. I don't know why that's the easiest, but my handle is at Dr. Jim Bob, Dr. Spelled Out. And then my website is drjimbob.com, Dr. Still Spelled Out. It's the same everywhere I'm at. And so we've got you know info there on the different courses and groups that we offer, and then on Instagram is where I put you know most of the content and doing videos and stuff like that. So awesome.

SPEAKER_02 43:23

Jim Bob, so grateful for you. Thanks for having me.