This episode is supported in part by the Christian Standard Bible, a translation designed to be faithful to the original text and clear for everyday readers. And we're just grateful for their partnership in helping bring gospel-centered content to families like yours. And to learn more about the CSB, visit csbible.com. to trust the lord to trust anything is to put full confidence and dependence on that thing right the hebrew verb there to trust is actually imaged by somebody laying face down on the ground with their back exposed right you're in your most vulnerable position you're trusting whoever's in the presence of you to not harm you to not take advantage of you right you're fully exposed and this idea of trusting god with all your heart every fiber of your being nothing held back and not lean on your own understanding. That's the contrast.
And so the way that we learn to trust God is we have to know him and we come to know him through his word. We come, it's not our opinions of God that matter. It's who is God and has he revealed himself. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.
And I'm Dave Wilson. And you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is Family Life Today.
Well, I've often preached. Yes, you've preached a lot.
Well, I was just wondering if you can finish this sermon theme. Sitting there in the front row. I do listen. I just don't always remember. And I know you're going to be able to finish this.
I've often said it's not the size of your faith that matters. It's the size of your God. Yeah. And so it's that. Wait, do I get an A?
Yeah, you did. Way to go. Give me five. Yeah. I mean, I didn't know if you listened, but you heard it.
Oh, I've heard that. Multiple, hundreds of times in 30 years. But often we think I need greater faith. And Jesus is the one who said, no, you just need mustard seed size faith, small faith. But if that faith is in a God you don't know or you can't trust, it doesn't matter what size your faith.
It's really the size of your God or the understanding of who he is. And I think that's really important because when we go through hard or tragic times or even times, we just can't make sense of it. And we can't understand how God would allow this to happen or allow us to walk this path. That's when we go back to that and think, is that real?
Well, that's when we find out what kind of God that we believe in. Yeah. It really is. And so we have Eric Reid back with us, a pastor, a dad, a husband. Man, we've had a couple days with you talking about your book, Uncommon Trust.
Learning to trust God when life doesn't make sense. First of all, welcome back to Family Life today. Thank you. Thank you. I've enjoyed being with you guys.
And I don't know if we can catch our listeners up for the last two broadcasts. I just said this, though. I just told Eric, I don't think I've cried through an entire two days of interviewing as I have lately. But this story is so compelling, hard, and yet it really does make us put our eyes back on Jesus. Yeah, and so I'll try and give a quick synopsis, and Eric, you can really jump in.
It's really a story of a dad and a mom who have their firstborn son and have a totally unexpected outcome. He's going to need medical help his whole life, ends up needing a kidney transplant at almost two years of age. Yeah, go ahead and tell us in one minute or less. Yeah, you were on track. A good kidney, a bad kidney needed to remove the bad kidney, live a normal life after that.
And they took both on accident, which propelled us into a very abnormal life. And we needed to get a kidney transplant. It took two years to get that. Lots of surgeries, lots of ups and downs, even on the way toward that. And so there's a physical journey we're going through to get him to a transplant.
And at the same time, we're going through a pretty profound spiritual journey of trying to figure out where is God in the middle of this and how to make sense of this and what's happened. and how do we navigate these things? You know, I outlined some of the things I started to wrestle with, even through this Daniel three, you know, God is able to save us. He may not save us, but he's in the fire. He's going to use your fire for others.
And he showed us that we're going to need others in the fire, just like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had each other. We were going to need community. We were going to need people to help us to stand firm and stay strong. And honestly, I took those things back to my wife who had a real hard time even being in the room with him. And I said, this is what I think the Lord is saying is how we're going to get by.
And those become the guiding principles for us over the next several years of trying to live our lives to, you know, not know what our future held, but trusting the one who held the future. And I love what you said. It's not about the size of our faith. It's the object of our faith. It's Christ.
It's the living God. It's not our faith. It's the object of our faith. And so that's really easy for me to say. it's quite a journey to get to a place where I trust the object of my faith.
Yeah. I mean, you ended up burying Caleb at age 15. Correct.
So you got 15 years and ups and downs.
Well, wait, let's go to that. Yeah. Like the first day you recounted walking your two daughters to the hospital room saying goodbye to their brother. Yeah. And so you've gone through some hard, hard things.
Yeah. He passes, but go back to those 15 years with him. Were those good years? What was that like? Yeah, they were gifts from God every day.
In fact, that's one of the lessons my wife and I from this. We're forced to adopt, but thankful to adopt is every day we had with him, every day we have with our girls is a gift. It's not a right. It's a gift. And so it's a deposit.
It's not a withdrawal. That helps us to recognize, like be thankful for the gift of this day, you know? And so 15 years yeah my son got his transplant at two and you know he had to have some medicines and some medical procedures And he I mean we went in and out of the hospital for infections and all kinds of things over the course of the following years But my son went to school He loved sports He was a Tennessee Vol fan who suffered like me. You know, he loved hockey. We had the National Predators were our team.
And so we went to hockey games all the time together, got the coach's tee ball team. A lot of the things that I wanted to do and be as a dad to a little boy, I got a chance to do all those things. You know, we dressed up as Ghostbusters and ran around Walmart like we were, like we were, you know, capturing ghosts in our little ghost captures. Like we just, you know, we just did a lot of fun things. But one of the things by necessity we knew we had to do was teach him about the Lord and for him to understand that his life was on purpose and in God's hands and that God was using his story and that none of these things were, They're accidental in the sense of the world.
None of these things were outside of God's plan for him and to embrace that. And so we were having big, giant theological conversations with this little boy his whole life. What'd that look like? It looked like just a bit at a time, you know, a piece at a time, teaching moments when he would be in surgery or he'd be, you know, dealing with an issue. We'd just be explaining, you know, it's like, or why do I have to have this feeding pump at night?
It would just be ongoing. It would just be all the time. We'd be talking about, where's God in the midst of these things? And we'd get our Bibles out. We'd have family worship.
And my lessons would be very much about, why are things like this in the world? Why do we see broken circumstances? And how do we trust God even if he doesn't change our circumstance? And so the lessons we were learning, we were just sharing because we were still learning them. And of course, now I'm pastoring at this point.
So I'm leading a church to understand these things, you know, and those years were wonderful. Years two through 13 for Caleb, he went to school, he gamed online with his buddies, you know, loved to play on the junior high basketball team. All of those things that a normal kid would do, he did. And if you didn't know his story, which so many people knew his story, but if you didn't, you wouldn't necessarily know anything was wrong, right? He's a little bit smaller than some of the people his age, but there was nothing drastic that would have made you think like, oh, mercy, what's going on with that little boy?
but he had a lot going on.
So when he was 13 years old, he started to have some issues, some eyesight issues. And we went to the doctor, nothing got picked up. They started having some really bad headaches. And so we knew something was off. He got to a point where he's like, okay, let's just take him to the hospital.
I mean, we were so used to the hospital. Going to the hospital was just normal for us.
So people here go to the hospital, they usually freak out. It's like, oh, it's just like going to your neighbor's house for us. Let's go see all of our buddies at the hospital. And so we go up there and they start running some tests, but nothing's kind of kicking up. And then he went unconscious and he would stay unconscious for three weeks.
And it was during that time that they discovered that he had something called fungal meningitis and it caused him to have a stroke. Our bodies would just be exposed to whatever it calls that and just kick it out. The immune system would just kick it out. But he's on immune suppressing drugs because of kidney transplant. And so what our bodies would kick out, his body doesn't have that defense system.
And so we had no idea, you know, if he would even survive, come out of the coma. I remember during that time writing articles, just a process in my own mind, because here we are, we're back in the fire again, in the heat of it. And Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 in that moment became really a staple for us. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths.
And it's a really easy verse as Christians to read. And it's a very hard verse to live. You know, it's so easy to say, hey, just trust God. And that's the right answer. You put it on the wall.
Yeah, you'll put it in your kitchen. And what does it even mean to trust the Lord with all your heart? Yeah, that's a great question. To trust the Lord, to trust anything is to put full confidence and dependence on that thing, right? And the Hebrew verb there to trust is actually imaged by somebody laying face down on the ground with their back exposed, right?
You're in your most vulnerable position. You're trusting whoever's in the presence of you to not harm you, to not take advantage of you, right? You're fully exposed. And this idea of trusting God with all your heart, every fiber of your being, nothing held back and not lean on your own understanding. That's the contrast.
And so the way that we learn to trust God is we have to know him. and we come to know him through his word. We come, it's not our opinions of God that matter. It's who is God and has he revealed himself. So it's getting into the word.
It's diving in with others to learn about who God is and to walk with him in fellowship and communion with him. The more we know God, the more our trust for God begins to grow. But the battle we'll always face is what is the deterrent of our trust? It's leaning on our own understanding.
Well, there you get into the theology of who God is. That's right. Help us understand who this God is. What does it mean that he's sovereign? Yeah, that's a great question.
I had a really powerful conversation with my daughter, my youngest, Kyra. I'm six years old at the time. And we were riding down the road together and she was crying. She was thinking about her brother. She said, I miss Caleb.
And she said, Dad, why did God do it this way? I gave her the really easy, good answer. I said, you know, one day when Jesus returns, he's going to make all things new and your brother is going to be restored and sin will be no more and death will be no more. And, you know, I'm thinking like she's going to be like, oh, OK, I get that, Dad. And she goes, no, but if God's going to do it that way one day, why didn't he just start it that way?
I said it did start again. I'm still trying to give like some basic like, you know, it did start that way. But then we sinned and rebelled. And she's like, no, no, no, Dad, I know all that. But I know one day God's going to make it where none of these things happen again.
Why didn't he make it where it couldn't happen to begin with? And it was in that moment that it hit me. I was like, this is a profound question. I was going to say, that's not a six-year-old. That's a 60-year-old question as well.
That's right. What's told me, her little mind's trying to grapple with understanding, like how do I understand God in this world where my brother gone And God could have done something different And I said sweetheart that is a question that philosophers and theologians have wrote major books about, but let me give you the best answer I can think of. I said, there's something about this kind of world where we experience love and then loss and hurts and pains and sadness and have to anticipate future days where those things There's something about this kind of world where God fixes it at the end, makes it new at the end, that gives him more glory and us more joy and more understanding of who he is than a world that would not have had those experiences. And that's the only answer I know to tell you. How'd she respond?
She said, I just want that day to come. Don't we all? And I said, yes, baby. That's why the Bible ends with, come Lord Jesus, come. And we live like that.
So here's what it's really done as a family. You know, we've gone from saying, how many at the restaurant? You know, five to four. And every time we say it, it stings. And yet we long for the day where that loss is not a reality anymore, where all things are made new.
And so we long for heaven. Life with Him there and us here makes us long for life there. And I think that's one of the things that suffering and pain and loss do in this world is that God actually loosens our grip on this world. The more people we lose that we love to the next world, the more we long for that world and lessen our grip on this one. I think that's right.
Hey friends, Ron Deal here, director of Family Life Blended. Did you know Blended and Blessed, the only worldwide live stream designed for couples and blended families, is free this year, Saturday, April 18th. We're gonna be live in Oklahoma City. If you show up there, we're gonna charge you for lunch. But other than that, it is free, free to live stream.
Churches can bring a group of couples together and enjoy the day absolutely free. Gayla Grace is gonna be with us. Davey and Christy Blackburn. Cheryl Shoemake's gonna be with us. Kathy Lipp and Brian Goins, our emcee.
It's gonna be a wonderful day. I hope you can join us. Learn more and get the link in the show notes at familylifetoday.com. How does walking through a valley like you've walked through affect your marriage? And how does a husband and wife walk through it together?
It will either make or break you. We have watched families that have gone through trials, whether it be when we knew them in the hospital or because of our circumstances, we've watched marriages end. And we learn later that the majority of marriages that have children with special needs and different issues, usually in a divorce, because it's so stressful. There's no normalcy. The routines get ripped wide open.
And so for us, first off, we've always just said our commitment is, I mean, you're stuck with me. I'm stuck with you.
So it'
