If you could pick any movie to go to, what genre, what kind of movie would you go to? Okay, this is going to sound crazy and I think you already know this, but either a movie about war and warriors, which is weird for a woman, or who can pass up a great love story. Yeah, I mean it is strange, I guess not strange, but you love like guy movies where there's a conflict.
Well, there's a great leader and the people will follow. That's because you're married to one. That's it. Is that what it is?
That's it, yes. 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 or on our Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. I love a love story as much as anything I'd ever go to. And today we're going to enter into a love story.
Yeah, a great love story and great love stories usually have some sort of angst in them. And we're going to discover that today as well. Yeah, so we have Jonathan Pitts with us today.
Welcome to Family Life Today, Jonathan. It's good to be back with you guys. Back with us, I know.
You've been with us before. Was it two years ago? Yeah, a little more than two years. It would have been February of 19.
Okay. Yeah, and it was, I think, our first month or so of doing hosting with Bob Lapine for Family Life Today. So we were brand new and your love story was, it's remarkable. And now you have a book about it called My Winter Season. And we'll explain what winter means.
It's spelled a little different than you would think for the season. Seeing God's faithfulness in the shadow of grief. I know you're in Nashville. You're with Church of the City there.
I've been an executive pastor there, and I know you're in a different role now. But how many daughters? Four? Four girls. Yeah, 17, 14, twins that are 11 right now. So you're a busy, busy guy.
Busy world, all-girl home, lots of estrogen, lots of fun. Which is interesting little tidbit, but I know a lot of you have watched The War Room. And the daughter in that movie, to Priscilla Shire, was your oldest daughter.
Yeah, Alina Pitts played Danielle Jordan, I think her name was. Yeah, and she was great in that movie. Yeah, you know, it's funny, you know, even like the non-Christian critics, as much as they want to like trash Christian film, they could not trash My Daughter. It was so fun to read, like how they really could trash the movie because the movie is awesome. But like, just something about who she actually really was as a girl, that she was actually able to play into the role that just made her character really authentic and real and really beautiful.
She kind of played like this heavier girl who's been impacted by her parents' marriage or difficulty in marriage. And beautiful story. If you haven't seen War Room, you need to see it. You need to see it. It's actually one of my favorite movies, and I have recommended it to so many people, especially people that are struggling and are maybe really struggling to see if there's hope left. So watch that. Yeah, and again, I'm a guy that's pretty critical about movies.
I don't know, maybe we all are. In fact, we go to so many movies, at least pre-COVID, that people in my church would literally text us for our review. And War Room, I'm not kidding, I even texted Michael Jr. and said, dude, you can act. I mean, he was great. And Priscilla, your cousin, was incredible in it as well. She actually, I think she could have a whole career. I mean, she kind of has now. She's been in multiple films now, but she could have had a whole career just in film alone.
She's incredibly talented, creative. Feels like a whole season ago, whole life ago, but it was an awesome time. Yeah. Yeah, talk about that, because we're not here really to talk about the War Room, although we just gave it a nice plug, but my winter season is spelled W-Y-N-T-E-R. Tell us the story, because some of our listeners do not know. Yeah, well, I'll just start by saying in September of 2001, my winter season began. I met a young lady named Winter Danielle Evans, who I'd fallen in love with in college. I'll never forget being at a party.
It was right after 9-11 happened, and it was like this party on my college campus just to kind of give everybody a little bit of life back. And I would meet her on the porch at this party that neither of us really had any business being at, but we were there. And I would get her number, and I'd never call her. And eventually, she'd walk up to me on campus. She's a spunky girl. And she said, why haven't you called me yet? And I was like, I don't know.
And so a couple of days later, I called her. But on our first date, which was Monsters, Inc., a movie. Monsters, Inc., great movie. Yeah, the original one. Are you an animated toy, I mean, like a kids' movie guy? Because I am. Even the newer ones coming out.
What was the one with the jazz musician? I mean, yeah. Soul. Soul, yeah.
I like watching them. So anyway, that was our first date. We'd get engaged there for seven months. We'd be engaged for a year and got married two weeks after we graduated from college. We would have our first daughter, Alina, who you were just talking about.
And then our life would take us to Texas. We went to visit Winter's uncle, who happened to be a pastor of a church, a guy named Tony Evans, who a lot of your listeners will know. I had no idea who Tony Evans was.
You really didn't. No, I had no idea. My mom had heard him on radio before, but I didn't know. I didn't really realize he ran like a small village in Texas, in Dallas.
But anyway. Small village. He's a pastor of a church, but it's a massive thing. Jonathan, talk about your faith back then. Like, where were you spiritually in Winter, too? I think Winter and I met each other at a place in time where actually God would use us to grow each other up. Because we both grew up in Christian homes, believed in God deeply. And we're just walking in a, I guess I'd say, kind of a lukewarm kind of a place.
And God would use each of us to kind of draw each other back to him and challenge each other, which we would do for the rest of our lives together. So we went to Dallas on vacation and would never come back because Winter was a grant writer, Dr. Evans was looking for a grant writer. I was in pharmaceutical sales.
My company downsized, which gave me an opportunity to think about what's next. And so we would move to Dallas kind of on a whim and a prayer against our family's better wishes, the rest of our family. And we would end up being in Dallas for 14 years. She'd work as a grant writer for a couple of years there. Then she would start a ministry called For Girls Like You, a magazine for tween girls.
And there's a whole long story to that. And I would end up being in ministry with the Evanses. I would be Anthony Evans Jr.'s manager for seven years. I'd run Dr. Tony Evans' national ministry for seven years and would spend 14 years in the Evans brand of ministry, I call it.
Winter was growing her ministry. We were starting to do stuff together, write together. And God would just give us ministry, really our last five years of marriage, kind of giving away a little bit of the story. But our last five years of marriage would be spent doing ministry together. We'd write a parenting book together. We'd write a marriage book together. And really early on in 2018, felt like God was kind of calling us into a new season.
And I had an opportunity to go pastor in Nashville at Church of the City. And so together we'd accept that role. Together we would buy our home in Franklin, Tennessee in, let's see, July 10th of 2018. And then we'd get our girls enrolled in school and we'd go back to Dallas. And it was back in Dallas for our last week there, my last week of work, that winter would in her cousin, Priscilla Shires, kind of ministry space, kind of guest space where we were staying, she would breathe her last breath.
She'd have a heart, kind of have a heart dysrhythmia. And this woman who I literally had been married to at that point, 15 years and 27 days, where 27 days past our 15 year anniversary, would pass away my arms as I desperately tried to save her life. And most traumatic experience of my life, hopefully will always be that and traumatic for my girls as well. And I'm just trying to tell the story in a little kind of a preview kind of way here, but ultimately we would continue on.
We'd bury winter in Dallas and we would move on to Nashville. And so for the last three years, I will have been single dad knit, raising my girls, trying to get them through their grief, getting myself through mine. I would say at this point, we're as healed as we'll ever be. And there's always going to be a part of us that live that experience. And I've lost my first wife and my girls have lost their mom. And the thing I've realized about grief is it never really fully goes away with each new life thing. There's always some implication based on where you've been. I would especially think that's true based on your girls as they're getting older and they're hitting milestones.
Yeah. Like winter would have loved to have seen this. Yeah, my oldest girl just turned 17, big milestone. And probably the hardest thing about that for her is her mom not being there for that. Well, take us back to that time because when we had you a couple of years ago, you had just finished a book with winter about marriage. Yeah, I was actually with you guys six months after she passed away.
What's crazy is- It was that soon. Yeah, the day that she passed away, it was a Tuesday of my last week of work at the Urban Alternative with Dr. Evans and the last thing I did before leaving that office was sign the final edited manuscript of her marriage book and would email that on. I forged her signature and emailed it on to our publisher. I would go home from there, she would pass away my arms. And what I would realize is that book would actually become kind of a time capsule of our life together, our marriage together. And so we actually published the book six months after she passed away. For me, yeah, just a time capsule and a reminder of how good God is to give us good things. You know, you think about Job and the Lord gives, the Lord takes away, bless be the name of the Lord.
I really have tried to have that heart posture all this time. Turning that book in was just a reminder to me of God is good, he's got plans and you don't know what his plans are going to look like, but he's always good. I love hearing that from you because how old was winter? 38.
So she's 38 with four young girls. I'm sure that there was a part of you that thought, Lord, what are you doing? Did you have that at all? And how did you get through that? I really didn't have a lot of that, not because I didn't like wonder what God was doing, but I'm telling you, like from the very beginning, and I don't think he does this for everybody, but for me, and that's why the subtitle of the book is Seeing God's Faithfulness in the Shadow of Grief. God was literally opening my eyes to things that he was doing that were just so big and so immense in terms of his goodness, even in the middle of the hardest time of my life. And so me even turning that book in, like there was no coincidence in my mind that the day that she died, I signed the final edited manuscript of that book and turned it in.
Yeah. You know, there was no coincidence that we were just moved out of our home, sold our home, left literally this life that we built together, this life that we had to go to a new place. It was like God was like, I'm putting you on a new journey.
It's going to be different. The book is really packed with story after story of me seeing how good and kind God was in the middle of the hardest season of my life. Share some of those stories. I'll never forget the day before Winter's funeral. It was a Friday and I was in my, we were staying at my brother-in-law's house. I just couldn't go back to the house that she passed away in.
And so we're at my brother-in-law's house, her brother's house. He had just moved to, even this, he had moved to Dallas from Baltimore where they grew up together two and a half years before she passed and felt like the Holy Spirit told them to move to Dallas. He didn't have a job. He literally quits his job. And the day he goes in to quit his job, he gets told that he's being let go and gets a severance package.
So it's like God's drawn him to Dallas. And so we get to spend a little over two years with my brother-in-law, my sister-in-law, who really was like a father to her because her dad was a drug addict and he was five years older. She became like a father figure to her in a way.
One of my best friends and a brother to me now. And I'm trying to remember the story I was just telling. I'm at his house and I'm just overwhelmed.
All these people are in the home. It's hot to Texas day and I'm just feeling like I'm suffocating. And so I go out of the house and sadly it's 107 degrees outside because it's July in Texas. And so I get outside and I can't find any shakes.
There's not a lot of trees in his property. And so I kneel down beside a fence just trying to get some peace. And I turn on my Spotify and the first thing playing is this little music piece called Moving On. And it's Steven Furtick talking about Jacob. It says Jacob buried Rachel. He set a memorial and then he moved on. That's what you listen to.
That's what I listen to. And it's a day before I want to bury Winter. And he's basically talking about this idea of Jacob buried Rachel, this woman he loved. He set a memorial. He didn't forget. He marked her tomb.
He marked that spot never to forget. And then he moved on. But he moved on because he had a place to go. He had a place to get his sons. God had a plan. And so he moved on because there was purpose in his next steps. And I'm telling you in that moment, I was like the Holy Spirit was telling me like, you're going to do the same thing because I've got a plan for you. These girls have a place to get to. You don't know why I took Winter.
He didn't know why I took Rachel. But ultimately I've got a good plan and you're going to go to that place. And so it just was like this moment of just being like, God just gave me this massive, I mean, how many stories are there like that in the Bible and how many preachers are there preachers on their stories? And it just happens to be on your Spotify.
Happens to be on my Spotify. And so I would play that thing over and over again over the next several months and just know that God had a plan. And sadly, that plan for me started with, just like anybody else, with a bunch of grief and a bunch of unknown, a bunch of darkness and all the things you walk through when you lose a loved one, especially a loved one that close. For me, it wasn't really a lot of anger. I didn't really ever have a lot of anger, but I was gripped with fear. And like, it was hard for me to sleep at night and just even thinking about as a husband, like you lose your wife and it's a woman that you're protecting. And all of a sudden you leave the hospital and you leave her body that's going to go to the morgue. And it's just really, it can be really dark. And so that was really dark for me. And at the same time, you have four daughters.
Yeah, so you've got to take care of and like, you can't sit too long. But I do want to say this as I hear that moment with that message. You know, for many times when we go through really, really hard things, here's, here's the questions I think we have. God, do you see, do you know, are you here?
Do you care? And again, for a listener that's listening right now, it's going through some dark valley. It's a reminder, yes, he does see, he does know, he is with you, he is there. Yeah, it's almost like instead of asking God, do you see, we should be asking ourselves, do we see? I think about Philippians 4, it's been really impactful in my life.
It's been really impactful in my life recently. But Philippians 4, 8, Paul says, whatever is true, whatever is right, whatever is honorable, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, whatever is excellent. Think about these things. Like, and before that, he says, rejoice in the Lord always, again, I'll say rejoice. Then he goes on to say that. And Paul's in prison, writing to a persecuted church, telling them to see what's true and right and pure and honorable and lovely and excellent. And he's saying that because he knows those things are there. And he's basically asking them the question, do you see what is actually there? And I feel like if nothing else, my story has been one of God somehow helping me to see a bunch of big things.
They're actually so big, I'd be an idiot not to see them. But maybe so somebody else can actually even be encouraged to look for those things because they were really evident in my life. But God's always moving for his children. He's always moving.
He's always encouraging. There's always a reality behind the reality. Dr. Evans always says, if all you see is what you see, you'll never see all there is to be seen.
Like, how do you see beyond what you see? For me, God's made it really clear and really evident even in my loss. And that's Paul's encouragement to us, like, see what's actually true. So, like, the truth is, winter passed away, which was really hard for me.
But the hardest day of my life was actually the most glorious day of hers. So, if the only truth I see is that I lost my loved one, I'm not going to see the full truth. When in reality, to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
Like, that's what Paul says. So, if that's actually a part of the reality, there's a lot more beauty in that day than I could see if I didn't actually see the full picture. And I'm not trying to make light of loss because it was the hardest day of my life, hardest year of my life, hardest month of my life, hardest moment of my life, hardest parenting journey I've gone through so far. I'm not making light of it. I'm just saying that God is actually there in the middle of it. Yeah, it's a passage we grieve, but we don't grieve without hope. You know, as others grieve without hope, you still have hope. What about your daughters? Were they able to see any of the kind of things you're talking about?
Yeah, it's funny. They're all different and they all experience grief different than me. I think the hardest thing for me to do in my grief as this type A driven Enneagram 3 pastor is allow my girls just to be themselves. And so, I found out probably eight months in, I'll tell the story because she's told it before, my oldest daughter, eight months into our grieving journey, eight, nine months in, I'm walking up the stairs of my house and she's in her bedroom. She's a quiet girl and she's laying in her bed and I said, is everything okay? And she said, yeah, and she didn't want to talk. And so, I just walked in her bedroom and like, what's going on? And she's like, I don't really want to talk.
And I just kept pressing it, kept pressing it. And eventually, she just opens up and she says really vulnerable. She says, dad, I'm having a hard time believing that God is real.
And if he's real, I'm having a hard time believing that he's good. And you would have thought the way that I reacted, that she was trying to make a personal indictment of me because what I did is took what she said and made that about how good of a dad am I being that my daughter could question God's goodness and God's reality. And it was actually the first moment where I realized I didn't even really have this terminology until probably a month before, just because I was in counseling, just with the grief, is I had like a kind of a codependent relationship with my girls where if they're happy, I'm happy. If they're sad, I'm sad. And I couldn't let them be who they are because that would impact how I feel about myself. I couldn't just lead them without having them manage how they feel. And so, as a dad, the thing I've had to do is just let my girls be my girls. Trust that God's got them, pray for them deeply, but also allow them the process. They've all processed differently.
My oldest daughter, and she said this as well, we've done a lot of interviews together, so she's the one I feel safe talking about. But she dealt with a lot of anger. Anger I never had. She was really angry. I mean, she lost her mom, who was really kind of her best friend. They did, Winter was on the war room set with her and did hair for her and Priscilla. They spent a lot of time, they worked three books together. They traveled and toured together after all that. She lost one of her best friends. In fact, the weekend before Winter died, they were doing a mom-daughter conference together.
Wow. So she had a lot of anger. What was really beautiful for me is a couple of weeks ago, we were doing an interview and I talk a lot about worship through that. Like all I had was worship in the hardest times, I just worshiped God. And the person interviewing asked like, Alina, did you worship like your dad? And she was like, no, I couldn't. But she said, but because he did, and I watched him, I now can.
Which was a massive, like I didn't realize the impact. Because in those moments, I'm like- You didn't know in those moments. No, I was afraid that I was going to lose my daughter, like that my daughter was going to hate God for the rest of her life. And like all these different fears that we can have as parents. And ultimately, there's this quote by a psychologist, his name's Kurt Thompson.
And Kurt says, to the degree that a parent makes sense of their own story will be to the degree that a child can feel secure in theirs. And so in that moment, the worshipful moments I had, I worshiped, I sang- It's your breath in all lungs. I can grab a guitar. So we pour out a praise, pour out a praise.
It's your breath in all lungs. I can't sing. No, it was really good. So I praise you only, great are you God. I sang that in her ear. As she's- Yeah, in the emergency room, they basically said, hey, we've got, we had a pulse, we don't have it, you should come say goodbye. And so I sang that in her ear. We sang Good, Good Father, as I told my girls about the fact that their mom went home to do with Jesus. And that night at my brother-in-law's house, we sang a bunch of songs.
I didn't know what to say. So we just worshiped. And that's literally all I've had. Like in the hardest moments of my life, I've had worship. And so for me, finding out later that me owning my story, what that looked like was me just worshiping God, but I didn't understand.
That's what Job did. You know, I'm not comparing myself to Job, but like, the reality is God gives, God takes away. We don't understand when he gives. We don't understand when he takes away, but we better worship it in both because he's the author of both of those things. And so we've worshiped and I'm just really grateful that I didn't know it then, but that that did make a difference in my daughter's life. And she can worship now in the joy that she's finding that even that time she feels guilty for finding, you know, as a daughter who's having to move into a new season of life. But they've all grieved really differently and they all grieve differently still, you know?
So like, even on, whether it be birthdays or holidays, you just don't know what to expect. And what I've decided now is whatever it is, I'm just going to sit in it with them. And that's really compassion, you know, just sit with somebody else in their pain and they've sat with me in mine. It is interesting, isn't it, to think about what you just shared.
I think we can miss this. It's like, you know, if somebody's struggling, maybe it's your daughter or somebody and they're struggling with the goodness of God, we often think I need to teach theology. I need to show them scripture.
I need to make a case that he is still good. Here it is. And yet what hit your daughter was her dad worshiping the God she wasn't sure was good. Just why? I mean, and again, I could talk about the power of worship. There's something beyond the spoken word. It's emotive. It's the feelings are involved.
Maybe the bodies of, I mean, I know that when Ann's sister died, we talked about this recently, we would worship at church and just ball. You know, you feel that's amazing that your daughter's watching that. And that's what she points to, to say, this is what brought me back, watching dad worship. And yet, Dave, I was thinking so often, especially as our kids get older, we want to have all the right words. We want to have all the right theology.
We want to have all the right discussions. And sometimes all it takes is us living it and them watching us love God, love others and worship. I know I asked one of our kids one time, like, do you remember anything I taught you biblically? It goes, not really, which was so depressing to me. But he goes, but what I do remember is I remember watching you cry and have your hands lifted up in worship. I remember watching you on your knees on the deck worshiping. He goes, those are the things I remember. And he said, I remember, Tim makes me cry. He said, I remember thinking whatever she has, I want that.
And that's what I'm imagining with your girls. Whatever you have, dad, it's getting you through. And we want that. Yeah, it's literally all I had. And it's all we ever have. It's all we ever have. It's worship.
I heard Dr. Evans listen to him last night. The fine worship is basically just acknowledging and celebrating who God is. Yes. You know, even when we don't understand. And it isn't always even singing, but I would just say to the listener who's struggling right now, worship God.
Yeah. If you can't even sing out the words or speak them, listen to it. Just, you know, shut out the world, put on a worship tape, whatever, and just say, God, I'm going to worship you even when it's really hard because it changes something in us. And it might be the greatest action step. It allowed Jonathan, as you were saying earlier, to look for God. You saw him.
Mm hmm. We can really be looking for God even in our hardest moments. I think about the response of Job in the middle of his trials and his tragedies. He was the one who turned and said, ultimately, blessed be the name of the Lord, even in the midst of the grief and the sorrow. He did what Dave Wilson was talking about there.
He praised God. We've been hearing today from Jonathan Pitts describing the season that God has brought him through and is still bringing him through the season after the loss of his wife, Winter. In fact, Jonathan calls this his winter season, and it's a reflection on going through a season of loss and of grief. We've got Jonathan's book available in our Family Life Today Resource Center.
You may know someone who is in a similar season. Jonathan's book would be a help, would be an encouragement. You may want to get it and give it as a gift.
Share it with them. We've got copies in our Family Life Today Resource Center. Order it from us online at familylifetoday.com or call to order 1-800-FL-TODAY is the number.
Again, the book by Jonathan Pitts is called My Winter Season, and you can order it from you can order it from us at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-358-6329 to order 1-800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word Today. I know it would not be surprising for many of you to know that a program like the one we've listened to today, God uses these programs in remarkable ways in people's lives. We often hear from people who will write to us and say, that's just what I needed to hear at the exact moment I needed to hear it. And we want to say thank you to those of you who partner with us to make the Ministry of Family Life Today possible. You have no idea the hundreds of thousands of people who are being touched and who are being impacted as a result of your investment in the expansion of family life today. Every time you give, you're helping us reach more people more often, helping us effectively develop Godly marriages and families.
And we are so grateful for that. In fact, if you're a regular listener and you've not made a donation in a while, or maybe you've never donated to support family life today, when you make a donation today, we'd like to send you a couple of books that we talked about already this week. Matt and Lisa Jacobson have written books on ways that we can express love to our children, a hundred ways to love our sons and a hundred ways to love our daughters. We'll send you their books as our way of saying thank you for your partnership with us in the Ministry of Family Life Today.
You can donate online at familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY to donate. And we look forward to hearing from you. We also hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to hear, among other things, about how Jonathan Pitt's church came around him and helped him during his, what he calls his winter season, when his wife passed away. I hope you can tune in for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Bob Lapeen. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.
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