Kathie Lee Gifford Discusses Her New Book, "It's Never Too Late."

Looking for that perfect Christmas gift for the family? Why not a chicken? Stick a bow on top, put the chicken under the tree, and who knows, you may even have a couple eggs to fry up for breakfast Christmas morning.

Give the gift that keeps on clucking. A chicken. Okay, maybe it's not the perfect gift for your family, but it is the perfect gift for a poor family in Asia. A chicken can break the cycle of poverty for a poor family. Yes, a chicken.

A chicken's eggs provide food and nourishment for a family, and they can sell those eggs at the market for income. When you donate a chicken or any other animal through Gospel for Asia, 100% of what you give goes to the field. And the best gift of all, when Gospel for Asia gives a poor family an animal, it opens the door to the love of Jesus. So give the perfect gift for a family in Asia this Christmas. Give them a chicken.

Call 866-WINASIA or to see chickens and other animals to donate, go to CritterCampaign.org. He'll give you hope for tomorrow, joy for your sorrow, strength for everything you go through. Remember he knows, he knows the plans he has for you. Welcome back to Hope for the Caregiver here on American Family Radio.

This is Peter Rosenberger. This is the nation's number one show for you as a family caregiver, and he does know the plans that he has for you. That's my wife Gracie from her CD Resilient, and she is indeed resilient. I've got another lady on the phone who is resilient, and I've had the privilege of getting to know her for lo these many years. And I heard her talking about her new book, and it really grabbed me, the title of it and the message of it, because so many family caregivers think that it's too late.

That their life is forfeit in exchange for the person they're caring for. And they struggle under this burden, and I thought, I'm going to reach out, I want to come on the show, and that is another woman who has a powerful voice, and I love her singing, and I love her music, I love her heart, and I love her laughter, and I've made her laugh, and that's Kathie Lee Gifford. She's with us today. Kathie Lee, thank you very much. Hi, Peter. You have made me laugh, buddy. Well, it was legendary when you and Gracie came on the Today Show. That was hysterical. I was telling Jonathan before you came on, I said, for whatever reason, I tend to be a little bit unfiltered, and things just pop out of my mouth, and I try to grab them and bring them back, but I can't, so I just let it go.

You know what? I've had a career because I'm like that. My first book was called I Can't Believe I Said That. And I haven't changed, and you haven't either.

God made us the way we are for a reason. He did, bless our hearts. But you just moved to Nashville after 35 years. Gracie and I left Nashville. We live up in the Rockies in Montana. How beautiful. How beautiful.

It is gorgeous. And we don't even have a traffic light in our county. Yeah, people forget that that part of America still exists. For me, leaving the culture of the Northeast is really what I was leaving.

I left the job, yes, but I left people that I love and adore, and they're still my friends. They always will be. But it was the culture that was killing me.

It's a culture of chaos now in many, many of our major cities. I was working on a movie here in Nashville coming up for a whole year. I was back and forth, back and forth, working on co-writing all the music for a movie called Ben King, writing with a brilliant writer named Brett James. And every time I get on a plane, Peter, to go home on a Sunday evening, I'd go, Why am I so happy here? And I just thought, you know, there's a culture of kindness here. I've been through now two elections in this area and never once did I get in an argument with anybody about anything. They'd always say, you know, after you vote, you know, let's get together and have a drink and write a song. It wasn't, and nobody, I mean, they yell down here, but it's usually at a football game.

Well, it's often at a football game. It's just a different world. And I was, I was literally, my spirit was being crushed and my soul was rotting. I just felt it. And I said, I got to make new memories or the old ones are going to kill me and I'm not ready to die.

Well, we came to that same epiphany for several different reasons. One of them is the humidity. I'm a child of the South and so is Gracie. I mean, I'm country with a K. And we came out here because the low humidity and the cool air is just easier on her arthritis.

We've been coming out here for 30 years and I was sitting in bumper to bumper traffic and 9000 degree heat and humidity down on I-65 right there, 100 Oaks area. And I'm thinking, why am I doing this? And so the biggest traffic jam I have out here is usually cattle. And every now and then you have to stop for an elk. And it's, but it's been good for her.

I'm so glad for you. Yeah. You know, we, we need peace in our life too. We don't just need a paycheck and a roof over our heads. We need peace. After Frank passed and after my children had, had left and they were pursuing their own lives, which that's what I raised them to do.

I was happy that they were doing that in Los Angeles. And you know, I just, I was, I had crushing loneliness and I think that's true for many, many people as they get older as well. We start to, we start to lose so much that that's what we basically just you know, seem to be much, much more aware of the loss in our life.

Other rather than what we still have. We tend to go to a lot more funerals than, than other kinds of, you know, meetings. We can't go to anything anymore, but you know what I'm saying? At a certain point of your age, you, it's all about, you know, losing people, losing this, losing your job, losing your looks, losing your spouse, losing control of your body, losing all of that stuff, losing hope. And but that's not the, that's not the way God wants us to live our lives. You know, nobody ever retired in the Bible.

They just died. And I think we should take an extra look at that and say, okay, what am I, what should I still be doing even though I am older, even though I, I don't have the same job anymore, but what can I still do that's going to make me feel fulfilled? It's going to make me feel like somebody needed me and I could be there for them. And that's something everybody can do. Truly anybody can do. Look at your wife.

Look at you. Gracie has had more happen to her than almost anybody I know, but she still wakes up in the morning and says, okay, Lord, if I have a pulse, I have a purpose. And she does. And, and she, she was, uh, somebody was, and she chastised me a little bit because they're saying, oh, I just wish 2020 would go away. I wish we, you know, this and this. She says, she said, stop. There are a lot of people that wish they could have one more day with someone.

Even in 2020. And she lives with a lot of gratitude. And, uh, this place out here, you slow down out here. And we had so many surgeries in Nashville. She's up to over 80 now.

And so there's been so many surgeries and it was so much pain. And she said, you know, I want to be surrounded by beauty and, and slow, slow things down a little bit. And, uh, I feed the horses in the winter. I pull a sled full of hay behind my snowmobile. And I was talking to a local rancher out here and she said, she loves feeding that livestock because they're always happy to see you.

And so when horses come running up to me in the winter, even when it's 20 below, they're always happy to see me. And, and I walk outside sometimes and I see the stars and the sunsets. And I, my soul was so tired from all the chaos of, of our life, even in such wonderful places, Nashville, that I was telling a buddy of mine there and I said, my soul is weary. And so I get that where you were like, and so I'm so weary. Exactly.

Yeah. And that can happen to people anywhere, anywhere, especially caregivers. My sister took care of my, my parents, uh, before they both passed and she lived near them. So she got the bulk of it. And, um, my mom's been gone now three years.

And, um, and where is it two? I don't know. Yeah. Frank died in 2015. My mom died in 2017.

Yeah. So it's three years now. I can't keep track of anything more, but my sister, uh, is now enjoying life, uh, like she hasn't in decades and decades because she's, she's freed up. And, but, but, but boy, does she understand the soul weariness of every single day they needed something. And she felt like, how can I give any more Lord than I'm already giving? And every day he gave her manna. He gave the Hebrews, you know, what they needed one day at a time. That's what he did for her. It's what he's done with me. Uh, he'll do it for anybody, you know, draw near to God and he'll draw near to you. If you're feeling far away from God, it's cause you move, not him. I had a lady call into my show last week and, and she said, well, you know, the Lord never puts more on you than you can handle. And I stopped her.

I said, no, that's not actually true. He asked a blind man to see, a deaf man to hear, and a dead man to walk out of the grave. He doesn't put more on you than he can handle.

Yeah. Everybody thinks that's the scripture. When you ask them, okay, where's chapter and verse on that? It's not in the Bible.

No, it's not. One of those that has been passed down is that he, what it says is my God will supply all my needs, all according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus. I think Philippians 4, 19, I think.

I'm not sure. I'm not, not a scholar, but I know that that's what it says. And, and, and I agree with it. And he does give us more than we, than we can bear. And that's why we cling to him.

And then somehow he gets us through. It's hard to cry out to a savior you don't think you need. And, uh, and so this is when, when I started this show so many years ago, I was determined to do two things. I wanted to penetrate into the isolation of caregivers because you can testify this with your sister and some of the things that you dealt with, with Frank. And you don't have to go into all the details of his last days and so forth, but I know there were painful times. But the loneliness that comes, the isolation that comes from caregivers and caregivers can feel isolated in a crowded room and we can feel isolated on a crowded pew. And, and so I wanted to penetrate into that with hopefully, uh, some, some insights and some wisdom. I'm in my 35th year of this now.

And, um, and also help bring some good theology to this conversation and not just give, you know, greeting card messages. And, um, but when I heard you talking, I was, I was listening to you on Martha MacCallum on Fox and, and Gracie and I were watching it together and, and she's doing, by the way, she's doing okay. We've had a couple of leg issues out here, um, that we're trying to adjust with her prosthetics.

And that's always been a little bit challenging. It's not because she's an amputee. It's because the rest of her is so broken. She's an orthopedic train wreck.

And so they have, there's a lot of alignment issues. And then she got the coronavirus and then she just, she's just coming off of a bout with shingles. So she's not really had the best year. So it's been, and then, and then she's married to me, you know? Well, that alone would do me in.

We were, we were at Walter Reed one time with a young woman and she had lost her leg on the field there in an IED. And she was just a precious young lady. And, and, um, she looked at Gracie and she had big tears in her eyes. She said, you ever, you ever think I'm going to find a boyfriend? And Gracie said, threw her thumb over at me. She said, well, I found this guy. And I said, Gracie, hasn't she suffered enough?

Really Gracie? I'll give that, but no, I, I, I wanted to do this. And when I listened to the enthusiasm you had, and I, and I could just see so many of my callers, so many of these listeners who are just living in such heartbreaking isolation, thinking that God has forgotten them, that they're stuck all up hours, all night, you know, doing laundry and changing adult diapers and cleaning up messes and, and, and everything else or special needs families and so forth.

And I thought, no. And, and one thing that you said, and I want you to unpack this, take as long as you want, because this is really important to, to my audience. And to me personally, what you have to say on this, the goal for all of us as caregivers is to stand at a grave one day. That we may not do that.

Lord may choose to do it differently, but that's our goal is we don't want our loved one to live without us. But I am trying to help my caregivers and myself see that we know we don't want to stand there with our fist clenched. At resentment at our loved one, at family and friends who didn't help the way we thought they should or doctors or even at God. And, and I, and when you said it's never too late for forgiveness. And so many people think that they can't forgive because their loved one's going on or whatever. And forgiveness doesn't mean it doesn't matter. It just means that you're going to trust God to sort this out and not yourself. You're going to take your hands off of someone else's throat.

Talk a little bit about that. Well, I think obviously forgiveness is crucial because Jesus says it was. He said, how many times am I supposed to forgive? Seven times seventy. That's the perfect, perfect number for, for love.

It's what happened on the cross with seven times seventy. It's what happened, it's what happens when we love unconditionally. Get out of our own pain and say, it really, it isn't about me.

The trouble is our own selfishness. Even when I forgave my husband's infidelity, it didn't mean all our problems went away. We had new ones.

I had to learn to trust him again and he had to earn it. And you know, but, but, but if I had never forgiven him, whose lives would have been destroyed besides mine? Mine would have been. Frank's would have been. Our children's would have been. And then everybody else that works for us with the family and all the people we take care of. Excuse me, excuse me, Peter Holt.

I've been doing this book tour for about two weeks now and that's the first time I've coughed. Excuse me, one more second. Don't forgive, we only hurt ourselves. When we hate, it doesn't hurt the person we're hating. Hate hurts, you know, hurts us. And Jesus said, forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.

How many times have we had to say that in our own lives? Jesus did not use the King James language, but he said, Father, they don't know they're crucifying their creator. They don't know. I've come to set them free. They don't know. I love them. You and I are one, Father, and we love them.

They just don't know. I try to model my life on our Lord, and I'm terrible at it so many times. But I keep getting up, he keeps forgiving me, and there is no condemnation in Christ, the word says. So he doesn't condemn me, and I'm not to condemn anyone else.

The truth is, we don't have the right to. You love people. I can manage you to love people. Leave everything else up to me. Leave all judgment. Leave all justice. Leave everything up to me, because I am sovereign God, and guess what?

You aren't. And we've been battling this since the garden, you know, the Garden of Eden. We want to be God. We think we know better.

We have a better way. And we certainly don't understand suffering, and we don't understand why a loving God would allow suffering. But, I mean, he gave us, as you know, Peter, he gave us free will.

That's what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We can make choices about the way we want to live our lives. And too often we have chosen enmity. We've chosen anger. We've chosen bitterness. We've chosen hatred. We've chosen racism. We make those choices. Not God.

He doesn't want that for anybody's life. But we choose it, and then we blame him when our lives don't turn out the way we'd like them to be. You know, we don't remember the fact that, oh yeah, that's true. I did do that. Oh yeah, I did pick that. I did choose that.

Yeah, that was me. But we blame him. And the beautiful thing about it is that he can take it.

You know, he can take all of it. What he can't take is the heartache of us rejecting him. And so many people reject him for all different kinds of reasons. Many of them reject him because they feel that he could never love them because of what they've done in their lives.

So they've decided that they're a better judge of themselves than God himself is. God says, I love you. God says, I see you as a child of mine. I'm going to wrap you in a robe of righteousness, put a ring on your finger, and I'm going to call for the fatted calf to be prepared because I love you.

And you've come home and we're going to celebrate. God is a God of celebration, not a God of condemnation. All of those are terrible, terrible translations of the Bible by people who never read the Greek, never read the Hebrew, and just think they know what it says.

They don't. And the worst one, you'll probably get, you know, people can crucify me. I don't care. I've been studying rabbinically, in other words, the way the rabbis do, the Old Testament and the New Testament for years and years and years. And the King James Version, which some people think is the only divinely inspired word of God, is the worst translation of any of them out there. Jesus did not speak the King's English. He spoke Hebrew. He spoke Aramaic and he spoke some Greek.

And, you know, I think it was 1610 or whatever that the King James Version was written in. Jesus was a Jew. He was not English. Jesus was a Jew. His mother was a Jew. His earthly father was a Jew, and all of his first disciples were Jews. You know, so people are so biblically sort of ignorant, and I'm not condemning them for it.

I'm just telling you the truth. I have people come up to me all the time and go, Jesus was Catholic, right? I go, I think it's a joke when they say that. They really believe it.

It's not their fault. They've been taught all their lives falsehoods, mistruths, and downright lies. And if you want to get joy in your life, you want to get some understanding what the Scriptures say, start studying it rabbinically. Read a Bible called The Tree of Life, written by Messianic rabbis, and it'll tell you what the Bible really, really says.

We could go into that for hours and hours, but what I know from it is that God did not want us to suffer. He put us in a garden to have community with Him. He put us in a garden to love each other, be fruitful, and multiply.

And He put us in a garden to work. He put us in perfection, and yet He still says, Well, stewardship is a big part of what we talk about on this, that we don't own this. I don't own this. I didn't do this to Gracie, and I can't undo it. I'm a steward of it, and ultimately this is, and I tell my listeners, I say, Look, look at your hands.

If you don't see nail prints, this ain't yours to fix. And we're spending so much time trying to— That's a great way to say it, Peter. Well, we spend so much time trying to fix something that is not ours to fix. I don't know why Gracie suffers.

I don't know why—take it back. I know why she suffers. I don't know why God doesn't intervene in her suffering. And I don't understand it, and I struggle with it, but as I struggle with it, and there's nothing like caring for a woman with disabilities for a couple of decades to expose the gunk and the bad theology in your own soul. And God has used these things as a crucible for me to explore His goodness and provision, and that's where the cross looms so large. And this is the message I want my fellow caregivers to understand, is that this is not punishment.

Gracie's not being punished. That was all taken care of at the cross. This is part of this broken world, but it is being redeemed even as we watch it in front of us. And I see so many people in bondage to this, that when you started doing this, it's never too late. And I look at this, and I thought, oh, people need to hear this, that their life is not over. I mean, I'm working through lunch on the day of my funeral.

I mean, I'm not stopping. And it's never too late to forgive. People in the Bible did not retire.

They died doing God's work. But it's never too late to forgive. It's never too late to trust God with whatever is going on. And I deal with people calling in with just heartbreaking realities. And yet this has ended this. I want them to hear this message.

I want to hear it from you. You know, when I went through my own moral failures myself, I outed myself on your show. But there was a story behind even why I did that. That was not arbitrary.

I did it intentionally. But then I'm in a position where I am caring for the very woman that I wounded. And I look at this in the context of the cross, in the context of God's provision, and the depth of His mercy and grace in this, and what He's able to reach into the most horrific of things, and weave redemption in ways that we can't even imagine.

And that's what I heard from you the other night when you were doing this interview. That's what I'm hearing from you in this book and from your heart and from the years that I've known you, is that if we're willing to trust Him, however scared, and I tell this to my fellow caregivers, just understand that His scarred hand is holding on to your scared hand. And Gracie's scars are temporary. They're not going to be—she's not going to have these scars in eternity.

But His scars are eternal. And that means everything to us that He did this. And so as we timidly, however timidly we do trust Him, and I know you've been very public about a lot of the things in your— you've been public about everything in your life, Kathy Lisa, to be honest. Well, as much as I have felt free to be. Yeah, I've got secrets. Everybody does. But I keep my own, and I keep others. I have secrets that will go to my grave with me because people have asked me never to tell it. So I won't. I've been very open about my life, and I've tried to live an honest one.

So if you like me or don't like me, it's on an honest basis. I can live with that. Well, as we tell people with Gracie, everybody knows she's an amputee, but that doesn't mean everybody gets to see her limb. And it's not how lurid the tale. It's how great the Savior. And that's our message.

It is. And I remember one time, Gracie and I were going through with me personally and all this many years ago, and I just came off the public eye for a long time. I didn't play the piano at church.

In fact, I don't think anybody knew I even played. And then one Wednesday night, right before Thanksgiving, we were having a communion service at church, and the pastor had walked with me. He's through all this stuff. He said, I want you to play while the people are having communion. And I looked at him, and my tears just filled my eyes. I said, I'm not worthy to do this.

And he said, get up there and play. And another pastor told me, he said, we excommunicate people from the church, but we also communicate the gospel. And this is what you've been doing in this book is communing the beauty of the gospel to people whose lives are so wounded and so lonely and so scared. And it costs you something to write this book.

You don't write a book like this and just glibly. I would imagine there are tears on the page at some point on this thing. Yeah, many times. First of all, nobody wants to rehash old pain. But sometimes, I mean, I left certain things out of the story the first time it was told, but now I feel free that I can. Sometimes it's because someone has passed on, or just because I've learned more information.

I don't know, but I just prayed over every word, of course, and every page. I said, Lord, I don't want to hurt anybody. I want to help hurting people.

So it's not a tell-all book to embarrass or to hurt anyone. I tell truth about people that have hurt me, but I have no enmity towards them. I have no hatred or bitterness. People hurt out of their own woundedness, and that's why I've been able to always forgive whatever somebody did or said, because I know that good people, happy people, joyful people don't go around hurting people. Wounded, desperate, broken people do that, and I can't hate them for that. I can just pray for them. Dear Lord, you know what they're going through. Help them, Lord, and help me to love them the way you loved me, and look past the hurt and see the wounded soul in them. And like somebody like a Howard Stern, I talk about the 30 years it took for us to come to a place of this kind of redemption in our crazy story.

Lots of things like that. I mean, it's a who's who of people that are well-known in this world, but I didn't try to write a book about who's who. It's just that this is my life. These are the people that I spent it with. These are the people that I had impact with and interaction with every day of my life because of the nature of who I was married to and what I did for a living. So it makes for, I guess, an interesting reading, but behind every one of those stories, even if it's with a Howard Stern, there are people of other people that have had somebody for 30 years that they needed to forgive or needed to get right with.

I forgave Howard 30 years ago the first time he ever hurt me, but he didn't know it. And it's an interesting story in the book. I tried to only put interesting stories. I don't want to bore anybody.

I'm an entertainer. I learned that a long time ago. The worst thing you can do is bore somebody. I hope it's an entertaining book. I hope it goes from hilarious to heartache and heartbreaking because life does in the blink of an eye.

You can be laughing yourself thick over something and then crying your eyes out in the next hour. I mean, it's just that's life. But that's life. But how do we do life?

We do it with our savior. You're right. Exactly.

With his scarred hands and our scared one. I love that. That's beautiful. You've got to give me credit for it because I came up with it. I do give you credit for it. I'm telling you that.

I think that's brilliant. Well, this is something I've learned while in the fetal position asking God for mercy and understanding that mercy there was great and free. Pardon, there was multiplied to me. There my burdened soul found liberty at Calvary. When you see the goodness of God, it does change how you interact with other people with these things.

And this is something I yearn for my fellow caregivers and myself, too, is that whatever you're carrying right now, whatever it is. And I know it's painful. I get it. And it's hard to watch things that you can't control. It's hard to watch someone suffer.

I get that, too. But he who began a good work is faithful to complete it. And this is the message Kathie Lee has in this thing.

It's never too late. As long as you're breathing, you have purpose in the kingdom of God. And then when he takes you home, you got purpose in that kingdom. And it's a beautiful testimony and a remarkable life, Kathie Lee. And I appreciate you taking the time on the show with me today. You're always welcome to come on.

But this was the message I wanted people to hear. And thank you. And people can go to your website, right?

It's KathieLeeGifford.com. The book is wherever books are sold, correct? Yes, that's right. The sled dogs bring our books out here.

That's the Pony Express I heard. We always have a white Christmas out here. By the way, rank yourself as a mother-in-law. Are you enjoying being a mother-in-law?

Oh, my gosh, I am a 10. You know why? I stay the heck out of their lives and let them live them. I only do what they want me to do. I only come visit when they invite me.

I only give my opinion if they ask for it. And we all get along great. You know, we have three grandchildren now.

Oh, great. And we started young. And the doctor said, you know, if you guys are going to have children, you need to have them while you're young because Gracie was so broken. So I went to Gracie and I said, well, we've got to do this, baby. The doctor says we have to. And I've got a prescription and everything.

I don't know if it's covered under Obamacare, but I bet you it's covered under Clintoncare. No. No, I kid. We'll probably have to edit that out.

We are so bad. But you are a delight. You are just a delight.

And thank you for taking the time. Oh, give that sweet woman a big, big hug for me around that beautiful Medicare. She is tougher in train smoke. That's why we named her record resilient.

She is tougher than train smoke. But you have a merry Christmas. Are you going to be able to spend Christmas around in the Nashville area? Yeah, for the first time. You'll enjoy it. My children are all going off with their respective in-laws. And I'm going to have a tender Tennessee Christmas, like my friend Danny Grant wrote.

Yeah? I've known Amy for many years. And that is, you will have one. We will have more snow, but that's okay. That's all right. You just cuddle up, all right? I love you, Peter. You take care. Thank you very much, Kathie Lee. You too.

Merry Christmas. And I very much appreciate it. The book is called It's Never Too Late. And it is never too late. Go get it today.

KathieLeeGifford.com. It's never too late. Thank you, Don.

You're welcome. I'm Gracie Rosenberger. And 26 years ago, I walked for the first time on two prosthetic legs. I saw firsthand how important quality prosthetic limbs are to an amputee. This understanding compelled me to establish Standing with Hope. For more than a dozen years, we've been working with the government of Ghana in West Africa, equipping and training local workers to build and maintain quality prosthetic limbs for their own people. On a regular basis, we purchase and ship equipment and supplies.

And with the help of inmates in a Tennessee prison, we also recycle parts from donated limbs. All of this is to point others to Christ, the source of my hope and strength. Please visit standingwithhope.com to learn more and participate in lifting others up. That's standingwithhope.com. I'm Gracie, and I'm standing with hope.