Short Take: How did losing your mom teach you about mourning?

Tell us about the story of losing your mom and then how that led to this deeper understanding of what it means to mourn over your sin.

In the book, I kind of tell a little bit of the story. I was adopted as a one-month-old, but prior to my parents adopting me, my mom and dad then went through really a lot of really difficult, painful seasons of getting pregnant and then having a miscarriage. My mom probably went through three or four miscarriages, and then she actually had a little girl who lived 24 hours and then died. They adopted me probably a year later, saying in the book my mom had a lot of, I called it, pent-up mothering to do. I mean, she just smothered me with love and grace and mercy, led me to Christ.

It really just created an amazing, amazingly warm and loving home and a deep relationship. So she was everything to me. I mean, I loved her deeply. And so I think because of that connection with her, when she died, it just really hit me in ways that I think were surprising to me. And if I experienced the ache, the dullness, the why am I crying now, kind of the surprise side of grace, you get ambushed by tears when you don't expect them. That whole experience helped me to really fully understand, I think, this beatitude with the idea of being, do we ever really grieve over our sin in the same way that we would grieve over the death of a loved one? And that really hit me hard David, just from the standpoint of like, I think a lot of times, most people, we spend a little time excusing our sin or rationalizing our sin or belittling our sin or ignoring it, and then we get around to confessing it. But I thought, do I ever really mourn over my sin? Have I ever ached over my sin in the way that I ached over the loss of my mother? And it really hit, I really need to rethink how I think about my sin and how it affects Christ and how it affects other people. And so it really pushed me then, I think, to take my sin more seriously, just because of how Christ thinks about it and not how it impacts me, because I think a lot of people do that. Yeah, we take it seriously because there was a consequence I didn't like, but do I take my sin seriously because it was a part of sending Christ to the cross? So it really forced me to really dig into my own heart and go, I don't know that I've ever mourned over sin in a way that would reflect a level of understanding of the seriousness of my sin.