Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It’s a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute, supported by listeners just like you. I’m Dr. James Dobson and I’m thrilled that you’ve joined us.

Roger Marsh: Welcome to Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh. Life has a way of handing us lemons sometimes, right? Circumstances that we never chose and oftentimes we can’t control. So what do we do when the sour moments come?

On today’s edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, Dr. Dobson sits down with author and longtime friend Don Jacobson and his wife Brenda to talk about Don’s book, God Makes Lemonade. Before we begin, here is Dr. Dobson to set the stage for us.

Dr. James Dobson: Most of our listeners know that they don’t have a lot of control over which lemons they get and how they get them. The Bible says in John 16:33 that in this world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I’ve overcome the world.

I know of no philosophy or no thought in life that puts those two ideas together. This is really going to be tough. You’re going to be stressed. Your life may be in danger and probably will be. But be of good cheer. Somehow that is a contradiction in Scripture, but we know why, because God says I am there. Even when you go through those hard times, I will be there and sometimes I’ll choose to make lemonade out of your lemons. We’re going to talk about that concept today. I think it’s a great one.

Roger Marsh: I certainly have to agree. And now here is that conversation featuring Dr. James Dobson and his guests Don and Brenda Jacobson on today’s edition of Family Talk.

Dr. James Dobson: Don and Brenda Jacobson have been colleagues and friends of Shirley and me for many years. Don was the owner of Multnomah Publishers for 14 years before he sold it to Random House. I’m still half mad at him for doing that.

He published a number of my magnificent books, including Love for a Lifetime. Multnomah published that book in 1988, and it sold at least a million copies, probably more than that. Also, Night Light for Couples, which was your idea, Don, and then Night Light for Parents. Honestly, those are two of the books that I’m most proud of and I appreciate working with you on it.

Also, Marriage Under Fire and a number of other books. Brenda has been a mentor to moms for many years. They have four children, great kids, I might say. We’re so glad to have you all here. We want to talk about your own book, Don. You’ve come up not only with a concept about lemonade and have written a book called God Makes Lemonade: True Stories That Sweeten and Inspire, but this is going to be a whole series. It’s almost an enterprise. Isn’t that what you have in mind?

Don Jacobson: We sure hope so. We believe that just the response we’ve had from people so far seems like it’s touching a nerve.

Dr. James Dobson: Why don’t you start by putting your spin on what that means to have lemons come into your life and have God then do a miracle and turn them into lemonade?

Don Jacobson: The verse you gave, Jesus is really clear. If you’re alive, you’re going to have tribulation sometime. Whether you have had it, will have it, or are in the middle of it, people are going to go through tough times.

The fact of the matter is that we have little control over it. When your mom said to you, "Jimmie, make lemonade," that was your effort. What these stories are about are stories where people have no control. It’s like Joseph. His brothers throw him into a pit. He’s sold into slavery.

And yet God does something that he has nothing to do with because God’s with him the whole time. These stories are for people in the middle of pain, in the middle of discouragement. That’s not when we need to hear people say, "It’ll be okay." It’s just hard to hear that from people, but you give them a story. You tell them a story and they get to see God’s faithfulness over and over again. It just provides encouragement for that person in that time.

Dr. James Dobson: Going back to that Scripture again, John 16:33, Jesus was talking to his disciples right before he was crucified. He spoke these words and he did not say, "In this world you might have tribulation." He said it is a certainty. Most of the men that he was talking to on that occasion were executed.

He was serious. He was saying, "Don’t think this is an easy life. It’s going to be difficult. But be of good cheer. I have overcome it all." That means you can overcome as well. Even with the concept you just described about the fact that God can turn lemons into lemonade, he doesn't always. I think of Joni Eareckson Tada, who broke her neck all those years ago. I think she was 17 at the time. She’s still paralyzed. Sometimes the lemonade comes in another form than in the eradication of the tribulation.

Don Jacobson: The lemonade isn't always what we expect. I’m sure if you’ve read her testimony, you know her and she would have prayed for healing at that time. But out of that, years later, she looks back and says, "Oh my goodness, look what God has done."

Presidential commission for the handicapped. She looks back and says, "Look what God did that he never could have done through this healthy girl." He put her in that position of vulnerability and dependency. So the lemonade was something she didn’t want, didn’t wish for, but definitely happened.

Dr. James Dobson: Brenda, one of the centerpiece stories in God Makes Lemonade was something that happened to Don early in his life. He was, I think, 24 years of age. I’m going to ask him to tell the story, but is that an example of what we’re talking about here?

Brenda Jacobson: Oh, absolutely.

Dr. James Dobson: Were you all married at that time?

Brenda Jacobson: We had been married for three years and had no kids yet. But it changed our lives.

Guest (Male): And for the better, but we need to talk about that.

Dr. James Dobson: Don, it had to do with an afternoon where you decided to go hunting alone.

Don Jacobson: It did. I was in commercial construction at the time and loved working outdoors. I loved working with my hands and with my body. That particular day, a gunsmith had told me he’d fixed my gun. I invited a couple guys to go with me as I went and picked up my gun. Nobody was able to come, but I didn’t tell anybody I was going hunting and I didn’t tell Brenda that. I headed out into the woods to a couple different places.

Dr. James Dobson: That’s not real smart, Don. Nobody knows where you are and you’re carrying a shotgun.

Don Jacobson: I was a young guy, pretty confident in myself. I was just going to go out just for a quick moment. I grabbed my dog, Big Boy, a black Labrador, and we went out. We were sneaking up and I could hear the ducks quacking out there. Big Boy was being really loud. I told Big Boy to stay and tried to get him to be quiet.

Then I did something really dumb. Again, I’ve hunted all my life, grew up doing that in our family. I reached back and whacked him on the rump with the gun, with the muzzle facing towards me. The gunsmith had fixed it wrong and next thing I know, I’m laying five or six inches in water face down trying to figure out what had just happened.

I lay there for a moment and I said, "Oh my goodness, I shot myself." I rolled over back on my back, still laying in water, and just saw my gun laying in half. I knew something had gone wrong. I just said, "Lord, I’m going to need some help on this one," and started trying to shoot SOS shots, but it’s kind of hard with a double-barrel shotgun that’s broken in half. I started yelling, but nobody came.

Dr. James Dobson: Where did the shell hit you?

Don Jacobson: Right in the side of my stomach, about four inches above my hip bone. One of the most amazing miracles is that not one BB came out. Both you and Ryan know what a shotgun can do. Not one BB came out. It’s a 12-gauge number four shot, really heavy shot. Not one BB came out.

I’ll just flash forward about 30 days after I got out of the hospital. I went back in and the doctor laid me down on my stomach and without any anesthesia at all just went and popped 16 BBs right out of the surface of my back. Had any of them come out, I would have likely bled to death because I was out there 11 hours before anybody found me.

Dr. James Dobson: So the shot went all the way through and lodged near your back.

Don Jacobson: It kind of went everywhere. If you saw my X-rays right now, you’d see BBs spread over in about a five-inch area because they just kind of went everywhere, nicking organs, intestines, and all of that.

Dr. James Dobson: I cannot believe that you didn’t bleed to death because a 12-gauge shotgun with number four shot will put a hole in a wall. Especially up close like that, it would be about three or four inches in diameter.

Don Jacobson: It was. And I’m lying there, at least what I thought, bleeding to death. I knew I was in trouble and I was praying, "Lord, I need help." I yelled and nobody came. It was about 4:00 in November and a cool night. Then I stood up. I was able to get up, but once I got up, I could not swing my leg forward. I could only rotate my foot back and forth.

There was extensive nerve damage. So I got back down and started to crawl. At that point in time, I thought I was going to die because I had this unbelievable pain in my chest. What we found out later was it was a BB going through my heart and depositing itself in my lungs. If you see my X-rays right now, you see all these BBs in this five-inch area on the right side and then you see one sticking over here in my lung.

The amazing thing is in that moment I prayed a really quick prayer. I said, "Lord, if you’re going to take me home, do it quick because it hurts." In that moment, the pain was gone. It subsided significantly and I knew if they found me before morning, I was going to live. That actually plays out later in the ninth day of critical condition. I’ll come to that in a moment.

Dr. James Dobson: All right, now that was November in Oregon. The sun goes down very early and it gets very cold up there. So you’re out there by yourself and it’s dark or getting dark.

Don Jacobson: Almost dark. I started crawling out of the area further and then I was running out of gas really quick. I knew I was bleeding to death. So and I knew if I kept going to my car, I’d never make it. So I laid down on my side underneath the tree and Big Boy came and lay by me and just kind of held him during the night while I was out there. He kept me warm.

Dr. James Dobson: Brenda, what were you doing?

Brenda Jacobson: When he was late for dinner, we were planning on having guests for dinner that night. Some close friends of ours came over to watch a TV show of who shot J.R. on Dallas. So when he didn’t come home for dinner, I was really shocked, especially since he knew we were having guests over.

Finally, they showed up and I said to Eric and Jeri, "Don’s not home." Eric goes, "Don’t worry about it. You know he has bad tires. Let’s just wait until after the show," because it was right at the time for the show. So we watched the show. At about 10:00, we started calling around. This happened at about 4:00, so he’d already laid out there for hours.

We called my brother and he kind of mentioned that Don was wanting to go hunting that day. So we looked, I went outside and the dog wasn’t in the kennel and we kind of said, "Aha." So we did some more calling around. By about 11:30, we had kind of figured out for sure that he was hunting.

We kind of divided teams up. My dad and my brother went to one place that he has hunted before and my uncle and my cousin went to another. Because there were no cell phones, my dad said, "You stay home and stay by the phone." I said, "I can’t stay home." So he said, "Okay, then you and Eric and Jeri take Roslyn Lake and drive out where he’s never hunted before."

So we headed out. I knew those roads well, however, it was really foggy that night and you couldn’t see 10 feet in front of you. So as we were driving down, we missed the road. We finally got back on track and went by Roslyn Lake. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw this glisten, which is really strange because the lights were straight ahead. I said, "We need to pull over and check this." So Eric pulled over and it was Don’s car.

Guest (Male): You were panic-stricken by this point.

Brenda Jacobson: At this point, I was thinking what other possibilities because those are the possibilities I thought. His car didn’t work. Then it started bringing foul play or people into this. That’s what we started thinking, is maybe he’s being held or something like that’s going on. As we were driving, we went up to the bank, the top of the bank and Eric yelled, "Don!" loudly and he goes, "Did you hear that?"

My wife and I looked at him and said, "No." He yelled again and said, "Did you hear that?" and we said no. He goes, "Get back in the car. I’m going in." So his wife and I got back in the car and Eric started barreling through the woods.

Don Jacobson: He heard Big Boy barking. I was totally conscious and you asked if I lost consciousness. I don’t know. I remember being awake a lot. I bet I went to sleep and may have lost consciousness, but I was awake in that moment. The timing was amazing. You talk about the cool evenings. God just totally used the temperature to slow my metabolism down, which actually came out later because I was very close to hypothermia when they finally got me.

Guest (Male): That reduced the bleeding.

Don Jacobson: Big time. It slowed everything down. Between my voice and the dog, Eric came in. I know what the voice of an angel sounds like now. It sounds like Eric. He got there and he said, "Bud, how are you doing?" I said, "Pretty good. I shot myself." He said, "Well, I’ll go get..." I said, "I was able to get up earlier by myself. I bet if you help me, I could get up." Of course, by now I’d lost so much blood. He helped me get up and I just swooned. I went down and he took off running to go get some help and went back to the car.

Brenda Jacobson: He comes back out to where we were and said, "Brenda, don’t worry. Don just shot himself in the midsection." I just kind of went, "You’re kidding me." So we went to a neighbor and woke him up. He had told Eric that he was thirsty. So when we went to this farmhouse, he mentioned that and this farmer brought out some homemade grape juice in this jar and was going to take it out to him.

Don Jacobson: These guys called the fire department and it’s a volunteer fire department and everybody showed up. A couple of fire trucks, a couple police trucks, just a lot. In the meantime, they came back out there, got a coat on me because I was so cold and they brought this can of grape juice. I’m so thirsty, I can’t wait to drink it. I’ve never met a jar that’s going to keep a lid on it, especially if my friend’s there.

But these two big guys, this farmer and my construction worker buddy, could not get the lid open. I’ve been sent home from surgery for drinking a cup of coffee because you’ll drown. They don’t want it in there in your lungs. I just felt like there’s an angel sitting over there just saying, "Not happening, boys, sorry." Just didn’t let them take the lid off. Just because with where my condition was, I would have drowned in surgery likely.

Dr. James Dobson: Did you have the energy to pray through the night?

Don Jacobson: I was praying during the night and hearing the geese go over and mocking me with their honks, saying I shouldn't have been out here hunting. So they got me in an ambulance. Actually, they couldn't for a while. What happened was they got the team out there and they tried to get IVs into me and my veins had all collapsed.

They couldn't move me and so they called in an ambulance company and they brought in a pair of plastic pants, put them around me, pressurized and pushed the blood back up into my vitals and finally got the IVs back in and were able to start carrying me out. Remember, it was so foggy that night and this is where it’s really interesting what God did here.

Brenda Jacobson: I was sitting in the police car and listening to them keep changing the hospital location to a closer and closer hospital. Finally, they changed it to Gresham Hospital, which was five miles from there, but it was a little dinky country hospital and he was almost dead. They didn’t think he would live the helicopter ride to get to one of the major hospitals. So we went there.

When the police officer turned around to me, she said, "I’ve never seen someone as calm as you are in a situation like this."

Guest (Male): That’s not really your nature, is it, Brenda? Do you typically stay calm?

Brenda Jacobson: No, not really. In fact, wounds and blood and the thought of that is something that kind of freaks me out. So it was definitely the Lord. While I was sitting there, they were talking with the Life Flight helicopter and saying there is no way we’re going to be able to land this helicopter. We might as well go back to home base.

They said, "Just keep coming. Just try. We have to try." They came and about five minutes before they were going to land, the fog cleared. Totally cleared and the moon shone and the stars shone and the helicopter was able to land.

Don Jacobson: They picked me up and took me away. The same exact thing happened at Gresham Hospital. Right before we got there, the fog just rolled out and they landed. They were scrambling like crazy trying to get out there before the fog came back in. They got sucked in for five hours.

As I was being wheeled into the hospital, one orderly said, "You’re in luck." I just shot myself, right? He said, "No, Doctor John Brosy is on call tonight. He’s on call one weekend every eight weekends. He’s known in Portland for his ability to deal with wounds because he did his internship and a lot of his doctoring in Africa and had a lot of need for that." He was just a specialist. What I didn’t know at the time was he’s a Christian who also happened to go to our church. I’d just never met him.

We went in and this was 1980. They had to warm me up because my body was so close to hypothermia. Again, God did everything, waited until the last moment on everything just to give him the most glory. They had to warm my blood up. Everything they did, they had to warm me up and finally did the surgery from about 4:00 to 7:00. When he came out of the surgery, he went to Brenda and said some kind of sobering things.

Brenda Jacobson: The doctor walked up to me and said, "He’s still alive," which they hadn't anticipated him living through the surgery. He said, "If he lives, he’ll have a permanent colostomy for the rest of his life and he’ll never walk again."

Dr. James Dobson: All right, I just looked up at the clock and we’re out of time, which angers me. When I really get into a storyline like this, you want to hear the outcome. We’re going to have to make people come back next time because we’re not going to get it all said.

The essence of it is that we’ve got you at the hospital and you’re between life and death. You have survived to this moment. You’ve had a great physician who, it’s obvious, the Lord was looking out for you. Be of good cheer. But we still don’t know. We know you survived because you’re sitting here, but we don’t know how. We’re going to pick it up right here next time if you can be with us again.

Don Jacobson: We’d love to.

Dr. James Dobson: Brenda, thanks for your part in telling the story. You’ve got more to say to us, so we’re going to have to say goodbye to our listeners. I’m sorry folks, it just worked out that way.

Roger Marsh: Well, what a place to leave off. A newlywed couple, three years in, facing news that would test anyone’s faith to its limit. We’ll have to wait until next time to hear how God writes the rest of that story. You’ve been listening to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk featuring Dr. Dobson’s conversation with Don and Brenda Jacobson about Don’s book called God Makes Lemonade.

If you missed any part of today’s program or if you’d like to hear it again, you can visit drjamesdobson.org and find all the audio there as well as information about Don Jacobson’s book. Again, that’s drjamesdobson.org.

Here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we are committed to preserving and promoting the institution of the family and the biblical principles upon which it is based. Programs like the one you just heard today are made possible by the generosity of listeners just like you. So if today’s conversation encouraged you, we invite you to partner with us with a gift of any amount.

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Well, I’m Roger Marsh, and on behalf of all of us here at Family Talk and the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for part two of the conversation that Dr. Dobson had with Don and Brenda Jacobson. They’ll finish sharing their remarkable story of survival and hope. That’s coming up right here on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you trust for the family you love.