FamilyLife Today®

Speaker 1

There's no waste in God's economy ever. There's no waste in God's economy ever.

Speaker 2

What does that mean?

Speaker 1

He will use everything together for good. And when you know that's true, no matter what you're going through and no matter what you have endured in the past, God can use that in a beneficial way.

If you're looking forward instead of focusing on dwelling backward.

Speaker 2

Welcome to Family Life Today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

Speaker 3

And I'm Dave Wilson. And you can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is Family Life Today.

So isn't it interesting? We're sitting in a studio in Family Life Today studio with a couple that didn't want to have kids, and they have more kids than anybody I know. And grandkids.

Speaker 2

They had 12 children and 37 grandchildren.

Speaker 3

Yeah, seriously. Bill and Pam Mutts are back with us. And I really want to know, do you know every single grandkid's name and birth date?

Speaker 1

We have those all on a chart. And that's why you use Excel.

One of the reasons that we can do Christmas is because you only get assigned two people, people over the entire family that you give gifts to. And so you're only buying gifts for two people every year.

And it's randomly sorted so that doesn't happen within a 10 year period.

Speaker 3

Hey, we should do that with our seven grandkids.

Speaker 2

Do you guys do that too? You don't buy a present?

Speaker 4

We don't do a present. No. We don't even do birthday presents. What we do is when we're together.

Speaker 2

Because we could be poor and living.

Speaker 4

On the street, what we do is we just do something special when we're with that family the next time we're with them.

Speaker 2

That's a good idea. Worth the burger.

Speaker 1

And listen, if we go back, even in training with our own kids, we never focus on fairness because life is not fair until we get to heaven.

So our reality was that if I would see something I'd want to purchase for one of the kids when I was somewhere else and bring it home. I didn't worry about then having to buy something for everybody else.

We didn't worry about the amount of money we would spend equally at Christmas.

Speaker 2

Wait, wait, wait. This is mind blowing right now, honestly, because it's all about fairness. Like, I used to even count the number of gifts for each child. And I know a lot of parents do that or you're spending the same amount.

Speaker 3

But we didn't have 12, but you're.

Speaker 2

At the airport, you have children. You're like, oh, Carrie would love that. So you would just get it for.

Speaker 1

Carrie, bring it home, and if somebody's upset, you say, you'll have yours. Just relax. And that created a tone where there was an absence of expectation.

And my mom would do it to a penny. So for Christmas, she spent exactly the same amount of money for us. And I always thought that was a little weird.

Now, I will tell you, there were some places we missed it. Sometimes I remember Ozzie saying to me, he was our children’s fifth child. He said, you know, I've just been getting underwear the last three years for business.

Speaker 3

That guy.

Speaker 4

We got up our game.

Speaker 2

I wonder if I miss somebody. Like, they're like, well, yeah, everybody's gotten something, dad. But I haven't for three years.

Speaker 1

So we work on it. But then that's a fun way to.

Speaker 4

Well, because you'd have to do necessity to be like, okay, who needs shoes? We'll make that a Christmas present. Or, who needs underwear?

Speaker 1

But I think we set ourselves up poorly when we think that life is going to be fair. As parents, we can make life fair for our children, when in fact, there's going to be nothing but a disappointment in that regard, because there's lots of inequity in life.

So it's important to consider what you can do about seizing moments as you grow and mature. This means being available to volunteer and to help someone else, even when other people aren't doing that, even when your family members aren't doing that.

Additionally, think about what jobs you can take on in the house that would help everybody else out. Even if you're not being charted the same in terms of the zone that you're responsible for this time, maybe you could pick up that area.

Speaker 2

Too, if you didn't listen to yesterday's episode, go back and listen, because we ended at a point where you guys got married.

Pam, you didn't really necessarily want to have kids. You didn't think about it much because it would be an interference for the plans that you had.

Kind of made for yourself.

For myself, yeah.

Speaker 4

Had it mapped out.

Speaker 2

But then you got back from your honeymoon, and a month later, you're pregnant.

You also made a decision that wasn't easy, but you went to Jesus, you prayed about it for a while, you surrendered this, and you decided, we're not gonna use birth control.

We're gonna trust God with our future and the amount of kids we have.

Speaker 4

So when you say that too Ann, I just wanna have a caveat of saying every person is an individual. Every person has their own relationship with Jesus. And I would say the one thing that is the must is that you go to Jesus and just ask him.

Speaker 2

Because you're not saying everybody said this yesterday, it has to do what you did.

Speaker 4

Nope, correct. But asking Jesus, if you don't wanna miss out on God's best, then ask.

Speaker 1

Him in any area of life.

Speaker 4

Yeah, so he might have a different plan for you. In fact, he probably has a different plan for you than he does for me. And that's the beauty of having a relationship with Jesus.

Speaker 1

I think it's important to recognize that there's God's permissive will and there's God's perfect will. We don't always focus on seeking God's perfect will, but if we want to know it, we have to yield completely to what He will show us.

This is part of the balance of life that He will bless. The positive decisions we make and the leadership decisions we undertake are significant. However, if you want to achieve a true center, you have to give everything up and maintain an open-handed heart before God, allowing Him to place in it what He wants to bring in.

Speaker 4

My heart's exploding with multiple things that I want to say, and I want to go back to the discussion that we started to have, which is about our oldest daughter, Carrie. She couldn't wait to have kids but was having such difficulties getting pregnant. Carrie had had endometriosis growing up and experienced terrible periods. If you have a daughter who's going through that, please go to the doctor to get her help because it's really painful.

Anyway, Carrie eventually got pregnant. She was so excited and looking forward to this baby. One day, she was home vacuuming the carpet when her mother-in-law came in and said, "Carrie, your legs look so swollen; I think you better go to the doctor." So, she goes to the doctor that day, and they said that she had preeclampsia. It was so bad that they took her by ambulance to the hospital.

Speaker 2

How many weeks pregnant was she?

Speaker 4

She was 21 weeks.

Speaker 2

So halfway through.

Speaker 4

Yeah, so she was living in Indiana and by then we had moved to Florida. We hopped in a couple of cars and drove back up to Indiana. When we got there, the doctor said, "Hey, you know, this is not looking good. I think we're gonna have to take the baby because either Carrie's gonna die or the baby's gonna die or both."

That was like so heartbreaking. Especially, we just want you to know, those of you that are listening who have gone through the heartache of not being able to get pregnant or getting pregnant and losing a child, it's so huge. We want you to know that we're feeling that with you right now. And I'm sorry.

Speaker 2

And what has happened with Carrie since.

Speaker 4

They ended up adopting two kids from Russia?

And my name is Zaza, which comes from. I said, what's the name of the grandmother or the grand queen in Russia? Czarus.

I became Zaza, which is short for Tsaras, the grand. The Grand Queen of Russia.

And so all the kids call me that.

Speaker 2

I was gonna ask all of them call you that.

Speaker 4

They all do. I mean, there's a couple rebels in there that call me other things.

Anyway, and so Kate and Hudson were our two from Russia. And then Carrie had two others that she had twins through a surrogate. Carrie and Phil did.

And then 10 years later, after they were working through some things, they used their last embryo, which was Jack that they've had, and they had two other embryos that were not good. So they ended up using all their embryos, which was awesome.

But so they had five additional children after Gracie.

Speaker 2

That's sweet.

Speaker 4

So Gracie was our first grandchild. We lost.

Speaker 3

But you lost a child yourself, Jonathan.

Speaker 4

Yes. Take us through that.

Speaker 3

Walk us through there.

Speaker 4

So in 1980, I was pregnant with our second child, Jonathan, and like I told you, we were childholics. We were so crazy excited about these kids.

And so here we had a girl, then we had a boy, and then Jonathan was seven months old.

Women. Men. I'm telling you, when your spouse gets home and they go, what have you been doing all day? And the house is a mess.

It's like I was playing and just taking care of our two kids, because that was a big deal. Two kids is busy.

Speaker 2

It's busy.

Speaker 4

And so sometimes if I meet somebody, they'll go, hey, we only have one child. Or we only have two. And, like, that's a gift from God. So just know that's really super important.

And so I just want to go back to, you know, those my years in the 20s where Jonathan, I would come home and Bill would say, "Pam, what have you been doing today? The house is a mess." I'm like, taking care of these kids, but it's been such a joy.

And I'm so grateful for the time I spent with them, taking them both to the playground, you know, going on book dates with them to the library and all those kinds of things.

And so one weekend we went to...

Speaker 1

Lake of the Ozarks was actually for a weekend with another couple. They had a concern the entire weekend. They had a daughter Jonathan's age, and a baby was drowning, which they talked about throughout the weekend.

But she could not see the face. These were our best friends that we spent time with.

Speaker 4

What do you mean?

Speaker 3

They had like a premonition or a daughter?

Speaker 1

Yeah, she had dreams and so she was very concerned about it being her baby throughout the course of the weekend. This is my best friend who is a resident physician.

So we were with Lynn and Warren, and we came home from that weekend. We had just moved into a new house and we were doing some remodeling. The bathroom at the current stage was by the front door.

We had picked up someone on the way home who had some dogs to bring home with us. Pam had let the dogs out in the morning, and while she had just started a bath with Carrie and Jonathan in it, about an inch of water in the tub, she went to get the dogs because they were by the front door to get them back in.

And in that period of time, Jonathan fell in the water.

Speaker 4

The dogs were barking and I was like, oh, my goodness, we've just moved here. I don't want our neighbors to be mad. I'll just quick go call the dogs. Called the dogs, they didn't come.

And I could just tell it was like the Holy Spirit said, Pam, get in there. So I went, and Jonathan had fallen over and ingested water. I immediately screamed, and the visitor came down and started CPR.

And then we...

Speaker 1

You called 911?

Speaker 4

I called 911 and the ambulance was on his way. And I called Bill's work misdialing and calling again. And his boss answered it.

Speaker 1

This is a pre cell phone era. And so the boss came into a meeting that I was in at the time and said, your wife called. Your son's drowned. You're supposed to go home right away. So that's what I heard.

Speaker 2

What happened in your, like, just sunk.

Speaker 1

Just sunk. And the parade the entire way there that something was misunderstood in the process of that. And I turned the corner into our driveway and there's an ambulance.

Speaker 2

And so like when you come back in and you see him, are you just in an absolute panic?

Speaker 4

Oh, my. Yes, yes. I mean, you're shaking, but you move into what you know you have to do.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 4

I had run across the street to get a neighbor who was just studying to be a nurse, and they came and got Carrie and took her to their house.

And then the paramedics were there. Yeah, the paramedics got there and were working on him.

And then they transferred him. And you're like, wait, they're taking my baby away?

Speaker 1

And Warren is the emergency room physician.

Speaker 4

Your friend in the er, in the.

Speaker 1

Er at the hospital. He goes, I know this baby. I can't do this. And just think about the premonition of the weekend before.

And so God used him to be a conduit. Back and forth to us on Jonathan's progress, which continued to erode.

And I think there was to some degree, I just knew God was going to do a miracle and somehow Jonathan was going to make it.

Speaker 4

Whereas I had also called our church, they'd sent somebody over to pray with me. And I was in the corner of the room just praying. But in my heart, I knew Jonathan was gone. So it's interesting to just see the difference with the two of us.

Speaker 1

In fact, when our pastor came, I said, you don't need to stay. This is gonna be fine. He goes, no, no, I'm staying.

Speaker 4

So we were 26 years old at the time, pretty naive in that, and just, you know, believing God for a miracle. And it was. It was dreadful. It was dreadful.

Speaker 1

And Warren walked in and said, "We lost him." I remember having one last chance to just hug him and smell his hair, and, you know, the pain of giving him back. Pam did the same thing, and Warren came up to me after we were getting ready to leave to go home. We had Carrie, our two-year-old, with us at the time as well, of course.

Warren said, "You know, Bill, marriages that have a child die are in like the high 80 percentiles of getting a divorce." So the two things that had just happened to me were Jonathan's loss and that warning. We drove home, and I decided I really needed to deal with that immediately. I sat down, asked Pam and Carrie to sit down, and I picked up a Bible. I said, "This book is either true or it isn't. And we know it's true. That means God loves us and he has a plan for our life, even through this."

I want you to know that I totally forgive you for what has happened because I knew that we needed to apply what we know: God is sovereign over the course that is ahead of us as we go forward. We hugged and prayed sitting there, and then we had wonderful friends surround us. After that, we went to bury Jonathan. Was it the next day or two days?

Speaker 4

So, yeah, we had a graveside funeral. When we drove up, I was like, where did all these people come from? This was before texting, and I was wondering how all these people knew.

Well, you know, word travels so fast. I was just amazed to see all the support from people there. But I was numb, actually. I think I was just so numb.

Speaker 2

Were you beating yourself up?

Speaker 4

So there were a couple of things that happened when we came back from the ER. Well, I can talk about this because she's not alive right now, but one of our relatives got on the ground and started pounding the ground and saying, "Pam, how could you leave the bathtub? How could you leave the bathtub?"

And yes, even one of my dear friends, too. And I was like, I didn't mean to. I just... He'd been sitting up, and I had hardly put any water in the bathtub at all. And so I'd never even thought that something like this could happen.

And so to me, the greatest miracle was Bill's acceptance.

Speaker 2

I was gonna say, when he said that to you, what did that feel like?

Speaker 4

Can you imagine the pain it would be to live through? Blame your. You know, you're beating yourself up enough to say, I can't believe that I left the bathtub.

And here you have a husband that says, I love you, support you, I forgive you before I'd even asked.

And to me, that's the greatest miracle.

Speaker 1

I think there were gradients of protection of Pam's emotions that I got to observe over the following months, because it was kind of easing into the responsibility level over time. We had heard a message at our church several months later about God's sovereignty and man's responsibility, you know?

Pam stood up at the end of that sermon out of Romans and turned to me and said, "You think that if I hadn't walked out of that bathroom, Jonathan, he'd be alive today, don't you?" I said, "Yes." And then she just wept. That was really the bottom of getting to it.

I think there's a picture in that of giving people time to work through the whole process that I wasn't cognizant of or necessarily nurturing. The forgiveness gave the plate for that. But the fact is that in watching it, you cannot predict how someone goes through healing processes. You cannot predict how someone goes through grieving.

So you have to be alongside them and enable them and let God do the work, the Holy Spirit work.

Speaker 4

So just seeing God's involvement all the way through the process was incredible. I talk about this in the book "Seven Specific Things" where we saw God prepare us. That morning, we were reading out of Ecclesiastes together, and Bill was getting ready for work. It says, "death is better than life." I'm like, "That's the weirdest verse, Bill." You know, I read that that morning, and we talked about it.

And then, of course, having Warren there as a receiving ER doctor, along with the best paramedics that came from two different stations working together, was remarkable. There are things that you see God's hand in as He allows us to go through grief and pain in this life, whether it's losing a son, a daughter, or a parent.

Speaker 2

A best friend or a grandparent, a grandchild.

Speaker 3

I mean, I'm sure you've sat with many couples over the years, maybe, that feel like they're responsible for a tragic death or whatever in their family. What do you say?

Speaker 4

My goodness, you know what? The enemy wants to hold us hostage. He does. He wants to hold us hostage.

When you have that initial thought, oh, my goodness, I can never forgive myself. And I remember thinking, if anything would ever happen to my child, there's no way I could live on.

And then here I'm confronted with this. I mean, Ann, did you ever have that feeling with your kids? Did you ever think, oh, my goodness, if anything happened to this child, how would I ever be able to survive?

Speaker 2

I think we all think that it's our greatest nightmare and our greatest fear.

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 4

And those of you moms and dads that have teenagers that are driving, just starting to drive, do you remember that first time when they drove away in their car and you're like, oh, Lord God, we just ask your protection over that vehicle and that brain, because you never know. We never know.

But that set a precedence for us, too, in our marriage to think about when we're in a fight and we're separating and we're going our individual ways, you don't know if something can happen to that other spouse.

So how are you going to work through, or at least hold that argument and love each other? Well, even when you're in division, what.

Speaker 1

Were your last moments like? Because that morning I told Pam, I've got to get to work, give Jonathan a kiss for me. And I didn't. And so there's no waste in God's economy ever. There's no waste in God's economy ever.

Speaker 2

What does that mean?

Speaker 1

He will use everything together for good. And when you know that's true, no matter what you're going through, it brings a sense of peace.

No matter what you have endured in the past, God can use that in a beneficial way if you're looking forward instead of focusing on dwelling backward.

Speaker 2

So even after all that, you would both say God is a good God without any question.

Speaker 4

And you know what, Ann? For me, because I'm more equalized in my emotions, I would say Bill really feels deeper than needed to develop in me. And you know what? God used this tragedy to bring me to the point where I needed to learn to cry.

I remember going into a Bible study, and I was so excited. This one great Bible teacher in our church was going to be teaching that day. And so I thought, well, I'll go. We were standing at the door, and as we were walking in, they were handing us Bible verses, you know, and then we all sat down.

So she's teaching her lesson, and she has this person read and that person, and then she said, "Okay, who has the story about David and Bathsheba?" Guess who does? Me. And so it's just, you know, the story of David and Bathsheba is about ready to lose their baby. They're losing their baby. God says, "Your baby's going to die."

I read those verses, and then I start crying. Nobody had ever seen me cry before because they kept asking Bill, "Are you sure? Pam's grieving. Are you sure?" At night, I would grieve. When I wasn't with people, I would cry. I started crying, and I was like, "You all know what that verse means to me," because I had just gone through the loss of a child.

Nothing gives you the ability to comfort others than when you've gone through a tragedy.

Speaker 2

Well, I think as a listener, we're all encouraged, we're hopeful, and I think the theme is we can trust Jesus because he loves us, he knows us, he's with us. That was a great conversation with Bill and Pam.

Speaker 3

It always is.

Speaker 2

It is.

Speaker 3

Seriously, whether we're on, you know, on a podcast, talking to them, or in their family room, and there's 15 kids running around the house and 38 grandkids. It's always fun.

Speaker 2

Bill and Pam Mutts have a new book called Richer by the Dozen.

Speaker 3

Get it. Wherever you buy your books, it's going to literally help you and maybe change your legacy.

Speaker 2

Family Life Today is a donor supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.