FamilyLife Today®

Erik Reed: My whole understanding up to that point was that if you just love Jesus and have enough faith, everything's supposed to just fall in place. It's like cupcakes, rainbows, pixie dust. Everything's supposed to just be perfect.

So, here we are, young married, young in our faith, serving in our church, eager and zealous for the Lord. We have a son born early with big-time medical issues who has challenges.

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

Dave Wilson: And I'm Dave Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today. Okay, I've got an Ann Wilson exclusive question. I want to hear your answer to, actually, I'm going to throw you on the spot. It's a pretty heavy topic.

Ann Wilson: I hate these.

Dave Wilson: All right, top one reason you think people walk away from their faith? If they have a faith and then they just like, "I don't think I can keep believing anymore."

Ann Wilson: "How could a good God allow this pain or tragedy in my life and in the world?"

Dave Wilson: How'd you know? You knew I was going to ask.

Ann Wilson: I think that's what everybody wonders. The people on the street that I'll talk to that they have no belief or maybe they've turned away, it's tragedy and they're like, "I just don't know how God could allow that."

Dave Wilson: "How could a good God allow bad things to happen to good people?" I mean, that is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, hurdle for not just other people, us as well. That's a real and there aren't any easy answers.

So, we've asked a pastor to come in. Erik Reed is with us today on FamilyLife Today and you've never been here, so welcome to FamilyLife Today.

Erik Reed: Yeah, thank you guys for having me. This is exciting.

Dave Wilson: Obviously, as a pastor you've dealt with that issue, but we're going to find out today as a husband and a dad as well. You pastor a church in Lebanon, Tennessee.

Erik Reed: That's right.

Dave Wilson: And married with two kids.

Erik Reed: That's right.

Dave Wilson: Well, take us back to December 1st, 2019. I don't know if you want to go there, but it was a pivotal moment in your life. Sort of tell that story.

Erik Reed: It was Sunday morning and my wife and I had been in the hospital with my son Caleb, who was 15, going on a couple of weeks. Throughout his life, we had been in hospital weeks at a time, multiple times a year. So it wasn't a new thing for us. We were very comfortable with being in the hospital, more comfortable than most families probably would ever be.

We were at home. We packed our bags, we had routines. My wife would tend to the girls, I would stay at the hospital with him. I had my stack of books with me, my computer. We just had routines. We knew what to do because we'd done it so many times.

It was on this day that we would realize that it wouldn't be like any of the other times. A few days prior to December 1st, doctors had come up to us and said, "We need to start talking about possibilities of what happens if Caleb doesn't get better." Caleb had been dealing with respiratory issues that were a result of a lot of other things going on in his life, and we can talk about how he got to this point, but his respiratory condition wasn't improving.

That was the first time that we had to stop and go, "Oh my mercy. We may not go home like we have every other time." I think we had just grown so accustomed to: we go in, we get a tune-up, we get some antibiotics, we get better, we go home. We had done that so many times that it never crossed my mind that we may not get better and go home.

When the doctors told us that, we had to have some hard conversations with each other, with his primary care doctors, and talk about: do we think that everything has been done that could be done? We also were looking at a son who had been struggling and suffering for really his whole life, but the last couple of years in particular in a big way.

So early that morning, after discussions with the doctors and a lot of tears, we knew that we were at the end of the road. We went and talked to Caleb and asked him if he was ready to see Jesus. With his inability to talk at that point because of the stroke and plus he had a BiPAP machine mask on his face, we just asked him to blink twice if he was ready to see Jesus and he gave the biggest two blinks you could ever imagine.

At that point, our daughters were at church and we had family let them know that they needed to bring them up there to the hospital. Of course, we started calling our family and letting people know what was happening. Our daughters showed up to the hospital. I went out to meet them.

Walking them hand in hand down the long hallway to their brother's room, knowing I was about to tell them that he was going to go be with Jesus soon, was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. They just cried and I just hugged them and tried to console them as much as you can, and we went into the room together.

Katrina, my wife, was in there with Caleb and we all, the five of us, got to spend some time together before the rest of the family came in and he passed away. We prayed and read scripture over him. We sang "10,000 Reasons," his favorite song. That last line: "On that day when my strength is failing, the end draws near, my time has come. Still my soul will sing your praise unending, 10,000 years and then forevermore."

We just filled the ICU with praises to God and he passed and went into eternity and face to face with Christ. I prayed and gave thanks to God for a son that I got to have for 15 plus years and just asked him to help us. He has answered that prayer over and over again.

Ann Wilson: Erik, I'm sitting here crying because you've lived through the fear of every single parent. You've walked that, and I think what we're talking about today is: how do we find God in the middle of our pain? Because so many people are living that, experiencing that. Your book is called Uncommon Trust, which is a perfect title.

Dave Wilson: Yeah, because you had to do it. Give us a little back story of the 15 years of Caleb's life. It started out in the hospital when he was born. You knew you had complications.

Ann Wilson: And you were just starting to plan a church at that time?

Erik Reed: That's right. I was just brand new in ministry. We started a church the next year, but I was brand new in ministry. I didn't have much theology under my belt. I had a lot of love for Jesus and a zeal.

Ann Wilson: And you didn't grow up in the church?

Erik Reed: I didn't. I would go to church with my grandmother when I spent the night with her on Saturdays as a kid and that was it for church.

Dave Wilson: That was sort of a "you have to go to church with me" deal?

Erik Reed: Yeah, but I loved not being at my own house and spending the night with her, so it was like, "Okay, I get to go to church with Gan." So it wasn't that I minded church, but it was just something that I did with Grandma. My parents didn't go to church. So it was one of those things where not a lot of grounding, not a lot of depth or understanding.

Dave Wilson: Perfect candidate to start a church, right?

Erik Reed: Just the perfect pastor you would want. Honestly, if December 1st, 2019, would have happened 15 years prior, I had no grounding at all. Honestly, even if you do have grounding, you still get rocked and your legs get wobbly. So I had to jump into the deep end with no floaties on as a young man, married just over a year now with my first child, and we learned that he had some medical issues.

He was born premature at 30 weeks. He had a bad kidney that had cysts all over it and he had a good kidney. So we were told, "Hey, all we've got to do is get this bad kidney out. Once the bad kidney's out, he can live a normal life with one kidney." Doctors were telling us people live with one kidney all the time, don't even know they only have one kidney.

Ann Wilson: Really?

Erik Reed: Yeah. I've become an expert at kidneys. I just don't have a degree for it, but I can tell you a lot about your kidneys.

Dave Wilson: So you're 24?

Erik Reed: Yeah, at that time when he was born, I'm 23 about to be 24, and thrown into the deep end with a son born early with big-time medical issues. I don't have any theological grounding at all on "what do we do?"

My whole understanding up to that point was that if you just love Jesus and have enough faith, everything's supposed to just fall in place. It's like cupcakes, rainbows, pixie dust. Everything's supposed to just be perfect. Every story you hear, that's always supposed to be somebody else's story. It's "those people," it's never you.

So here we are, young married, young in our faith, serving in our church, eager and zealous for the Lord, and we have a son who has challenges. We wanted to wait for him to get bigger before they took the kidney out. So when he was born, what they did is they put a drainage tube in that would help keep these cysts from filling up. It kept draining the cyst, which was good, but the tube in his side started creating infections. He started causing problems.

He battled for those first two months off and on with getting infections and it became one of those things where doctors are saying, "Okay, there's a risk-reward here. The longer we wait and the bigger he gets, the better it will be for his surgery. The longer we wait, the more opportunity there is for serious infection, and he may not survive these infections. He's getting really sick when this happens." Which then sets him back from getting bigger too.

Finally they came to us two months after he was born and said, "It's best to get this kidney out."

Ann Wilson: Had he been hospitalized that whole time?

Erik Reed: The whole time. We were in the NICU at that point. He was born at 30 weeks in the hospital and we stayed there the entire time anticipating this surgery to come.

So surgery comes and it's kind of anticipation because the idea is, "Hey, we're going to have surgery and this is done. This nightmare is over."

Ann Wilson: So you weren't worried, you were anticipating?

Erik Reed: We were excited. Obviously, there are some nerves because it's a surgery and it's your child, but the whole thing was like, "We're going to get this kidney out. As soon as he urinates and we see that the good kidney's good, we're going home."

So they did the surgery. He goes to recovery and then he's in recovery and getting put back into a regular room and we're told, "Hey, the next morning, everything checks out and everything looks good, you guys will go home."

The next morning, I get up early anticipating the doctors won't come till lunchtime or so. I actually went and had a side job just because I was doing an internship at the church and they were paying me gobs and gobs of tens. I had to go do something. "I'm about to bring a kid home. I've got to go make some money."

So I was actually installing satellite dishes as a side job. I told her, "Katrina, I think I can go get a satellite put up this morning, come back to the hospital, load up, and we'll go home with Caleb." I took off to go do a job. She called me a couple hours later. She said, "You've got to get up here."

I said, "What's going on?" She's like, "I don't know. The doctors are running around. His blood pressure's really high, his heart rate's really high. They're doing ultrasounds but they're not telling me anything. Just get back up here. Something's not right."

Of course, I immediately go back and it's like a 35-minute drive and it was the longest drive of my life. I'm just praying. "God, I don't know what this means. I don't know what's going on. Please be with my son. Be with my wife." I felt so helpless. I was like, "I can't get here any quicker." I'm just sitting here. I'm crying and I'm praying. I don't even know what I'm praying for because I don't know what's wrong.

I felt so helpless. I get to the hospital and that's where we eventually learn. The surgeon comes in and he says, "I don't know any other way to say this, but there's been a mistake on the surgery. Instead of taking just his bad kidney out, we have accidentally removed his good kidney as well."

Ann Wilson: So they took out both kidneys?

Erik Reed: Both kidneys were taken out in the surgery. The way that happened was his kidneys, he had what was called horseshoe kidneys. They didn't know it at the time. Horseshoe kidneys, which if you imagine, if I held my fists together and then I linked them together with my pinky fingers. That idea that those two kidneys represented by my fists are connected.

Instead of a fist, think about little bitty thumbnails because this is a little bitty baby who's a preemie. So they were connected together and then folded on top of each other. So when they go in to take the kidney out of his body when they go in for the surgery, they look in, they see the bad kidney facing them. They see the cyst and they go, "Okay, there it is." And they go to remove it, not realizing that with that bad one is the good one connected to it.

Dave Wilson: Could they have separated them?

Erik Reed: No, once it's out of the body, it's done.

Dave Wilson: I mean, if they had known...

Erik Reed: If they would have known, they could have. But nothing that had been done up to that point in terms of testing picked up the fact that that was the case. So you're sitting in this hospital, sitting here in the room with him sitting beside us, blood pressure levels 200 over 100 blood pressures, 240 over 130... stroke-level blood pressure.

Ann Wilson: They say this to you and your wife. What do you feel in the moment?

Erik Reed: Numb. And the surgeon was so heartless even when he said it. He said, "It's unfortunate." He literally used those words. Those were his exact words.

Looking back, there's a story even about a journey of having to learn to forgive him. His bedside manners were nonexistent. I'm sure he was stunned. I'm sure he too was in a place of unbelief at what had happened, but his deadpan delivery and his "it's unfortunate" felt so indifferent. It felt so callous.

When he left the room, we just looked at each other like... and I was so naive at that point. I was like, "But what does that mean? Can they put it back in?" I'm so naive at that point. I don't have any reason to know about kidneys. I've got them, I think, so I don't need to know anything particular.

I knew nothing. My wife looked at me. She understood the full implications. She says, "You can't live without kidneys, Erik." That's when it hit me. Then the next question is: what can we do? Your mind immediately goes to solution.

We end up having a meeting later with a team of doctors and hospital administrators. It was me and my wife at a conference table full of very important people, and they're asking us and discussing with us what we want to do. These 24-year-old kids, never had a child, don't know anything about life, and they look at us and they say, "We've got two approaches."

They say, "We can do something we've never done with a child this size"—and this is at one of the top hospitals in the country—"or we can do nothing." I asked, "What does that mean?" And they said, "Your son will pass." I said, "Well, if there is something that can be done, we would like to try to do that. If you think that it could be effective, we would like to try to do that."

So they said, "Okay." And that meant the next thing that needed to happen was a surgery to place dialysis catheters. What we would have to do is get him big enough to get a kidney transplant. You have to have an adult kidney in even in a child because all the blood vessels would be so small if they were from a child that they would just clot off and it would be ineffective. So they have to get you big enough as a baby to get an adult kidney.

We knew it was going to be a process and the only way to get to that point was dialysis. To start dialysis on a little bitty baby, they had never done that. So they end up having surgery, we end up getting a catheter in. We were there I think another month or two just getting his body back regulated, blood pressure down, getting all the fluid off of him. Then we got to go home with a kid that needed to do dialysis every night at home.

After a year, the dialysis quit working because he started getting infections and had to put new catheters in. The catheters wouldn't work. So we had to shift over to a different kind of dialysis which they do where they run your blood through a machine. That required us going to the hospital three days a week, three to four hours at a time. So for the first two years, that was our lives with him.

Ann Wilson: I want to sit on the floor and just cry, imagining the two of you enduring this, walking through this, holding on to each other, praying for, hoping your son would make it, and thinking about all the dreams that you had for this little boy.

Erik Reed: I grew up imagining having a son. In fact, that's all I ever imagined was having a son. I was an athlete, I love playing sports, and I always thought about how I can't wait to have a boy to play ball in the yard with and do all these things.

Now all of a sudden, here we are with our world turned upside down. After it happened, my wife couldn't even go into the room and see him for days, she was so devastated. She couldn't even look at him.

A life-changing moment for me was the day after it happened. I went into his room. There's a rocking chair in there. He's in there hooked up to all kinds of things and machines are beeping. I had my Bible, I had a notebook. Of course, I haven't preached any sermons at this point in my life. I'm going in there for survival. I'm not looking for content.

I just had my Bible and said, "God, I just need to know what to do, what to think, how to survive, how to help my wife." I didn't even know where to turn. I'm flipping around. I don't know what I'm looking for, but I know I'm looking. So I'm flipping, I'm flipping. I'd read a few things and nothing was resonating where it was like, "Okay, God, you've got my attention here."

I got to the book of Daniel. Again, not grown up in church and at that point in my life, it's not like I had voraciously just tore through the Bible and had it all implanted. So I get to Daniel. The only thing I know about Daniel is like, "Oh yeah, the lion's den. I know that happens here." Yeah, I remember the Sunday school flannelgraphs and all those things.

But I got to Daniel 1 for whatever reason I started reading right there in Chapter 1. The very first thing that happens in Daniel 1 is God allows for Nebuchadnezzar to go in and take Jerusalem, to take Israel, and turns them upside down. These young men and all the best and brightest of the land get ripped kicking and screaming out of their homes, away from their families.

Dreams gone, everything changed in a moment. Sent away. New identities, new names, new language, new everything. I remember reading that and I just stopped and I was like... I felt like that's how I felt. Our world's turned upside down. Everything has changed now. I felt I could identify with these people.

I had no idea where the story was even going. Like at this point in my life, I'm like, "Here's Chapter 1. What's going to happen to them?" But I was drawn in especially by the idea that it says, "And God gave over Jehoiakim to Nebuchadnezzar in Judah." I just sat there and was like, "Okay, well, now what?"

I kept reading and you eventually get introduced to Meshach, Shadrach, Abednego. You see the command to bow down and they won't do it and all of a sudden they get summoned to Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar says, "This is it. This is your chance. Here's the fiery furnace. You can feel the heat on your face. Bow down and worship me and live. What God will save you from my hands?"

Their response to him, it was like the page... it exploded into life when they said, "The God whom we serve is able to save us." I wrote down in my little notebook, "God can save us." I turned over and I looked at my son and I thought, "Okay, God, I know you can save him. I know this isn't the end of the story. I know you have his life."

I just sat there kind of hopeful for a second like, "Yeah, that's right. You are the God who can save." Throughout scriptures, you're the God who rescues your people out of Egypt, you're the one that parts the Red Sea, you're the one that can send manna. You can do all things.

I was charged with hope in that moment, and then I read the rest of the verse. "But if he doesn't..." And I was wrecked by that. When I read, "But even if he doesn't... but if not... we will still not bow down and serve you." I just sat there probably with just a blank stare. I probably had a thousand-yard stare on my face if you'd walked into that room.

I was grappling with this idea that they were committed to following him even if he didn't rescue them. I was wrestling with this. I loved the idea that our God can save us. Why didn't he just put the period there? Why not stop? Just stop that, right there's good enough for me.

I started to really work through like there's something in the theology of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that understood God could absolutely save them but that God was under no obligation to do it. And here's the thing: that did not anger them. They were resolved and surrendered to say whatever he wills.

And guys, I'll just be honest, I wasn't there in my life. I could grasp with my mind exactly what they were saying. My heart could not comprehend: why wouldn't God rescue my son? But I knew what I was listening to, what I was reading, what I was looking at, what I was thinking about. I knew it was right. I knew I don't know how to get there, but I know there is where we have to be.

Dave Wilson: We don't have time to tell the rest of the story now, so you're going to have to stay tuned for Day 2 because we've got to go to: how did you get to Uncommon Trust?

Ann Wilson: It is always great to have these conversations with Erik Reed. Again, his book is called Uncommon Trust: Learning to Trust God When Life Doesn't Make Sense. Isn't that just the perfect book for the things that we're going through right now in our culture and in our time? If you want his book, you can just find it in our show notes at familylifetoday.com. Just click the link in those notes.

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