FamilyLife Today®

Erik Reed: All those questions about a future that you don't control started crippling my heart. I had never dealt with anxiety. I had never dealt with panic attacks in my life. I thought I was going crazy. I didn't even know what was happening to me. I thought I was having a heart attack driving down the road.

I'm like, "I'm too young to have a heart attack. That can't be it." But my heart was about to beat out of my chest. That's what it felt like. I pulled over on the side of the road and called my wife on the interstate. I said, "I don't know what's happening. My heart—I'm sweating and it's thirty degrees outside. My heart is beating out of my chest."

She said, "Go to the hospital." She didn't know what was happening either. I learned soon that was a panic attack. I would irrationally have those for years ahead. Out of nowhere, they would happen.

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

Ann Wilson: And I'm Ann Wilson. And you can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Dave Wilson: Not too long ago, I sat in a diner with a good friend of mine who's a dad. His daughter was at Oxford High School walking down the hall when one of her classmates started shooting kids in the hallway. I knew his daughter was at Oxford High School. I didn't know the details that she actually saw the shooter, realized it was a shooting, and ran out of the school, got in her car, and drove home.

Ann Wilson: And this is a friend of yours that you coached high school football with for a decade almost.

Dave Wilson: Almost a decade. His question to me was, "How do I trust God? How do we trust God? How do I help my daughter trust God in the middle of this kind of tragedy?"

Ann Wilson: When she has seen friends shot and she's asking the questions, "How does a good God allow this?"

Dave Wilson: Her biggest thing was she's still afraid. It's hard for her to shut the door at night and even sleep in her bedroom. That tragedy, like any tragedy, rocks the world. It rocks non-believers who say, "That's why I can't believe," and believers like us say, "Yeah, that's the reality of the world we live in."

There are not easy answers to that question. We've been discussing that already with Erik Reed, who's back in the studio with us. He is a pastor and wrote a book called *Uncommon Trust*. If we're going to find somebody that can help us understand how we trust God in this situation, Erik, you're the guy. Welcome back to FamilyLife.

Erik Reed: I'm not sure if I'm the guy, but I'm certainly a fellow traveler trying to figure it out.

Dave Wilson: You're a pastor, husband, and a father of three. On our first episode, we talked about—and I want to take us back there. We don't have to go through the whole story because if you missed yesterday, go listen to it, because Erik told us the whole story.

One of the things that was fascinating about your tragedy is when Caleb was born, there's a surgery that can be done that you think is going to make everything okay. I never got to ask you this question: the doctor botches the surgery and makes a mistake. That's even harder. Things in life happen that are out of our control and all you can say is it's a natural disaster. But when a human mistake causes tragedy, not only in your life but in your son's life, it feels even harder to understand. Talk about your feelings in that moment. How did you deal with not only the sadness but the anger I'm guessing you felt?

Erik Reed: We would deal with bitterness and resentment and anger for a good year after the surgery. We would replay that conversation so many times. His demeanor, his attitude, and all the things. Every retelling, he became more of a monster in the story.

Ann Wilson: For our listeners that maybe haven't heard yesterday, the doctor unknowingly removed both kidneys. Your newborn son was left without kidneys and he had to be on dialysis.

Erik Reed: He looked as if he was completely indifferent. No remorse, no empathy. Honestly, we grew to hate him every time we would watch our son struggle. Every time he was sick, every time we had to go back to the hospital, and every time we were in a surgery waiting room eager to hear a surgeon come out and say it went okay and still wondering if it really went okay.

We would go back to that moment and that man. I remember having dreams about what I would do if I got to run into him. I was in the Army, so I wasn't always a pastor. There were times when I thought, "Boy, if I found him out, just out, what would I do?" because I couldn't stand him. We even had family talking about finding out where he lived.

It got to that point. I knew it wasn't healthy. It's not healthy for our hearts, forget healthy legally. Forget jail time. This was not good for our souls. Bitterness and resentment is like drinking poison. Every little sip is killing you.

Dave Wilson: It gives us a glimpse into how angry and mad you were. You have a name for the person that caused this. It isn't something abstract.

Erik Reed: It's not abstract. This is a real person. It's a face and it's a son who is living out the implications of it.

Dave Wilson: You're looking at him every day. So, how long did that last? What did you do?

Erik Reed: Over the course of that year, finally reaching the end of what I knew was healthy, I started to tell my wife that we've got to figure this out. We've got to get to a place where our hearts can forgive him. Forgiveness is all over the Bible. You can't even read the New Testament without hearing Jesus say something about forgiveness.

It's all terrible stuff when you're hating somebody. Jesus says to forgive as you've been forgiven because if you don't, you won't be forgiven your sins. You think, "No!" Peter says, "How many times should we forgive somebody that's hurt us? Seven times?" Jesus says, "No, I tell you 70 times seven." He's not telling you to do the math. He's saying it's endless. You forgive indefinitely.

Then he tells a parable about a king who forgave a lesser servant a great debt, then that lesser servant goes out and holds over the head of an even lesser servant a lesser debt. The king hears about it and actually puts the debt back on him. Jesus ends that parable by saying, "So it will be with you if you don't forgive those who have hurt you."

I had to start grappling with what forgiveness looks like. I realized forgiveness has nothing to do with the person because he wasn't asking for our forgiveness. We may never have the chance to see him face-to-face to give him forgiveness. Forgiveness had everything to do with our hearts before God. Forgiveness always begins vertically ever before it goes out horizontally.

It wasn't a light switch. It wasn't like flipping it on and flipping it off. Forgiveness was a process. It was a process of going vertically to God to say, "You have forgiven me infinitely more than I've ever been asked to forgive another," and really feeling that. As Christians, we think about God's forgiveness of our sins. Do you really understand the gravity of that?

What have you been forgiven? What have you been rescued from? I deserve eternal judgment. My life has not been lived in righteousness. If there's a getting in on your own account, I'm going to be at the bottom of the list. As I looked vertically at the grace and mercy of God in forgiving me through Christ, I'm not being asked to do anything more than Christ has done for me.

In fact, I'm actually being asked to do a lot less. I had to really keep preaching that to my heart over and over before I could get to a place where I could really say, "I forgive him. I forgive this man." It was a process for me and my wife together. It was a process then that we had to lead our family through because our bitterness just echoed out to everyone else.

We had to say, "Guys, this is not honoring to God. He's given us so much grace and so much mercy. We're not being asked to do something that we haven't been recipients of." That process led us to a place of forgiving the doctor genuinely in our hearts. Truth be told, it's not one time. We have to keep choosing to forgive.

Dave Wilson: You get triggered.

Erik Reed: That's right. Even as I sit here before you, if I let my mind wander off into everything that surgery cost our family. When I'm at my son's grave with my daughters and we're talking about his life, if I let my mind wander off into the fact that he could possibly be here today if that surgery wouldn't have happened.

It doesn't take much for bitterness and resentment to come back. Forgiveness is a choice that you have to keep making. That became our mantra. We're going to keep forgiving. We're going to keep choosing to forgive. Anytime our mind starts focusing horizontally on all that he did, we're going to send them back vertically to all that Christ has done for us. That's the only way that we can give forgiveness. It has to come from above.

Dave Wilson: Were you able to see if Caleb was able to forgive him?

Erik Reed: Absolutely. This was a process from the time he was little. His whole life, this was a conversation we were having, talking about suffering and sovereignty and forgiveness and trusting God's plans for your life. It could not be a part of the conversation because we were going to have to explain to him why he was different from his friends.

Why has he got this feeding tube in his stomach? Why's he got all these scars on his chest? Why does he have to take these medicines every day? Why does he have to do all these things that are normal to him, but then he sees his friends and he says, "Oh, y'all don't have feeding tubes in your stomach?"

We just had to raise him understanding that this is your story and this is what is so unique about you. This is how God has worked in your life. Caleb fortunately never had the issue of having to forgive him because he understood God had his life in his hands, even surgical mistakes.

Ann Wilson: I'm also imagining that watching his mom and dad being able to forgive the doctor was a powerful model for him.

Erik Reed: A fascinating story that we never anticipated: one day after finishing dialysis in the hospital—Caleb had not had a transplant yet. He was almost two. It was getting close to time where it was like, "Hey, we're running out of time. He needs a transplant."

Ann Wilson: Just for our listeners that maybe listened to the first one, we left them on the cliffhanger of what happens. You decided, "We want him to live. We'll do whatever it takes." So, at two, he had a kidney transplant.

Erik Reed: He ended up getting a kidney transplant. He was on a list for a national registry. We never got a phone call. Everybody got tested. Me and Katrina got tested. Neither one of us were a match. He was having to have new surgeries all the time for new catheters because his catheters would clot off.

We were running out of spots for catheters. Literally the last one he got, the surgeon said, "I don't know if we'll get another one in," which was terrifying. We didn't have surgery scheduled, so what were our options? They retested us in a moment of desperation and my wife came back as a match who was not previously a match.

Ann Wilson: That's miraculous.

Erik Reed: It's unbelievable. My wife ended up being the donor for his transplant when he was two years old. Right before that surgery happened, we were there for dialysis and I was coming down the elevator. I'm holding Caleb in my arms, the elevator door opens, and it's the surgeon that took his kidney out.

Dave Wilson: Standing right in front of you.

Erik Reed: I hadn't seen him in two years and he's standing face to face. It was one of those moments where if you see somebody, you try to look away and pretend like you didn't see each other. We both tried to do that, but we were literally face to face in an open elevator.

There's nowhere to go. I attempted to walk one direction and he's going the same direction. We even did the little dance where you're trying to walk past. Finally it was like, "Okay, this is so awkward. We're going to have to acknowledge each other."

Ann Wilson: And it wasn't like you were just some patient. He knew when he saw your eyes.

Erik Reed: I actually asked him, "Can I talk to you for a second?" We actually stepped out into a lobby.

Dave Wilson: With your son still in your arms.

Erik Reed: Caleb was right there in my arms. I looked at him and I said, "I just want you to know that my family and I forgive you for what happened." He broke down crying in the lobby. I broke down crying after that. I had overhydrated tear ducts that day.

Listen, we forgave him even if we never saw him again. But what it showed me was that he had actually carried a deep burden as well. We found out later he was a Christian surgeon. He had actually done all kinds of missionary work on children who could never have care.

Ann Wilson: Of course that's the case. You probably had never considered the nights that he had been up beating himself up.

Erik Reed: When you're bitter, you don't want to consider the other side. With some time and some maturity, I'm able to look back and go, there's no telling why he came across that day the way he did. We were hurt. You just can't even trust what you perceived on that day to be completely accurate. He broke down and told me, "You have no idea how much that means to hear."

That's the last time I ever saw him. It was transformative for me because it reminded me that we often make people into monsters when they're just people. He made a mistake and he felt that mistake all the time.

Dave Wilson: Just think how different that moment would have been if you were bitter.

Erik Reed: I don't know what I'd be saying to him or doing to him.

Ann Wilson: It's so sweet of God to connect you guys to free you both up. He needed that freedom.

Erik Reed: We had forgiven him, but talk about just the weight off your shoulders to be able to say that to him. To look him in the face and say, "We forgive you." To see his face just break in front of me. It was a powerful lesson.

Dave Wilson: It is a picture of the gospel.

Erik Reed: That's exactly right. Forgiveness is all about the gospel. You can only forgive by the power of the gospel. Christ's forgiveness to you is how you can ever forgive another person.

Dave Wilson: What you did and, as you said, you're still doing, still choosing to have to do, is not possible apart from the power of God.

Erik Reed: You can't get there if you're hoping that somebody will be forgivable, that they're going to come begging for mercy and forgiveness, or that they're going to come to their senses of what they've done. There's no conditions that Jesus puts on our forgiving. When you always put it on the other to be forgivable, you're going to find yourself withholding forgiveness or finding excuses to withhold forgiveness. There's some people who will never want your forgiveness who you need to forgive.

Dave Wilson: If God did that for us, we're still not forgiven.

Erik Reed: That's exactly right. We were never forgivable.

Ann Wilson: What about for the person who maybe just stayed angry with God?

Erik Reed: That's a really good question. Going back to when I was with my Bible and notebook in hand that day, I got to the book of Daniel. The very first thing that happens in Daniel 1 is God allows for Nebuchadnezzar to go in and 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. Everything changed in a moment. New identities, new names, new language, new everything. I remember reading that and I just stopped. I thought, "That's how I felt." Our world turned upside down. Everything has changed now. I felt I could identify with these people.

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. All of a sudden they get summoned to Nebuchadnezzar. He 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."

Their response to him exploded into life when they said the God whom we serve is able to save us. Then I read the rest of the verse and I was wrecked when I read, "But even if he doesn't, but if not, we will still not bow down and serve you."

The thing that I kept reading in the story was after they're thrown into the furnace, he's in it. The fourth figure in the fire. There's another in the fire. For somebody who had never read that, there was no cliché for me to say, "God's in this furnace right now. He's with us." He has the power to rescue them and keep them from ever going in it, yet allows them to go in it only to show himself to be there.

Dave Wilson: That's a great point.

Erik Reed: He was always with them, but fascinatingly, he became visible to them in the fire. They saw him in the fire. He was always there but the fire made him visible. I think that's true in life. God is always with us. It's in our suffering and sorrows that he's I believe most visible to us.

Jesus is the man of sorrows who came and suffered. I would argue we're never more like Christ than when we're in our sufferings. The one who came and suffered for us. Those three things immediately—I'm just sitting there with my son in the room with me and I'm going, I've got a lot to learn because I can grasp these with my head but I've got to get these into my heart.

The Lord showed me a few other things that I knew would guide us that day. The presence of God in that fire was on display to everybody outside the furnace too. The satraps, the prefects, the governors. The Lord made it clear other people are going to watch y'all go through this. You need to be faithful.

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Ann Wilson: It's interesting as I read your story that you have these miracle moments, your wife's able to give a kidney, and Caleb's going to have somewhat of a normal life.

Erik Reed: Yes. Normal compared to the first two years.

Ann Wilson: And then you experience panic attacks and anxiety, which is so normal. What did that look like?

Erik Reed: I had all the right ideas from the text and yet my heart would soon be under crippling panic attacks. That's another reason why I'm saying it had to go from my head to my heart because I could agree with those things, but those things weren't in my bones yet. To trust that God is with us and that that's enough wasn't in my bones yet.

I was still fearful and worried. Everything was still about what's going to happen tomorrow? What's going to happen next month? Is he going to survive to get a transplant? What happens if he gets the transplant and it doesn't last long?

Because here's what we knew from the homework we had to do: his life would be forever affected. There's no reset at this point. One transplant isn't going to last a lifetime, which means at some point that kidney would fail and we'd be back in the boat of needing dialysis until he got another kidney.

We almost ran out of dialysis options this time. Are we going even be able to do dialysis? And who's going to give him a kidney? All those questions about a future that you don't control started crippling my heart. I had never dealt with anxiety or panic attacks in my life. I thought I was going crazy. I thought I was having a heart attack driving down the road.

I'm like, "I'm too young to have a heart attack. That can't be it." But my heart's about to beat out of my chest. I pulled over on the side of the road and called my wife on the interstate. I was like, "I don't know what's happening. My heart—I'm sweating and it's thirty degrees outside." She said, "Go to the hospital." So I learned that was a panic attack. Out of nowhere, they would happen.

Dave Wilson: What's really interesting is so many of us think believers don't have those.

Ann Wilson: Oh mercy.

Dave Wilson: Pastors certainly don't have panic attacks, but there you were. Anxiety's real.

Erik Reed: I was ashamed of it. Once I learned what it was, for a while I never told anybody because I didn't want anybody to think I was crazy or that I didn't have my life together. Then I started to realize that actually a lot of people struggle with this.

What would begin to unfold in the years ahead would be not only learning to deal with that but learning to get under the root of why I was having them. I didn't want to treat symptoms. I wanted to get to the root. So much of my anxiety was driven by leaning on my own understanding.

Trying to make sense of what was happening and what was going to happen. Trying to control and cling to what the future was that I didn't have any ability to direct. That's a hard thing to do when it's your son and his future and his health.

Ann Wilson: I think what you said was you were learning to trust God, but you hadn't learned to trust him in your bones yet. I think that's where a lot of people are thinking, "I haven't learned that either. I need to know how to do it."

Dave Wilson: We have to find out because we've all quoted Proverbs 3, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Do not lean on your own understanding." We don't know what that looks like. We don't have time for you to do it, so we've got to bring you back.

Erik Reed: I'd be happy to come back.

Dave Wilson: Isn't this just a great conversation to have with Erik? He's practical and biblical. It helps us to put our trust back where we need to put our trust when things seem crazy, and that's Jesus.

His book is called *Uncommon Trust: Learning to Trust God When Life Doesn't Make Sense*. You can find his book in our show notes. Just click the link there when you go to familylifetoday.com. I really hope that you'll share this with your friends because when it makes a difference to you and it helps you, it's going to help your friend.

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Dave Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.