Being Honest with God

Dannah Gresh: After experiencing a terrible loss, Elizabeth Mitchell took her raw emotions to God.

Elizabeth Mitchell: “Will I ever be able to smile again?!” I woke up that morning and I thought, I will never know joy again. “Of course, You can’t bring anything good out of this much pain!” I think I said that out loud to the Lord.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast for January 15, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh. Our host is the co-author of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: As I think about the conversation we’re about to hear, the words of a song by Babbie Mason and Eddie Carswell come to mind. Here’s what it says, in part: 

Babbie Mason Singing:

All things work for our good,
Though sometimes we don’t see how they could. 

Our Father knows what’s best for us,
His ways are not our own.
So when your pathway grows dim,
And you just don’t see Him,
Remember you’re never alone.¹

Nancy: And it goes on from there. Our guest today had moments where her pathway was so dim that she could not see God’s hand in what she was going through . . .at all. Dannah sat down with Elizabeth Mitchell to hear her story. It’s one she tells in her book Journey for the Heart, and the subtitle is something that all of us can relate to needing: Hope When Life’s Unfair. Let’s start by getting to know Elizabeth a little. Here’s Dannah.

Dannah: Elizabeth, tell us about when you encountered Jesus, when you came to know Him as your Lord and Savior.

Elizabeth: I was a young girl on the island of Jamaica. We had just moved to a new church and for the first time, in a little Sunday school class in a little room, in this precious church called Grace Missionary Alliance, the gospel was presented and I, for the first time, realized that Jesus had not just died for the sins of the world—He had died for my sins.

And as a fourteen-year-old girl I opened up my heart to Him, received Him, and through that church and our move later on to Boca Raton, Florida, I was discipled through wonderful teachers and pastors who directed my heart to love Jesus with great passion, and to be open to serving Him in whatever capacity He would call me to.

Dannah: I love that! I love that Jesus found you there in Jamaica. I can hear a little lilt of an accent in your voice. It’s just barely there; it’s beautiful. I love it!

So, you come to know Jesus, you come to Florida, you meet this man in south Florida, you’re discipled, everything’s fine, life is great. Yes? No?

Elizabeth: Yes! I had three children. I had a wonderful husband, supportive family and church, ministering and working in commercial real estate with my husband, homeschooling our children . . . and then our fourth child was born, James Mitchell.

The doctor said, “Everything’s fine,” but they never brought him to my room. They kept telling us from the nurse’s station, “We’re warming him up.” A few hours later a lady in a blue coat walked into my maternity suite and said, “Mrs. Mitchell, I am the neonatologist.”

I remember, Dannah, springing off that bed as if I’d been whipped. I said, “Is anything wrong?” She said, “There might be.” As the day unfolded, we discovered that James had transposition of the great vessels and two other heart defects.

There was no hospital in south Florida that could address his grave concerns. They airlifted him to Boston Children’s Hospital. My husband flew with him and I joined them the next day. James had his first open heart surgery when he was three days old. 

They repaired his “plumbing,” they told us, but in doing so in that lengthy surgery, they destroyed his electrical system. So at ten days old, he had a pacemaker. After that it was every couple months there was some procedure, some other big issue to deal with. James just had to get used to it. The whole family had to work around it.

I had a loving husband and children, and we learned to roll with it. It became more normal going to hospitals and emergency rooms and dealing with his cardiac issues.

Dannah: So, Elizabeth, as you’re sharing this you sound so calm. You truly have a soothing voice, very calm, but those early days must have carried some moments of deep devastation. Can you take us to one of those?

Elizabeth: The whole thing was devastating. When we first heard the news, I remember wanting to reach over to that pediatric cardiologist and turn her off as she was telling us all the deformities he had. I wanted to turn her off like you would a terrible TV show . . . and she just kept on.

And when they took James in that airplane and I was not allowed to go, that was such a horrible feeling! I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. When I got on that plane and sat down and had to tell our other three children goodbye and leave everything familiar and fly to Boston to everything that was unfamiliar and scary and fearful, it was truly God’s presence and God’s Word that gave me ability to put one foot in front of the other and not throw myself on the ground and have a temper tantrum.

I remember when I heard I had to fly to Boston, I had just delivered a baby, I had no clothes to put on. It was snowing there, and I was in Florida. Just how was I even to think what to pack to get there? And God just rained down grace on me and on Bill, and He carried us! 

Sitting on that plane, I opened up the Bible. I wasn’t interested in eating or watching anything. He took me to Psalm 20. It’s such an incredible Scripture! I want to read it to you; it has become one of my most special passages. Usually I have it memorized, but of course, I’m talking to you.

It says:

May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble!
   May the name of the God of Jacob protect you!
May he send you help from the sanctuary
   and give you support from Zion! . . .

May he grant you your heart's desire
   and fulfill all your plans! . . . 

Now I know that the Lord saves his anointed;
   he will answer him from his holy heaven
   with the saving might of his right hand.
Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
   but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.”
(Psalm 20:1–2, 4, 6–7)

That was as if heaven opened up. God didn’t just didn't just send me a postcard; it was a one-on-one conversation with the Almighty, who let me know, “I’m fully present with you. I’m fully present with your son and husband. I will carry you through.” And so, it was His Word that was oxygen, it was water, it was bread that sustained us.

Dannah: Verse 4 says, “I will fulfill all your plans.” There probably wasn’t anything in your heart that had planned to be sitting in Boston with a newborn with some of the most devastating news a mom can ever hear!

Elizabeth: No. 

Dannah: So, how do you reconcile that with that Scripture?

Elizabeth: You cry. You cry out to God. You feel sorry for yourself for a little while. You realize that you’re not the only one dealing with terrible stuff. You cry out to other people to pray for you. You hide in His Word, and tell Him you don’t understand. You ask Him any question you want to ask Him because you know He can handle it.

He handled my doubts, my questions, my concerns, my fears—my fear that James would not live through any of this trauma, the fear that I had to abandon our other children to take care of James, the fear of the unknown, the fear that everything is absolutely out of your control.

You ask Him the questions, and you know that most of them will not have an answer. But I turned my face in His direction and begged Him for grace, begged Him for mercy for where we were. And I was honest; I didn’t pretend to be spiritual.

I knew that I had no capacity to handle any of this that was unfolding, and neither did Bill, and that we needed the Everlasting Father, and He never disappointed us.

Dannah: I love that authenticity! I think too many times we hear testimonies of people who say, “I trusted Him. There was grace.” But we don’t hear, “It was brutal, and I had to be honest with God.”

Elizabeth: It was brutal.

Dannah: I have a couple “mom” questions that are just running through my head. First of all, you’re away from those first three children. You’ve mentioned that a few times. How did you give that to the Lord? I think there are lots of moms who, it might not be that they’re physically away from two or three or one of their children, to care for another. Maybe it’s just a child in the home who has a lot of special needs and they feel that burden of, “But God, what about these three children?” They might feel mom guilt. How did you reconcile with some of that, because this wasn’t like you’re away from them for a day or two. It was lots of that.

Elizabeth: It was weeks at a time! I had to depend on other people to fill the gap when we weren’t there. I had to remember that God loves them far more than I love them. I had to remind myself that He brings good from what is not good. 

The same way that He was giving Bill and I grace, He would give our three children grace. I didn’t have to like what was happening. He was asking me to endure it, to love them any way I could. But for now James needed undivided attention, and that was my calling at the moment. I had to trust the friends and the family that were helping us with the others. 

You have to let people help you. I had to let people know how needy I felt for the children and allow them to help me when I wasn’t physically present.

Dannah: It’s not an easy thing to do. It takes a lot of humility to do that. You learn that very quickly in a crisis.

Elizabeth: This whole thing is very humbling.

Dannah: Yes. I have a friend who is going through something with one child and the other children are all suffering as a result of it. She was really struggling with it yesterday, and I said, “You know what?” I said exactly what you just said. “God loves them more than you love them. Esther had to go through becoming an orphan and living in terrible times to be there ‘for such a time as this.’”

Joseph had to be sold into slavery—by his brothers!—to be in the position God needed him to be in, to be who God needed him to be. And so there’s not a thing that our children are walking through right now that God doesn’t have plans for, that He can’t redeem and He can’t use.

Elizabeth: Exactly.

Dannah: The other thing that’s running through my head . . . and it’s exploding in my head! You said that the surgery they did on your baby boy destroyed his electrical system. One, what do you mean by that? And two, the first thing that ran into my head was: were you angry? Were you bitter? Were you frustrated?

Elizabeth: Frustrated. The surgery was so long. The infant’s heart is the size of his fist, so like a small walnut. They did a six-hour procedure to repair all the different broken parts. But in the suturing, the cutting . . . His two main arteries were switched, so the blood that had oxygen was being routed to his lungs and the blood with no oxygen was being sent to his body.

Dannah: So that was a mistake, that was an error?

Elizabeth: No, that’s how he was formed, that’s how he came. That was the transposition.

Dannah: Oh, that’s how he was born, I’m following .

Elizabeth: Two main arteries were switched. They were doing the reverse of what they should do. Our heart has a built-in pacemaker. You have like an electrical circuit.

How they explained it to us is, in repairing the plumbing, because of all that strenuous work taking place, his electrical wiring got destroyed. So at ten days old, they went back in and put in a pacemaker. It is an artificial pump to keep the electrical part of the heart going. So that’s how that occurred.

Dannah: Wow! Did Baby James survive all of this?

Elizabeth: He flourished! He was nine pounds, so that was in his favor. It was in his favor that he had strong kidneys and liver so he could process all the medication that was being pumped through his system. None of that had been compromised.

Dannah: Praise the Lord!

Elizabeth: God gave him a fighting spirit, so he came home at two months old. Then at a year old, he had another pacemaker surgery. And when he was four he had his second open heart surgery and that one backfired. 

He was the fourth child in a family that was being homeschooled. They told us in Boston, “Don’t raise a ‘cardiac kid.’ Don’t pamper him and spoil him and let him feel that he’s so protected. Don’t hover over him so that you destroy him.”

So he was one of the family. Everybody wasn’t bowing down to James. We just worked around him, and he in turn learned to laugh and love. He had a sweet and joyful spirit, enthusiastic. No matter what seemed to come his way, God gave him grace. He was an overcomer. He taught us a lot.

Dannah: Take me to a moment, like let us meet him—his personality, something he did that was remarkable or memorable, a story you love to tell about him.

Elizabeth: In every picture we have of him, Dannah, his arm is locked around somebody—one of his cousins or his siblings or a friend at church. He just loved people and was always smiling. He was super-energetic, so he loved basketball. That was one of his favorite things.

When he got a basket in, he would go backwards down the court, like he was an NBA all-star. He appreciated life. Somehow he knew that life was a gift, and he couldn’t waste a minute on anything less than celebration. For him, that was the best hot dog he’d ever had or the best nachos!

All my four sisters thought that he loved their food the best because of how he raved at everybody’s home! He loved getting socks, and he loved puzzles with cartoons in them, and he loved Buzz Lightyear.

He had a piggy bank in the hospital room, so whenever one of the doctors or technicians came in to “bother” him, he would say, “You have to give me some money first,” so they would put money in his Buzz Lightyear piggy bank.

Dannah: Very spunky! Oh, I love it! 

Elizabeth: He never seemed down. He didn’t like that he was short. He had to be on a lot of steroids because of his condition. His dad and his brothers and his sisters are all over six feet. He had like twenty-some scars on his chest. He wasn’t self-conscious, but he didn’t like that he was short because of the steroids. That bothered him, I think, more than anything.

Dannah: Did James make a profession of faith? Did he surrender his heart to Jesus?

Elizabeth: He did. He was five years old. It was on our family room couch. I had the privilege of being there. I don’t remember all the details leading up to it. He was participating in AWANA, and we taught him the Scriptures at home. 

Something prompted him to ask how to get to heaven, how he could be saved, what it meant. I had the joy of leading him to the Lord right there in our family room! Because we homeschooled, we had more time perhaps for them to journal.

One of our treasured keepsakes is the fact that we encouraged them to have and to journal the Scripture that meant something to them in their quiet time. We got to see a bit of James’s heart through his journal, and I use some of those examples in the book.

Dannah: Well, you’re talking about him in past tense. What happened?

Elizabeth: He was thirteen and playing basketball and began throwing up. We brought him home, and we went to the doctors. He had had a heart transplant when he was four-and-a-half. He was now thirteen, now eight-and-a-half years after the heart transplant and all the biopsies and all of the medication for that.

His heart was being rejected by his body. It was a complete rejection. He had a double heart attack. The second one was in our bed, in our room, which you would think would be a safe place for a child to be, so close to his parents.

We took him to the hospital, of course, in an ambulance, and they couldn’t of course do anything. His heart had totally given up. We didn’t know he had had the first heart attack, because with a heart transplant patient, the nerves are cut, so they don’t feel the pain of a normal heart attack.

He couldn’t tell us anything. We thought it was the stomach flu at first. We found out that wasn’t the case. The last thing he said was, “Mommy, I can’t breathe.” And then he was unconscious. The Lord took him home with all of his family there.

The cardiologist said, “He’s fighting still. Bill, you have to give him permission to leave.” So his Dad bent down and said, “James, it’s okay. You can go home,” and then he did.

He showed us what courage was. He showed us not to feel sorry for yourself. He showed us how to appreciate every little thing in life. He blessed our entire family over and over again. Although he’s not here, I describe his life like an orchard that still gives fruit.

My husband preaches and our children teach Bible studies and lead ministries, and I teach and write from a place where we know that life is hard, but that God is good, and God is faithful. He sent James not as a burden for us, but as a gift for us so that we would learn to love the heavenly Father and how wonderful life is and what a blessing life is! We saw all that through the gift of James.

Dannah: That’s beautiful . . . and I’m so sorry! It’s still very fresh pain, even as you speak of James. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, I usually can talk without crying, I’ve come to that place, but sometimes I can’t. 

Dannah: Wow, I can only assume that that’s because someone listening needed to hear the tremble in your voice, to know that it’s okay.

Elizabeth: Yes, absolutely okay! They’re worth every tear, and the Lord can handle every tear.

Dannah: In those early days of loss, what were the hard questions?

Elizabeth: Knowing God could have prevented it, knowing that God could have stopped it like He stopped all the other problems and brought good from them. Knowing we had no control, and then the loss of knowing, “Nobody can fix this, no matter how much you love us.”

No matter how much I loved Bill or he loved me, we couldn’t fix the ache in each other. It was a permanent loss that would never go away. So many other things can be fixed with time, and this one couldn’t. So it’s that sense of agony that, “This will never go away. He will give me grace to handle it, but it will never go away.” 

Just that sense that, “Will I ever be able to smile again?!” You know, I woke up that morning and I thought, I will never know joy again. “Of course, You can’t bring anything good out of this much pain!” I think I said that out loud to the Lord.

I knew the Scripture in Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good,” but it’s the “conforming to His image,” (v. 29) and that He doesn’t spare us pain. We want Him to, but in His economy He uses pain and challenges and disappointments when life is not as it should be.

He uses that to make us more like Christ. Then we become an extension of Him in the lives of other people, and they know they can trust us with their heartache, because somehow we will be able to understand their disappointment, because we’ve had such a great one.

It takes time, Dannah, and you’re not to hurry anybody through their grief—not your spouse or your children, your friend. Everybody grieves differently. You give them space and time and give them a break, knowing that you don’t fully understand their ache.

Walk beside them, but don’t lecture them, and don’t read a lot of Scriptures to them. Love them where they are, love them back.

Dannah: You sound like a woman who has much wisdom, wisdom that can only be forged into a heart and a mind through the valley of the shadow of death. I imagine it’s out of that that you wrote Journey for the Heart: Hope When Life’s Unfair.

I’d love to know what treasures of Scripture you have that led you, not only to walk through this so well that you can have such a gentle spirit when you communicate, but also, you had to write it down! Would you join us tomorrow to talk about some of that?

Elizabeth: I’d be happy to, thank you so much. Thank you for all your very sensitive questions as well. I think maybe that’s why I teared up, with your gentleness. Thank you, Dannah.

Dannah: You are most welcome, Friend!

Nancy: Wow, what an encouraging reminder from Elizabeth Mitchell today! Even if you’ve personally never gone through the pain of losing a child, surely you know someone who has. Depending on where they are in their journey, maybe you’d want to encourage them to listen to this program.

We started today’s program quoting from the first two stanzas of a Babbie Mason song from the late 1980s. Here’s how the chorus goes:

Babbie Mason Singing:

God is too wise to be mistaken,
God is too good to be unkind.
So when you don’t understand,
When you don’t see His plan,
When you can’t trace His hand,
Trust His heart.¹

Nancy: Maybe today you’re facing something that you just don’t understand, and you can’t see God’s plan, and you can’t trace His hand. You can’t see what He’s doing in all of this. I just remind you that you can always trust His heart!

Maybe right now you just want to say, “Lord, I don’t get this. It doesn’t make sense. I can’t see how I’ll ever get through this on to the other side. But in the midst of it all, I just want to say, ‘I do trust Your heart. I trust that You are wise. I trust that You are good. I trust that You love me. I trust that You don’t make mistakes. And I trust that in Your time and Your way You will accomplish all Your good purposes through these circumstances.’”

And, Lord, may that be the case for many friends listening today, that we will come in a greater and sweeter and richer way to trust Your heart. Amen.

You’ll find a link to Elizabeth’s book Journey for the Heart in the transcript of today’s program at ReviveOurHearts.com. There are also other resources there that will help you or someone you know grieve the loss of a child in God-honoring, God-trusting ways. 

Again, go to ReviveOurHearts.com, and click on today’s episode. It’s called “Being Honest with God.” You’ll find the transcript there. As Dannah mentioned, tomorrow we’ll hear more from Elizabeth Mitchell, and among other things she’ll explain how anxiety and depression are like an alarm clock.

Be sure and be back for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener supported production of Revive Our Hearts Ministries, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ!

All Scripture is taken from the ESV.

¹ Babbie Mason, “Trust His Heart,” All the Best ℗ 2006 Sprill Hill Music Group.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.