In the Fires of Refinement
Dannah Gresh: A month after a tornado claimed the lives of her husband and two of her daughters, Kerry Tittle entered a time of serious and persistent depression.
Kerry Tittle: There was a sense of abandonment from God. I felt that He had abandoned me. I really felt like I was in this dark valley alone. I mean, it was probably the darkest of my days. I just couldn’t relate to people, my children. It was very difficult.
Today we’ll hear how God brought Kerry through the fires of refinement.
Leslie Basham: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, along with Dannah Gresh, for September 20, 2019.
Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Trusting God to write your story, well, that’s not so difficult when everything in your life is flowing smoothly. But sometimes God does things in our lives that are anything but smooth. Sometimes He writes the …
Dannah Gresh: A month after a tornado claimed the lives of her husband and two of her daughters, Kerry Tittle entered a time of serious and persistent depression.
Kerry Tittle: There was a sense of abandonment from God. I felt that He had abandoned me. I really felt like I was in this dark valley alone. I mean, it was probably the darkest of my days. I just couldn’t relate to people, my children. It was very difficult.
Today we’ll hear how God brought Kerry through the fires of refinement.
Leslie Basham: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, along with Dannah Gresh, for September 20, 2019.
Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Trusting God to write your story, well, that’s not so difficult when everything in your life is flowing smoothly. But sometimes God does things in our lives that are anything but smooth. Sometimes He writes the script in ways that make us cry out in anguish.
Both Robert and I have experienced the loss of loved ones. My father died unexpectedly on the weekend of my twenty-first birthday, and not many years later, my brother David was killed in an automobile accident at the age of twenty-two. Robert’s first wife, Bobbie, passed away after almost forty-five years of marriage.
Undoubtedly, you’re familiar with the pain caused by the death of someone you love. And maybe you know someone who’s going through that dark valley of the shadow of death even now. It’s in those moments that we have to learn to trust God in spite of the pain, in spite of the roller coaster of emotions that we feel.
Our guest today on Revive Our Hearts really understands those emotions in a big way. Kerry Tittle lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, with her seven remaining children.
Last spring, just a few days before the five-year marker of the death of her husband and two of their daughters, Kerry sat down with Dannah Gresh to share her story. Here’s Dannah with more of an introduction.
Dannah: Kerry Tittle, you and your husband Rob are dear names at the Revive Our Hearts headquarters. Tell me how you met Rob.
Kerry: Rob was working with Life Action in Buchanan, Michigan.
Dannah: Which is the umbrella ministry of Revive Our Hearts.
Kerry: Yes, right. He moved to Little Rock, and I met him at a church there. We were in a singles group together.
Dannah: What did you like about him?
Kerry: The biggest thing I liked about him was he loved children. He’s a single man, and he’s out there being an AWANA leader.
Dannah: That’ll attract a girl. (laughter)
Kerry: Yes! He loved children and was just a big jokester. He was just always being funny and full of a lot of joy.
Dannah: How long after you met him until you knew, “This is the man I want to spend my life with”?
Kerry: Oh, it wasn’t long at all. We were married probably within eight months.
Dannah: So, you guys, you’re married, and you have a few children together. (laughter)
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: You have nine?
Kerry: Nine children. Yes.
Dannah: A few people have told me that you became the homeschool supermom of nine. That’s the descriptor I got for you.
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: Would you say that that’s true?
Kerry: Well, I felt that. That was kind of what I poured my whole life into. That was my identity. That’s what I did. We homeschooled, and I mom’d. That’s what I did. (laughter)
Dannah: You mom’d. You were the mom. Was it kind of like the dream that you had dreamed? This is the life that you wanted to build, and you and your husband had it together.
Kerry: Yes. It was my perfect dream. I mean, custom-built a house for us with lots of bedrooms and lots of bathrooms. We had a lot of girls and chickens and just the . . .
Dannah: Girls and chickens . . . what more could a girl ask for, right?
Kerry: (laughter) Yes. It was the perfect, perfect life.
Dannah: But that all changed one day.
Kerry: Yes. April 27, 2014. We knew that there were going to be storms. And we knew that they would be severe because they had been talking about this on the forecast for days. I remember keeping my older girls home because they worked at a church and watched children. That night I told them, “We need to stay home because it’s just going to be too dangerous.”
And probably about 7 o’clock that evening, the outdoors looked different. The hue was just a weird green, and they were taking pictures of the lightning because there was just some really crazy lightning.
Dannah: The children?
Kerry: Yes. And I, being mom, walked out, and went, “Oh, I think you guys need to come inside.” I was getting a little nervous. Rob was out there with them. And they came in, and just, like, within seconds of them shutting the door, we saw these huge, forty-foot oak trees just laying down, effortlessly laying down in our yard.
Dannah: You didn’t hear a sound?
Kerry: I didn’t hear anything. We just saw trees laying down, and then everybody just instinctively went under the stairwell.
Rob and I and Tory and Rebecca were not able to get under that stairwell in time. We were still throwing things down the hallway, trying to make room. And we took a direct hit from an F4 tornado. And there was just this large . . . it was like an explosion.
There are some parts that are still very . . . I got hit in the head pretty hard, and there’s still some parts that I really don’t remember. But I do remember having to pull up out of the debris, and I remember seeing Rob and Tori and Rebekah. And I knew at that moment they had already been ushered into eternity. It was a very helpless situation. And there was still a lot of storm going on.
I found a root ball . . . I guess you call it . . . where a tree had been pulled up. I put my children in this hole to try to figure out what to do because at this point, it was like a wasteland.
Dannah: You were trying to keep them safe.
Kerry: Yes. The area that you’ve lived at for ten years didn’t even look . . . It looked like a war zone. It didn’t even look like where we used to live. I was confused directionally. It was already getting dark at that point. They were all barefoot, and there was broken glass and debris.
Everything was gone. There was no structure left of the house. I realized that we were landlocked with trees. There were no roads or anything, and I knew they needed medical attention.
Dannah: So everybody was hurt a little bit.
Kerry: Most of them were hurt, yes. I had one, Isabella, my middle child, who had a broken arm, but she had a lot of debris injuries. She actually had gone into shock later. But at that time, she was on the slab of our home, pacing back and forth, recalling every verse she had ever learned as a little girl. And Whitney ran for help.
Dannah: How old was Whitney?
Kerry: She was nineteen. It probably wasn’t what I wanted her to do, but she was up and gone. I was nervous because there were electric lines everywhere.
So Emily and I packed up all these little babies, and we just started walking. We were all barefoot. It was crazy.
Dannah: How old were the babies?
Kerry: Joshua was seven months. Asa was three. Molly was seven.
Dannah: Itty-bitty months.
Kerry: Yes. They were just stair-stepped all the way up.
Dannah: So you’re walking through the debris with little ones in the dark. You’ve left your husband and two of your children.
Kerry: Yes. I didn’t know what to do. I just knew they needed help. It was just hopeless. I couldn’t call. We didn’t have a phone. We just started walking, and a neighbor found us. And as the Lord would have it, his wife was a nurse. She just took all our kids in there and made this makeshift triage in her home and was caring for my children.
I just sat there, just trying to figure out what had just happened. I mean, I’m watching them take a diaper off my baby, and it’s full of glass. They’re bleeding, and it was just very traumatic. We had probably three hours before rescue could get to us.
Dannah: The storm was that bad.
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: You’re recounting this chaos to us with a lot of composure. Were you in shock? Were you composed that night because you were in shock? You just went into rescue mode, “I need to do what I need to do to save these children”?
Kerry: Yes. The shock lasted about eight months.
Dannah: What did that look like?
Kerry: Numb. It was very numb. It really was such a traumatic event. I couldn’t really wrap my head around what had happened. I mean, it took a long time to understand what had happened. I think I’m still processing that.
That was in April, and it didn’t really hit me until December when I had to go buy a Christmas tree. I think one of the reasons is we had no home. We had nothing. We. Had. Nothing.
Dannah: Everything was gone.
Kerry: Everything was gone. I just had to start finding a way for me and the children.
Dannah: Did you have to get a job?
Kerry: No. I didn’t. This was—just God. This story went . . .
Dannah: . . . viral.
Kerry: It was crazy. It was all over the news.
Dannah: I heard it.
Kerry: It was on national news.
Dannah: I was praying for you.
Kerry: We had gotten so many donations that we could start over. We had at our church. There was like a gymnasium that people brought stuff—clothes. To this day, I don’t think there has ever been anything that we ever needed. God’s people just banded together and took care of us. It was a pretty amazing thing for my children to witness.
Dannah: At what point did you feel established again; whereas, you have a home to live in, your children are back in school . . . or did you continue to homeschool? What did your new life look like?
Kerry: To be really honest, we’re still not 100% settled. Everything still seems pretty new to us.
Dannah: And it’s been five years.
Kerry: It’s been five years. I got small jobs, like work for a magazine, writing. People have asked me to come speak at conferences. That has kept me kind of busy. We’ve done some writing projects. We came out with a children’s book on grief. I used a story that my son made up himself, and it was sweet. My daughters . . . they do work.
Dannah: How was your relationship with God in those first few months as you were getting re-established?
Kerry: Those first eight, nine months, I felt like the spiritual rock star kind of thing (laughter) because it was pure shock. But I walked like the perfect person grieving and smiling and praising the Lord and trying to help other people through trials, if you can believe that. And I thought, Oh my goodness. I’ve got this amazing faith.
And slowly, as reality began to set in, I was challenged with a lot of things that I didn’t believe in: depression, PTSD, trauma. Those types of things.
Dannah: You experienced them?
Kerry: Yes. And I was afraid to talk about it. You know, in Christian circles you’re afraid to say those things.
Dannah: Yes. We can be very allergic to depression and PTSD.
Kerry: Yes. Because I thought those were spiritual things, spiritual problems.
Dannah: How did the depression show up? Can you take us to a day when you were really feeling it?
Kerry: Sure. Well, I had a friend who was a biblical counselor, and, interesting, as a very dear friend of Rob’s, he was helping the family and I try to process things. He shoved this little book across the desk at me. It was Ed Welch’s book on depression, Looking Out from This Stubborn Darkness. They caught it before I did.
Dannah: They saw the depression before you did.
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: But what did they see, what symptoms in you?
Kerry: I isolated myself a lot. I didn’t go anywhere that there were people. That was probably the main one. I didn’t want to enter in to any sort of grief. I didn’t want to talk about it. You know, that sort of thing.
Dannah: You were just smiling.
Kerry: I was just smiling.
Dannah: And so he pushes this book across the table at you. What was your first thought?
Kerry: Yes. I couldn’t even say the word—the “D” word. I said, “This isn’t me. I am not depressed.” (laughter) I wasn’t very kind that day. I just remember taking the book home and throwing it in a drawer for about two months.
About the third month, I pulled it back out, and I started reading it and realizing, “Oh my goodness. Yes. This is hard stuff.”
Dannah: What did you recognize? In the pages of that book, what sounded like your story?
Kerry: There was a sense of abandonment from God. I felt that He had abandoned me. I really felt like I was in this dark valley alone. I mean, it was probably the darkest of my days. I just couldn’t relate to people, my children. It was very difficult. Having to get up every morning and get that smile on was just a chore. I mean, it really was a chore.
So I did this for about three years.
Dannah: Three years of faking it.
Kerry: Oh, yes. And that was one of the reasons I didn’t go out often, because I could only put up that facade for so long.
Dannah: What were your children seeing behind closed doors?
Kerry: I did my best to model that in front of them, and it was a huge disservice to them because they kind of felt like they couldn’t share their grief. It was just kind of a tight-lipped situation, and we just didn’t talk a whole lot about it.
And then I finally, when that third year ended, I just started looking into ways to help my children. I made up games. We started writing stories together. I started letting them talk.
Dannah: What kind of games?
Kerry: Interesting—I just did these four pieces of paper with a happy face, sad face, mad, scared. And I took tiles that people would make back-splashes with, little, small tiles. I took a Sharpie, and I drew every random picture you could find—ice cream cone, stop sign, school bus—whatever.
Then I put a few in there that I knew would trigger some emotion, like maybe a little black truck (because Rob drove a black truck), or a tent (we loved to camp), or a tornado or lightning or clouds. I would let them separate them onto the different emotions. We did the happy ones first. “Which ice cream do you like?” And then we would work up to the harder ones. And once they were able to be able to speak and talk, it was so much easier.
Dannah: So you’re giving your children permission to have the emotions that you were not giving yourself permission to have for three years. Correct?
Kerry: Correct.
Dannah: Why? Why all of a sudden the change of heart?
Kerry: Well, I just thought there was this standard of how . . . Because people would tritely throw those words, “You need to grieve like you have hope.” And I didn’t know what that meant at the time. And they would say, “We need to rejoice in our sufferings.” We take all this Scripture, and we throw it out there, but that’s all they would throw at you.
Dannah: If you look at those in isolation, that’s going to lead to something not real.
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: As you turned to the Bible to sort through what was unbiblical thinking in your heart about emotions, what did you discover in God’s Word about grief and depression and the darkness?
Kerry: Well, first of all, I looked at characters, like David and . . .
Dannah: And obviously Job—everybody asks me, “Have you read Job?” (laughter)
Kerry: Yes. I’m looking at these men, and they were a mess. I mean, when you read the Psalms, they’re going through some dark stuff.
Dannah: They were a hot mess.
Kerry: Yes. So I started realizing that there isn’t this timeline. There’s not this standard. And, honestly, what really brought me to the understanding of it all was there were so many verses in Scripture that talked about the refining process.
I studied it. I studied literal refining processes. I realized trials are evidence of God’s grace in our lives that’s changing us and transforming us and removing those impurities. I had found in Romans 5 where he talks about suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and I found that character really was a Greek word that means “proof.” They use it to determine a metal’s purity, which I thought was interesting.
Dannah: And you felt like you were going through that refining process?
Kerry: Oh, absolutely.
Dannah: When we throw Bible verse at people and expect them to put on a happy face and isolate verses, like, “We do not grieve without hope,” and we don’t look at the whole context of Scripture, like the fact that Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus knowing He was going to raise Him from the dead. Why was He entering into the grief? Why was He entering into the darkness of sadness and depression by weeping in front of everybody, knowing that He was going to raise Lazarus up?
We can’t just isolate passages when we’re helping people through dark times. We have to look at the whole counsel of Scripture.
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: That’s what you started to do three years into your loss.
Kerry: Yes. And what we find is those bricks of verses that we throw are not helpful at all. It’s very hurtful.
So, at that point, I was passionate about understanding. We just have this stigma of what grief should look like.
Dannah: I think that’s true. I think we do have a stigma with how grief should look, and we’re afraid of it. It’s messy, and it requires time. It requires patience. It requires understanding. And it’s not easy. So we want people who go through trauma and loss and pain to grieve efficiently so that we don’t have to . . .
Kerry: Yes, because it’s uncomfortable for us.
Dannah: It is uncomfortable.
Kerry: There was also a pride issue there when you have been the supermom of nine children, and now your children who have gone through trauma are starting to spiral. I mean, their dross is coming to the surface because that’s what happens when you throw hell to the fire. That’s when the sin starts to show. And, again, I was still in the fishbowl.
Dannah: People were watching you.
Kerry: Your whole life is unfolding in front of everybody. That’s probably when I realized that I had set my identity more in family and being a mom and those things rather than God. That was my idol. And, obviously, that was crushed.
It was a hard path to go back and to see who I was in Christ and those promises, the promises I had to cling to.
Dannah: I want to ask you a question. There’s one woman listening who is in that place of wearing the mask of perfection every day. She’s lost someone she loves very much. She’s choosing to believe that she has to put that smile on, and she even has people telling her that otherwise she’s not walking in truth. How would you counsel her? What would you say to her heart today?
Kerry: Well, first of all, we know that Scripture tells us He’s close to the brokenhearted. Thank goodness we have a Father that we do not have to have a mask for. We can go to Him, and we can cling to Him.
I would tell her that once I got past that, and I was honest about who I was and where I was, and I still love the Lord, that was a huge burden that was lifted off of me—to be real and to be transparent.
I also found that God was more glorified in that transparency and in that realism, and people would come because it was a safe place.
Dannah: You were a safe place. You became a safe place.
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: Your story was a testimony. Without you propping it up or pretending it was different than it was. I think of the Bible verse that says that we overcome the enemy by the blood of the Lamb (the blood of Jesus) and the word of our testimony.
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: So many times we act by our lives and our picture-perfection and our Instagram persona that we don’t even need the blood, that we don’t need the price that Jesus paid.
And you finally got to the place where you said, “No. I need Him, and this is my story, and I want to tell it in truth.”
Kerry: Absolutely, yes. And I will say that one of the things that I would strongly recommend is being careful on social media because whether we know it or not, sometimes we want to window shop on social media because everyone has their picture-perfect families. I was, like, “Oh, goodness. These are anniversaries I’m never going to see.” And I would be discontent.
Dannah: So did you have to jump off of social media?
Kerry: There were several times I had to just jump off and realize that God is good, and what He has for me is good. Sometimes those things can derail those thoughts.
And another thing that was very helpful to me was I would journal, and I could be brutally honest with what I wrote in my journal because it was for me, and I could say I felt this way, or I felt like God had left me and He wasn’t coming back.
And then I would take those statements, and I would compare them with Scripture. But I did it all in writing, because that’s just my learning style, but I had to write it. And I would do that every night for . . . I’ll still do that now, and that has been such a huge help for me to keep my mind focused.
Dannah: So on one hand you’re saying, “Give yourself permission to grieve. Give yourself permission to be depressed if that’s a part of your grieving process.” What about anger?
Kerry: I don’t know if this is a personality thing. I have not experienced anger. Obviously, I think there’s a lot of help, and there are a lot of really good, biblically sound people—friends, your pastor—who will walk through . . .
Dannah: Guide you through Scriptures.
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: One of the verses that comes to mind when I think about anger, because I think if I lost my husband and two of my children, I might be angry. My personality is such that that might be something I would struggle with. And I think of the verse that says, “Be angry and sin not.”
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: Now, anger is a good emotion that God gave us when it is in response to something we should be angry towards. And God is angry in the pages of Scripture sometimes.
Kerry: Right.
Dannah: And so, in justice and pain, and things that are senseless and awful—like what happened to you—I think some of us do respond in anger. I think that’s okay if we don’t sin in anger, and then we use that anger to turn to God.
Kerry: Yes. And also, if it is stifled, that’s just going to eat you up inside, and you’re going to become bitter. So that’s not a good thing.
Dannah: Right. So, Kerry, tell me what your life looks like today.
Kerry: Today we have good days; we have bad days. Obviously, during the time of this recording, we’re coming up on the five-year anniversary, and it’s been a little emotional around our house.
Dannah: Anniversaries are painful.
Kerry: They’re very painful.
Dannah: Do you give yourself some room on those anniversaries to talk about Rob and the kids or to grieve?
Kerry: The nice thing, Rob’s work place at FamilyLife made our family a photo album of him. They all wrote things about what they liked about him because we lost all our photos and stuff. We don’t have a whole lot of tangible things that I can bring out for the kids.
Dannah: So that book’s a treasure.
Kerry: Oh my goodness, yes. We’ll bring that out, and we’ll talk about it. And we usually release balloons—just a way that they can express. And the little guy, Joshua, he’s only five, and so he just has a lot of questions about heaven. So we talk about heaven a lot, we do, at anytime. I’m trying to counsel my children, and it counsels my own heart as well.
Dannah: In circumstances as painful as yours, from the day that tornado hit and you lost Rob and Tori and Rebekah, too, walking with that fake persona of, “I’m okay. Everything’s okay”— you’re a super godly woman, although it wasn’t real; to now where you’re honest and truthful about your hurt and your pain and your story, how does somebody walk through those things choosing to trust God?
Kerry: Looking at, again, Romans 4, I was watching how they were talking about Abraham having hope against hope. I didn’t understand what that meant, and the more I’ve walked through this, I’m realizing that the fact that I’m even standing here today before you is God’s grace.
Dannah: Kerry, you’ve actually begun to build a ministry around encouraging others who’ve walked through similar tragedies as yours. What’s that looking like?
Kerry: Actually, that really wasn't intentional. That kind of happened, and it was just amazing how many people were suffering silently and afraid of not being Christian enough with whatever they were facing. I just found that being transparent has been the most helpful thing for them.
Dannah: Yes. Hearing you say that makes me think, “Wow. The Church is not doing a very good job of walking beside people in their tragedy and in their grief.” Advise us.
Kerry: I’ve learned to give grace because the Church has come to a place where we have to fix something. We see a problem; we see someone hurting; we have to fix it. If we don’t fix it, or they can’t be fixed, there must be sin somewhere involved. Sometimes God allows people to suffer because He’s working. He’s working in them, and He’s working in people around them.
I don’t think the Church intentionally is messing up here. I really don’t. I think there just needs to be an understanding that sometimes it’s not in their hands. I mean, sometimes God does really big things.
I think fixing it isn’t as big as coming alongside and helping. That would be mine. It’s just to be listening and walking with them through it.
Dannah: You talked earlier about how, in the beginning aftermath of the loss of your husband and the girls, that you had fake fruit. You called it fake fruit?
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: And that was the joy in the suffering and all that stuff.
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: What does the fruit in your life look like today?
Kerry: I would say peace. It’s been more peaceful to have your mind on the Spirit. That’s biblical to have your mind on the Spirit rather than on our circumstance. I’m not going to say I do that perfectly. That’s a battle for me. That’s a constant, having to renew my mind, to remember these things.
Dannah: So it’s okay to grieve.
Kerry: Absolutely.
Dannah: And say, “This isn’t how my life was supposed to look—at least if I was writing the story.” But then you don’t fixate on that. You turn your eyes to Christ. You renew your mind. And that’s, I guess what trust looks like.
Kerry: Yes, because you can only lift your eyes to where your help truly come from. You’re not going to find it anywhere else.
Dannah: Do you have new dreams?
Kerry: I wonder what God has for me because through all of this, I’ve realized that He’s writing the story. I’m a pen snatcher. I always want to take the pen and write my own. So now I realize that, in His sovereignty, He’s got a plan, and I’m just kind of waiting it out.
Dannah: That is a beautiful visual imagery, Kerry, that you’ve just shared. You’re trusting God to write your story, but you’re a pen snatcher.
Kerry: Oh, I am!
Dannah: I’m sure that Nancy and Robert wish they’d thought of that when they wrote You Can Trust God to Write Your Story: Embracing the Mysteries of Providence.
If you’re having a hard time embracing the mystery of providence in what’s happening in your life right now, if you’ve been encouraged by Kerry’s story today, you might really be encouraged by a copy of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story.
I’ve learned a lot of intriguing things about how I snatch the pen out of God’s hand. That’s a beautiful picture, Kerry. How do you resist that urge when it comes up?
Kerry: Well, I don’t always resist it. I try to lean on my own understanding, and I’ll try to do things my way. It doesn’t always work out.
Dannah: That’s an honest answer. I think the point is to be aware that we’re snatching it.
Kerry: Yes.
Dannah: And then when you realize, “Oh, no! I’m writing this story again,” you give it back to God.
Nancy: Kerry will be back with a final thought in just a moment.
The book that Kerry and Dannah have been talking about, You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, is available to you any time here in the month of September.
It’s the first book Robert and I have written together. In fact, one of the chapters is called “You Can Trust God When You Lose a Loved One.” Our hope is that the comfort others have found as they embrace the mysteries of providence will be a deep source of comfort and encouragement to you when you face the death of someone you love.
This book is our way of saying “thank you” for your donation of any amount. We’ll send you a copy when you contact us with your support. To do that, just visit us at ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1–800–569–5959.
Now, on Monday we’ll take a closer look at trusting God when tragedy strikes. We’ll hear how a father in the Old Testament grieved the tragic deaths of his sons. I hope you’ll join us for Revive Our Hearts.
Now, here are Dannah Gresh and Kerry Tittle with a closing thought about ministering to others who’ve experienced the loss of a loved one. Here’s Kerry.
Kerry: It’s always harder whenever I’m trying to do it my own way—it’s always harder. I’ve learned I’m probably a far more patient person today than I was five years ago, because I was a fixer. Everything was so-so, and I controlled my atmosphere. He’s really changed me in that way. He’s changed my heart. He’s changed my priorities.
In 2 Corinthians 1:3 through 4, it talks about our suffering is to help others who suffer. And it’s just part of the Body, walking with each other and helping each other down that road. And that’s what I hope to do. I hope that’s what I’m doing well. I don’t always do it well, but that’s kind of my passion to hurt with those who hurt and suffer with those who suffer.
And you can’t fix it. Sometimes you just can’t fix it. It’s a thorn that God has not removed. We can ask as much as we want, and if it’s not meant to be removed, I think that’s where we just need to be patient with those people and love them and come alongside them.
Dannah: I think you are doing it well, Kerry, and I think you did it well today. I’m praying that someone was encouraged by your story. I know I was.
Kerry: Thank you.
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