Episode 71
Living With Questions After Loss – Pt. 1

Jill:
00:09

Hi there. Thanks so much for joining us at the Finding Hope Podcast, getting through what you never asked for. We’re Charlie and Jill LeBlanc, and we are your hosts for today. We wanted to share a special episode with you today that we recorded with some friends of ours who have a ministry called Healing Journeys today. And they have people come on every day, live teaching on healing.

Jill:
00:40

And it’s mostly talking about physical healing, but they also have people that minister on emotional healing, trauma that people have been through. And they asked us to come on and talk about how Jesus heals broken hearts. So we did that. Recently, we also aired a couple of other episodes from that same series. We hope you got to see those as well.

Jill:
01:07

So, Charlie wants to share a little bit about what you’ll be hearing today.

Charlie:
01:12

Yeah, I mean, really, don’t need to say a whole lot, but this is, we continued on this series and we started talking about the mental battle that you deal with when you’re going through loss, the attack on your mind, the attack on your heart, trying to destroy you, and how we just need to have a healthy, theology, a healthy understanding that the enemy is out to steal, kill, and to destroy us. And we need to, you know, guard our minds, guard our hearts, cast down imaginations. So we talk a lot about that. Of course, we always hit on the god of love, the god of compassion. But you’ll enjoy it, and, just let us know how you like it.

Charlie:
01:52

We’ll give we’ll we’ll be back with you, and and continue to minister along these lines. Hi, everybody.

Jill:
02:01

Hi. Welcome to Healing Journeys Today.

Charlie:
02:05

Yes.

Jill:
02:05

We’re Charlie and Jill LeBlanc and we’re here to share with you today that Jesus heals broken hearts.

Charlie:
02:13

Yes, he does. Thank God for it because we’ve been through a situation that we needed our hearts mended, and you know the beautiful thing is that a big part of Jesus’ ministry according to Luke four eighteen, is that he says, The spirit of the Lord is upon me, and in that phrase he said, He has sent sent me to heal broken hearts. Wow. So that is a big part of the healing ministry of Jesus, is to heal broken hearts. And then of course, he was quoting Isaiah 61, which also says, and to comfort those who mourn.

Charlie:
02:51

So, the ministry of Jesus, the healing ministry of Jesus, definitely includes the healing of broken hearts because people, we see a lot of physical healing that’s needed. We may see some limping, someone limping, we may see someone blind, we may hear of someone who’s had a heart attack, or you know, cancer is on them, or they’re going through treatment, they’re in a wheelchair when they come to a meeting. But what we don’t see is what’s going on inside of people’s hearts. Wow. And there are a lot of broken hearted people around us every single day.

Charlie:
03:38

And part of the ministry of Jesus on the inside of us to minister to the world is also to heal broken hearts.

Jill:
03:48

That’s

Charlie:
03:48

right. And through the grace of God, we can all be a part of helping people whose hearts are shattered for various reasons, know. There’s all kinds of different reasons that people’s hearts are shattered and

Jill:
04:03

Yeah. I mean, we live in such a broken world.

Charlie:
04:06

Yes.

Jill:
04:07

Oh my gosh. This world is so it’s it’s so broken.

Charlie:
04:13

Yeah. It really is.

Jill:
04:14

And and Jesus came down as a man, and he experienced humanity. He knows how broken we are.

Charlie:
04:23

Yeah.

Jill:
04:23

And yet, he continues to reach out to us with so much love, so much compassion, and mercy. And he is not trying to jerk our slack and say, pull it together. He’s here to heal our broken hearts.

Charlie:
04:38

Yes. Yes. I shared this yesterday. In regard to that, yeah, last Friday, I guess it was. That, you know, Jesus never rebuked the the disciples for having a broken heart or anyone in scripture.

Charlie:
04:53

He rebuked them for having hardness of heart, but not broken hearted. So Jesus has compassion, and as we can see here, his ministry is to love and help and heal people with broken hearts.

Jill:
05:08

If you didn’t get to see last week’s episode, we wanna encourage you to go back and watch it. And we we shared so much about just how he is compassionate towards us like what we’ve opened up here with today. Yeah. And just we just wanna encourage you to to not feel condemned because you’re struggling on the inside because that’s as much of a struggle as a physical ailment on the outside. But he wants to heal your heart as well as every other part of your body.

Charlie:
05:42

Yeah. And you know, part of that healing is I’m reminded of a scripture. I think we may have mentioned it last week. But it’s out of Isaiah nine where it says, in all of their suffering, he also suffered. Part of my healing came from knowing that God suffered with me, or that he had compassion on me, or that he wept with me.

Charlie:
06:03

To know that when you’re hurting that God is not against you. To know that you may feel like the whole world is against you when you’re hurting. You may walk into a church and feel like you can’t say anything to anyone about you hurting because afraid they’re going to condemn you, which many times they do, or they’re going to rebuke you with the scripture. Rebuke you with scripture, that’s true. I hadn’t heard of that before, but that’s a lot of what it is.

Charlie:
06:31

But, in all their suffering, he himself also suffered. The scripture tells us to weep with those who weep. So, these are all things we will touch on, continue to touch on. Romans twelve fifteen, weep with those who weep, rejoice with those who rejoice. But let me just share with you, if you don’t mind, just a little bit of my testimony.

Charlie:
06:50

Jill shared a little bit of her journey, and she’s gonna share more today her journey as well. And I touched on a lot of this last Friday. I said yesterday, but it’s it’s last Friday. I touched on a lot of this last Friday as well, but I just want to remind people that, you know, when we lost our son, Bovee, over fifteen years ago to cancer after a nine month battle of prayer and faith and standing and believing and knowing and trusting God for supernatural healing, knowing and trusting that he would be on the next healing journeys today, or even the healing journeys that Andrew Womack puts out. We just knew it.

Charlie:
07:31

Andrew had prayed for him, Joyce Meyer prayed for him, we had a whole team of people standing with us, praying with us, speaking the word over him, prophesying over him. We had prophecies from God at his birth, that he would be a prophet to many nations, that he’d be a preacher. Through the years, god showed us that those prophecies were coming to pass. He even came into our room one day and said, oh by the way, he said that god gave me my first sermon. This is when he was

Jill:
07:57

like 17 He years he said, God called me to preach tonight.

Charlie:
08:02

Yeah. And he gave me my first sermon.

Jill:
08:04

And that’s when he was working at a shoe store.

Charlie:
08:06

Yeah. He was back in there doing the boxes. And I said And he didn’t walked out of our room, went went went back to bed. Went went back into his room to go to bed. And this is after he got off work that night and I went, what, what, what, what?

Charlie:
08:18

So I walked into his room and I said, Bovee, what did you just say? He said, oh yeah, God called me to preach and he gave me my first sermon. I said, do you have it written down? He goes, no, I got it all inside of me, it’s all downloaded inside of me. And so, these things, you know, it says Mary said she pondered these things in her heart, you know.

Charlie:
08:40

We just kept pondering through the years these things in our hearts about both calling and his gift. So, when he passed and left this earth and went to heaven, it was a traumatic time. Yeah, you say, well Charlie, did you rejoice? Oh, come on, come on. We didn’t rejoice when our son died, okay?

Charlie:
09:00

We know that he’s in heaven, we’re grateful for that, and we do rejoice now that we know that our son is in heaven. But man, tell you, when he left us, we were broken beyond words. Our heart was shattered, we were crushed, we could barely breathe, we could barely talk, we were angry, we were hurt, we were just didn’t even know, you know, what we would do.

Jill:
09:28

Yeah, I wanted to just bring a little perspective here. For those of you, excuse me, who haven’t lost someone real close to you. So for those who have children that you love dearly, you can relate. Yeah. Oh my gosh.

Jill:
09:43

If something were to happen to one of your children I I mean, my daughter, after she had her first baby, she said and that was shortly after Bovee died. She said, I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through knowing, you know, loving her baby so much and and him possibly dying someday. And so she began to have even more understanding.

Charlie:
10:07

Yeah.

Jill:
10:07

But then, those of you that have a sibling, a sister, or a brother that you’re really close to, and if they were to die, they’re a full on adults in their forties or fifties or even sixties. If you’re close to a sibling

Charlie:
10:21

Yeah.

Jill:
10:22

This is what our daughters experienced. They were real close. Mhmm. And and this rocked their world. Yeah.

Jill:
10:29

So I’m just trying to give you a little taste of what it was like if you haven’t walked through that, but maybe there’s a cousin or a super close friend that you’re know, that that you love so much. And if they were taken away from you right now through a car accident or, you know, God forbid, an illness or whatever. If something took them away from you right now, how how hard that would be for you. Yeah. And some still may think, well, I know that God will strengthen me through this.

Jill:
11:04

You know? And he does. And he will.

Charlie:
11:07

Yeah. He does.

Jill:
11:08

But it’s not always instantaneous. No. Especially depending on the situation surrounding it all. Yeah. But I just wanted to interject a little bit of that so that those who, if you haven’t walked it, you can maybe understand a little bit through a relationship of your own that you do have right now, that if that was suddenly gone and what that would just try to think what that would feel like.

Charlie:
11:32

Yeah, that’s good. You know, God comes immediately to our rescue in every situation, but it’s not always easy to receive that right away, know. Mean, he began to pour out his peace, pour out his love, pour out his comfort to us from the moment that Beau passed. But our hearts were damaged, we had a broken heart. I hate to use this analogy, but it’s a real analogy.

Charlie:
11:54

You know, sometimes we may hurt our spouses, and you know, and we realize that we done wrong, and we say, you know, I’m so sorry, you know, forgive me. And they say, I forgive you, but there’s still that hurt inside of the spouse, that you know, it takes them a little time to get over it. Yeah, with their mouth they can say, I forgive you, with their, you know, with a hug or a kiss they can say, I forgive you, but they still have that lodged in them for a little bit, that it takes a little time for it to wear off. So, that’s a small analogy, a really small thing compared to what we went through, and although God was reaching out to us with his love and his comfort and his peace, I’m telling you it was just hard, our hearts were broken and we miss our son so much. And it’s a traumatic, it’s a trauma.

Charlie:
12:44

I mean, you have these people come back from the armed services, and they have friends shot next to them, they see people die. When you see someone die that you love, you are traumatized, And we were traumatized, I mean, our brain, your brain is not made to experience death like that. Right. God never intended death in the earth, that’s the last enemy that he’s gonna destroy when we get to heaven, but our brains and our hearts were never created to be able to handle this kind of a thing. Now, God for the new birth, thank God for the new creation, thank God for the power of Christ on the inside of us, that gets us through these things, but still in the natural, we still have a natural body, a natural mind, a natural eyes, natural nerves and feelings, and these things are traumatized and hit hard.

Charlie:
13:34

It’s like a it’s like a a crash, you know, it’s like a train hitting a car. It’s a crash, it’s a hurt, it’s a pain. And it takes time to recover from these things. I think you mentioned something about C. S.

Charlie:
13:51

Lewis and he said in his book about his leg.

Jill:
13:55

Yeah. One of them We read a lot of books early on in our grief journey, healing journey, however you wanna classify it. It was all of it. And one of them was a C. S.

Jill:
14:11

Lewis book that he wrote after his wife passed away from cancer.

Charlie:
14:16

Mhmm. Yeah.

Jill:
14:17

And they were only married four years, and they were very happily married, and she got sick, and then she died. And it took him a while. He got into a really hard, bitter place for a while as as we did.

Charlie:
14:31

We understand. Yes.

Jill:
14:33

But thank God we didn’t stay there very long. But he eventually resurfaced and wrote a beautiful book called A Grief Observed. And it was his grief that he was writing about. So he said, it’s it’s like it’s like someone that gets their leg take or it there’s a there’s a difference between getting your leg taken off or or he said getting your appendix out and getting your losing a leg. Yeah.

Jill:
15:05

He said, you know, you get your appendix out and, you know, you eventually heal up and you go on with life. And that’s not a big deal. You lose a leg and it changes everything. You get a prosthetic eventually and you can walk again and people that don’t know you can see you walking around town Yeah. You know, with clothes covering it

Charlie:
15:27

and They might even notice it.

Jill:
15:29

Never. Never know the But every morning, or rather every night after you take off, you get ready for bed, you take your leg off to get into your prosthetic to get into bed. And every morning when you wake back up, there it is again, your stump that you have to put this prosthetic back on. It’s like you you don’t get away from it. It’s there with you the rest of your life unless the Lord heals you and does a creative miracle and gives you a new leg.

Jill:
15:59

And so that happens. Praise God. And we’re believing God with a particular friend who is believing for that miracle. And they do happen. Thank Jesus.

Jill:
16:10

Nothing’s too big for God. Anyway, for that person, they never forget it. And it’s the same way with losing someone who’s a part of you in your life.

Charlie:
16:22

Yes.

Jill:
16:22

You don’t ever forget it. It changes you forever. Now it’s not that you stay in the pit the rest of your life. We don’t just live in grief. We still experience grief, and it’s been fifteen years.

Jill:
16:37

But we don’t live there, thank God. Mhmm. But every now and then, something will just surface. Yes. And it just is part of us now.

Charlie:
16:48

Amen. So one of the chapters in our book is called Every Journey is Unique, and we’re gonna talk about that probably next Friday, more about it. We may touch on it a little bit today, but you know, everybody is different in the way they deal with things like this, and a lot depends, and we said this last time about their relationship, you know, because we lost our parents since we lost Beau. My dad died three months after Beau died, and you know, I was saddened, I mean, I love my dad, but to be honest, was more happy for him because he was 87 years old and his body was failing, and he was weak, but I do love him and I do miss him. I miss him still to this day, he was an amazing man.

Charlie:
17:35

But you know, I’m at the funeral three months later, and it paled in comparison to what I experienced three months earlier with the loss of my son. The loss of my dad was, you know, I was okay with it, you know, he’d had eighty seven years, I’d love for him to have had him ninety seven, maybe not, know. I don’t know how grumpy he would have gotten. But nonetheless, I was blessed What to have a great dad, you know, and I miss him and love him. But man, a 23 year old son in the prime of his life, a musician, a gifted composer, writer, singer, drummer, guitar player, piano player, just, I can’t even, you know, I can’t tell you what a gift he was to me and to our family, but also a gift to the world that he was.

Charlie:
18:26

And so, it was a real rip off, know, I see the RIP, you know, rest in peace, but in my heart, when I see RIP, it’s rip. It’s a rip Because off, you in reality, we feel like we were ripped off because, you know, although the devil is defeated and he can’t win, and guess what, you know, he lost because he lost on Calvary when Jesus destroyed principalities and powers and made an open show of them triumphing over them through the cross. So, he lost, and as Jill mentioned last week, you know, death, where is your victory? You know, where is your sting? The sting of death is swallowed up, know, death is swallowed up in victory.

Charlie:
19:12

Yes, for those who die, praise God for the amazing victory. Praise God, they have no sting of death. They go right into the arms of God. They’re just, I mean, I can’t even imagine the glories of heaven that my son has experienced. In fact, I kind of sensed some of it.

Charlie:
19:28

I’ll share a little story with you later. But nonetheless, in reality, the sting was here. Mean, the sting, my daughters, my wife, me, the pain, the brokenness. To be honest, it’s fifteen and a half years and it’s hard for me to really articulate what it was like at that time. It’s so hard, because we journaled, thank God, and we wrote things, because without those journals and, I might add, the book that we just put out, called When Loss Comes Close to Home.

Charlie:
20:06

We took our journals, we took our thoughts, we took everything we had learned, and we put it all in this book. So we encourage you to get this book, When Loss Comes Close to Home, because it’ll get in there deeper because we wrote it from the journals, but it’s hard to express. Mean, the pain. Guys, I can’t tell you, I told you last week I said, I went to a doctor because I couldn’t stop crying. I just cried and cried and I think I mentioned it last Friday that we just met a lady who had just lost her husband less than, I think about three years ago, and as we were talking to her about our journey, little tears were just going down her eyes, she just couldn’t stop them, she just, it just bloop, bloop, bloop.

Charlie:
20:46

And you know, the tears are precious to God. The Bible says that He holds our tears in a bottle. They’re precious to Him. And anyway, that’s another whole side of the teaching, but you know, the loss was traumatic, and I saw a scripture in Psalm 7three 26 that really was part of what I experienced. David said, My flesh and my heart fails, but God is the strength of my heart.

Charlie:
21:17

You know, our flesh and our heart failed. Was broken beyond words. I shared last time that, you know, I was just hanging on by a thread, but God, you know, reminded me of the scripture where he went to Peter and said, who do you say that I that I am, Peter? And Peter said, lord, you know, you’re the Christ, the son of the living god and and then another place where Jesus said, lord, you know, Jesus said, Are you going to leave me? Is where I’m trying to go with this.

Charlie:
21:49

Are you going to leave me? I wanted to leave. Peter said to Jesus, Where can I go Lord? You have the words of eternal life. And so, had to run back to God.

Charlie:
22:02

And to be honest, and I say it that way, I had to, because in reality I didn’t want to. I’m being honest. I didn’t want to run back to God, because I felt like God had disappointed me. He had come sharp saving my son. I know that’s not scriptural, I know it’s not right, I know that there’s, when things like this happen, that God is not the problem, we know that.

Charlie:
22:32

But trust me, when you get in the middle of a situation that deep and that hard, it’s tough. Now real quickly, we knew that God, it wasn’t God’s will for Bovee to die, we knew it wasn’t both time, we didn’t jump and dive into any of those false doctrines. I greatly appreciate the foundation of the word that we’ve been under as Rhema graduates and as sitting under Andrew Womack’s now ministry for over forty years. Yeah, I did say that forty years, over forty years. We are that old.

Charlie:
23:07

We have sat and sang with Andrew and Jamie, and what an honor and privilege, but thank God we have a solid foundation of the word of God, so we knew it wasn’t God’s will for Bo to die. Right. You know, I think those who think that, well, it was just God’s will, I think some of them would go, well, you know, okay God, I’ll love you anyway. Well, that’s fine, you know, but it’s not true. It wasn’t God’s will.

Charlie:
23:33

You know, God’s will is for you to have a long life, satisfied long life, you know, eighty years to a hundred. I mean, you can have as many as you want, you know, according to the word of God. But, nonetheless, it was not God’s will for Bovee to die at 23 years old. It was not both time. And you you say, well, what happened?

Charlie:
23:56

Well, honestly, I don’t know all the details of it. I have a chapter in the book at the end called, What About Faith? And I talk a lot about some of the things in regard to what happened and how we have processed this. But you know, the devil is just, he’s out to kill, steal, destroy, the bottom line. And if someone dies early, he’s the one who’s been involved in that.

Charlie:
24:21

Cancer is of the devil. Can somebody say amen out there? I know that you agree with me. Cancer is of the devil, sickness is of the devil. He went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed of the devil.

Charlie:
24:34

All this stuff is oppression of the enemy and we knew that and we were fighting for our son, we were praying, we were standing, we were battling in the spirit, rebuking the enemy. You know, whatever you bind on earth is bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth is loose in heaven. So we did it all, brothers and sisters, but it didn’t come out the way we expected. And I said this last time that a wise pastor said, there’s faith to move mountains, but there’s also faith to stand when the mountain doesn’t move. And that’s where we are at today, even to this day.

Charlie:
25:13

We’re standing even though our mountain didn’t move. Now, one of the important things that I learned in this journey was that I had to learn to live in what I knew and not in what I didn’t know. As I’m saying, I don’t understand it all even to this day. You know, the Bible says the secret things belong to the Lord, but those which are revealed are for us and for our children. It also says in Corinthians that that we see through a glass darkly, but then we’ll see face to face.

Charlie:
25:40

So there’s a lot of things we don’t fully understand about this situation, but what we do know, and that’s the thing, you have to live in what you know, and unfortunately we know a lot of grieving people, not a lot, but we know a few grieving people that are stuck in their grief. They’re stuck in their mourning and they’re like, I don’t understand why. I mean, ten, fifteen years later, I just don’t know, I just don’t understand, I don’t know why God, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I think this decision, this revelation that God gave me about living in what I know and not in what I don’t know. And I just had to do that and we both did, we had to say, okay, we know without a shadow of a doubt that our son is in heaven waiting for us, there’s no question about it and we’re excited to see him.

Charlie:
26:33

And every time I start talking like that, Jill says, don’t go too soon now, you know. But we’re excited to see our son. It’s going to be a glorious reunion, there’s no question about it. But I do know that God is good. I do know that God is love.

Charlie:
26:48

I do know that God is not the author of death. I do know that there’s a, that I’m gonna go to heaven and see my son. So, I have to live in truth. I have to live in the truth that I know. I know that if God be for me, who can be against me?

Charlie:
27:02

And I also know that Satan roams as a roaring lion, am I talking too fast?

Jill:
27:05

You’re talking kind of

Charlie:
27:06

fast. I also know that Satan roams about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Jill:
27:15

That’s right.

Charlie:
27:15

So he is trying to destroy us, we realize that. In fact, a pastor came to us and said, Charlie and Jill, a lot of couples don’t survive after they lose children. They said, so be on guard, the enemy is gonna try to destroy your So we were aware of that and we talked about it and we prayed together and we said, man, we’re not gonna let this happen. You know, the devil’s a liar, we’re not gonna allow this to happen. So, you know, realize we lived in what we knew, not in what we didn’t know.

Charlie:
27:49

We knew that the devil was bad, that God was good, and we knew that we could have the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. We could walk in victory through this thing. It wasn’t easy, but we knew God was good, and we knew He would help us. Yeah. Well, hope you enjoyed that episode on healing journeys today that we did prerecorded, and God bless you.

Charlie:
28:20

We hope that it helped you in many ways. Now we’re gonna go into a part two next Tuesday, so stay tuned, be with us, and we look forward to seeing you next Tuesday as well. God bless you.