Latest / Father's Refuge / Beat Up by God: Matthew Jenkins on cancer, chronic pain, divorce, and finding faith in suffering

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Beat Up by God: Matthew Jenkins on cancer, chronic pain, divorce, and finding faith in suffering · Father's Refuge

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Share your core message that you offer to others who feel alone in their pain and doubt.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: So God can meet you in a place where life feels like it's falling apart, but your pain doesn't mean that he's abandoned you.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote Beat Up by God for people who still believe but are struggling to reconcile their faith with the pain.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: I want them to know that God can handle their honest questions, their anger, their grief, their exhaustion.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: Pain is real, but it doesn't get the final word.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: A father is often expected to be the strong one to hold his family together, to keep moving forward, even when part of his world has fallen apart.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: After losing his daughter Jessica to cancer, James Moppett discovered how few places existed for grieving fathers, and how many men were carrying their pain in silence.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Father's Refuge podcast was created to give those fathers a place to be seen, heard, and reminded that they don't have to walk through grief alone.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Through honest conversations, personal stories, and faith-rooted encouragement, James explores the realities of loss, trauma, emotional healing, and rebuilding life after the unimaginable.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Grief may change a father forever, but it doesn't have to destroy his faith or take away his hope.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is the Father's Refuge Podcast, a place for grieving fathers to find understanding, healing, and refuge.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: Good morning and welcome to Father's Refuge Podcast.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_02: My name is James Moffat, and I'll be your host.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: Today we have Matthew Jenkins with us.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: How are you doing, Matthew?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: I'm doing well yourself.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: Good.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: I'm glad you're on the episode.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Glad to be here.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so today we're talking about what happens when the life you've built falls apart.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: My guest, Matthew Jenkins, knows the story from the inside.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_02: After surviving cancer as a young man, he faced decades of chronic illness, repeated job losses, and a collapsing marriage.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: The weight of it all brought him to a moment of total desperation, feeling utterly abandoned by the God he'd believed in.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_02: That moment was the start of a raw, honest journey to rebuild his faith from rock bottom.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_02: He is the author of Beat Up by God, and his story is a powerful testimony for any man who has ever felt unseen in his suffering and silent in his grief.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_02: Hey Matthew, do me a favor and introduce yourself to the listening audience.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, like you said, my name is Matthew Jenkins.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote uh Beat Up by God.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: I am a father of three, fourteen, basically ten, and seven, a Christian cancer survivor.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: My story includes cancer at 20, chronic health issues, chronic pain, job loss, marital separation, mental health crisis.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: But the real story is how God met me in the broken place and began rebuilding my faith and my hope in him.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: So let's talk about the breaking point.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Unpack the years of accumulated loss, cancer, job loss, failing marriage that led up to the crisis.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: So like I said, I was diagnosed with cancer at 20, was at the time I was a junior in college.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: I had a four-year RTC scholarship with the army.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: I was planning on uh doing 20 years in the army and as a translator, my undergrad was in foreign languages, and September 11th happened my sophomore year.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I figured I'd learn some dialect of Arabic and be a translator in Afghanistan or Iraq or somewhere over in the Middle East.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: But God changed that and I spent until last year really, and great God.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't realize it, but that that permeated my being.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I hadn't until July of this year, I it it had been 12 plus years since I turned in two weeks' notice.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: Every time I l changed jobs, it was not by choice.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Had a car wreck in this October of 21.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 21.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: And had chronic back and neck pain.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: Left me where not disabled, but where I couldn't stand or sit for an extended period of time without pain.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a kind of a lose-lose situation.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: The lowest point came in March of 25, and I was unemployed for the second time in less than a year, separated from my now ex-wife for the second time in less than a year, and and and really just hit that breaking point and really didn't think I could had a reason to go on.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's a lot, for sure.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I always tell people that loss and grief doesn't necessarily mean the loss of a loved one, even though it can.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of times our stories surround loss and grief of of chronic illness, long-term illness, and obviously losing a loved one either suddenly or over a prolonged period of time.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: So and job loss is something that men, especially baby boomers, tend to get kicked to the curb.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I know that I mean I can kind of relate to your story about job loss with regards to chronic illness, because I I have a daughter who's 30 some odd years old, and she has Crohn's disease, and she stays sick a lot of the time, and she just can't hold down a job, and it just creates a a real crisis for her financially and all of that.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I can relate to that for sure.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: So feeling beat up by God, ex tell me about the spiritual crisis wrestling with a faith that felt empty and a God who seemed absent in his so in your suffering.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a it's an intentionally provocative title for a book that it really truly came from the lowest point of my life.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: In March 25, I put a gun to my head and and thought about ending it all.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it was only due to God's timing that my mom showed up and I heard the car door shut while I had the gun to my head and and decided not to do it because she had showed up.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: But I when I was telling her what I had done, I told her I was tired of feeling beat up by God.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, I don't believe that God's cruel or abusive.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was the language of pain.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was what the suffering felt like.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: I felt I I knew that God was sovereign, but I couldn't understand why he was allowing everything to happen.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I had a a pretty normal childhood up until about 20 when I was diagnosed with cancer.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then after 20, it just seemed like one thing after the other.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the the the book is about the journey from the the feeling of believing God's sovereign but not understanding why he's allowing what he's allowing towards trust and surrender and rebuilding.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: I know that, you know, we live through a circle of life.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: You're born, you die, and there are a lot of mountaintop experiences and there's a lot of valleys in our life.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, sometimes when the when the hits just keep on coming, you start questioning, why me, Lord?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_02: Why is why is this happening?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I know I when we lost our daughter, cr uh Jessica Ann in 2001 to cancer, we had a 14-month journey and they had to do an emergency surgery.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: And the the surgeons came out and basically said, We got about 80% of it, but some of it's on our brainstem, and we can't touch that.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: And so if she lasts 12 months, you'll be really lucky.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: So we had no hope.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: They gave us no hope, but we still clung to hope.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_02: We still believed that the God's a sovereign God, and He's the author and finisher of our of our faith, and that He is capable of reaching down from heaven and healing all of us of all of our illnesses.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and initially we had a lot of hope.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_02: And we were doing a lot of praying, and we were hoping that he would heal her on this side of heaven, and come to find out that was not the case, that he took her home.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I I had an epiphany at one point, about 50% of the way through the journey, that Jessica didn't belong to us.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: She was not ours, she belonged to God.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_02: God is, like I said, the author and of of creation.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_02: And we're here on earth and we have a purpose.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: Our life has a purpose.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: And for those of us that are believers in Jesus, that purpose is to serve him, and that purpose is to allow him to work through us to tell people about his love and his compassion and his mercy and his salvation.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yeah, it's going through that sort of thing, what I went through, what you went through, it's uh very difficult, and you find yourself asking a lot of questions.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: Why me, Lord?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: Why why does this have to happen to me?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: And we can look, you turn on the TV and you watch the news and you see pain and suffering and sorrow and all sorts of horrible things going on in the world, and you're like, if you're a sovereign God, and a lot of people ask the question of, why does God allow those things to happen?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the truth of the matter is is that God doesn't necessarily allow it to happen.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: It just it just happens.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that uh horrible truth that we don't want to wrestle with is that maybe some of those things happen because of humanity and our sinful nature and the things that are the struggles, the power struggles and the all of that that happens all around the globe.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, we just can't we just as a as human beings, we just can't seem to get along.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: Why can't we just get along?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: Why can't we just coexist?
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'll be driving down the street and I'll get behind a car and I'll see a I'll see a coexist sticker and I'll have I kind of chuckle.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: Why can't just let's just coexist?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, well, we we are coexisting.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe not so peaceably or as lovingly or as kind as we should be, but yeah, we're all coexisting.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: And there's this there's this huge struggle and friction between different groups of cultures and peoples, you know, and all of that.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_02: Let's see.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: So you went through a lot of trial, you went through a lot of you're down in the valley with cancer and your marriage not lasting and all of that sort of thing, and you're you came to a came to the conclusion that it just wasn't worth it, right?
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: And and I'm thankful that that you that something happened in your life at that moment to where you didn't go through with your initial thought, you know, I'm glad you didn't do what what you were planning to do.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: How did these experiences reshape your understanding of what it meant to be a man, a husband, and a father, especially when you couldn't provide or be strong in traditional ways?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: So in a lot of ways I'm still figuring out the answer to that.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: So at the a after I put the gun to my head, my now ex-wife filed a restraining order against me saying that I was homicidal, and I I'd lost access to my kids for over a year.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm now just just finally getting it back to a point where I have them every other weekend, which is which is great.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's not as much as I would like, but it's better than it was.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, I'm now divorced, so the husband aspect is a little bit uh unclear to me.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, you know, one of the things that I know I I want to get remarried someday.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: I I want to be a better Ephesians 5 husband.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's one of the areas that I failed in my marriage.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh obviously it takes two for a marriage to fail, but that's that's was really one of my failures was I wasn't being that Ephesians 5, loving my wife as as Christ loved the church.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: As far as um, you know, how suffering changed me as a father, it made me realize that my kids don't just need a father who provides or pushes through.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: They need a father who who's healing, a father who can repent and who can pray honestly, a father who lets God deal with the pain before it spills out his anger or control or withdrawal.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: One of the other areas that that really led to the downfall was I struggled with anger towards God uh over the cancer diagnosis for 20 years, and that really kind of permeated my my being, and I was chronically irritated, so little things would set me off.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so that that has led to my kids being in counseling to to deal with how to cope with their dad having been this angry monster for years, which is really hard for me to admit that I I acted in such a way that, to put it frankly, put my kids in therapy.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: But they are healing.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: I just got a progress update that my two younger kids are doing well enough where they're going to buy weekly counseling instead of weekly counseling, which is great.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so yeah, that that's kind of and then as a man, it just you know, I I really think similarly that it's one of the things it it taught me is that I can be broken but still be faithful.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the job loss for a lot of men is it we define we define ourselves by our job, typically as men.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, so for me to feel like I had no control over my my career, starting out when I was 20, all the way up into the the times where I was was not turning in two weeks' notices because I'd be laid off.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because it was never, it was never things like I was doing something wrong and got fired.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: It was just layoffs or change of direction with the company.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was really hard to spend all this time unemployed.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think in the last decade I've spent probably two or three years combined unemployed, uh which is not fun.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: It hurts financially, it hurts your property.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's stressful.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's stressful.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, yeah, I think in the last 18 months that it's really taught me that there's a lot more to being a man than your job or your marriage.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it's about for me, it I want to be known as a man of faith now.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I want.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: The there's a a movie um drawing over overcomer or overachiever, overcomer.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: And they ask who he is, and the last thing on the list is a Christian instead of the first thing.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I want I want if someone asks me who I am, I want to be a follower of Christ first.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not there yet, but that's where I'm I'm striving to be.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think we all struggle with that.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean I read something recently.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: I do a lot of writing and reading on Medium and Substack.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: And somebody wrote an article recently about or made a comment or something about uh identity.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: What is our identity?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: You know, and if you if you go you're a social setting, party, Starbucks, whatever, water cooler at work, you know, and you ask somebody, Matthew Jenkins, who are you?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: Who who is Matthew Jenkins?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of times people's will their identity is who they are at work, their professional identity.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm an architect, I'm a police officer, I'm a dentist, I'm a this, I'm a that.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, that's not what I'm asking you.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: Who who are you?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: What makes you tick?
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so so yeah, our our identity should be in in Christ, in Christ alone.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: And certainly we certainly have different aspects in our life.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_02: We're husbands, we're fathers, we're providers, we're you know, we we have a we we do have the professional side of our lives, but that that that work identity is what provides uh roof and food and you know, utilities and all that stuff.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's just uh it's just a portion of our life that we live through.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: And we can certainly, you know, while we're at we're at the water cooler, you know, we can we can let our light shine and hopefully be, you know, the light and hope and compassion that people around us need.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: And hopefully our life story speaks to our faith in a large quantity, in a large degree.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: So share your core message that you offer to others who feel alone in their pain and doubt.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: So God can meet you in the place where life feels like it's falling apart, but your pain doesn't mean that he's abandoned you.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote Beat Up by God for people who still believe but are struggling to reconcile their faith with the pain.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: I want them to know that God can handle their honest questions, their anger, their grief, their exhaustion.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Pain is real, but it doesn't get the final word.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I appreciate you being on the uh the episode today, Matthew.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm glad you're still with us.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm glad you wrote the book.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Where can the where can people find your book?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: The book's available on Amazon.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you want more information about the book and about me, you can go to beatupbygod.com.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, cool.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's easy to remember.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: It'll be in the show notes.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_02: So Matthew Jenkins is the author of Beat Up by God, a memoir about his journey through cancer, chronic illness, job loss, divorce, and a suicidal crisis that ultimately reshaped his faith.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_02: His core topics include men's mental health, grief, finding hope and suffering, spiritual doubt, and rebuilding life after hitting rock bottom.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_02: So to the listening audience, I want to say thank you for the privilege of your time.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_02: Go to fathersrefuge.com and subscribe and join the email list.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: At the very top of the website, you'll see a survey.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_02: If you'll take that survey, I'll get an email and it will help me to understand the type of resources and things that you're looking for on the podcast.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: I also have a Facebook group called Father's Refuge, and I have a Facebook page called Father's Refuge, along with a YouTube channel.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_02: So the audio portion goes to the podcast and releases every Friday at 8 a.m.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_02: And if you go to my YouTube channel, you'll see the video version of all the episodes.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thanks everybody for your time.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: Matthew, thank you for who you are, and thank you for sharing your overcoming story as you struggle through all of that.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: And uh now you're gonna be able to share that story with other people and prov give them hope as they go through what they're going through.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: So thanks for being here.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: All right, brother.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_02: All right, everybody.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: We'll talk to you later.