Latest / Faith Rehab / Rehab Reflections #2 - Steve's Friend Takes A Fall

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Rehab Reflections #2 - Steve's Friend Takes A Fall · Faith Rehab

• 0:08
  unknown: Okay, all right, right, right, right.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Faith Rehab.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is more of a micro version of what we do on a much larger scale.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Steve and I thought we'd hop on there and just share a quick little story about what's going on in our world.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: So this format's gonna be a lot different than what we offer you weekly, but it's still a fun way for us to engage and get a little shot of faith rehab.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like a yeah, like a little inoculus.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking like a shot of espresso or a shot of fireball.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Booster.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: Oh whatever else.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: Whatever Heidi.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: Heidi's birthday.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_02: She might have been doing a lot of shots.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I had no shots.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_02: A cake pop shot or something.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: But here we go.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: So for your birthday cake, well, like if you was your perfect birthday cake, birthday cake would be an ice cream cake.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I don't really love cake.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, what kind of ice cream?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: I know.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I'm so sorry.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_02: This is our last case.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I would do a birthday pie.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I would do a birthday cookie.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: No?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not a big pie person.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: What's sad?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: We live in this area where there's amazing apples all fall long and they grow pumpkins and stuff.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I pie it's too much crust.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not into it.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: I do love a good crisp.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have like what is your go-to guilty pleasure when it comes to like a snack or a dessert?
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: I my one true addiction is chocolate chip cookies.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_02: No walnuts, but a chocolate chip cookie.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_02: And if you come at me with like some hard, not gooey at all kind of crap, we're gonna have issues.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_02: But a nice gooey, warm chocolate chip cookie with milk, or if you do like I do sometimes with Diet Coke, because that balances it out.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_02: You drink you drink Diet Coke with no calories and have a chocolate chip cookie with a zillion calories, it's a net zero.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Steve, I went to Target over the weekend and I ordered my kids, they are like really into they're in this health kick.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: They're all about protein, they're all about building muscle.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I when I shop for them, it's kind of boring.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so I bought Oreos for myself.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the lady who was like checking me out, she's like, Have you had Oreos chicken and waffle Oreos?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, No, and it sounds gross, is what I'm thinking.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And she didn't actually do this, but I felt like she was like whistled, like, hey Johnny, go grab, go grab this lady a chicken and waffle pack of Oreos.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I had one in the aisle, like while she was checking me out, I ate two chicken and waffle Oreos and life-changing.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to sound dramatic, but they smell like syrup and they taste like chicken and waffles.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: But it's you don't know until you try to do it.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_02: Chicken and waffles, but not on an Oreo.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Also, with Oreos, double stuff, triple stuff, all the stuff.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_02: Give me a Octo stuff.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's what I would eat.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's what I would eat.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, how do you uh yeah, I wanted to tell you a story because it's just on my heart, and my heart is sad.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_02: And normally we try to do like uh upbeat stuff, and um and I had this like today we're recording on a Tuesday.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: I got home yesterday, but on on Sunday, so I live in Northern California, and in southern, but I'm from Southern California, and in Southern California we still have a lot of friends, and we were staying with some of their friends, some friends for an event that I was going to.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but then I have a friend who's a a firefighter in Long Beach, and in Long Beach they have a harbor, and in the in the port of Long Beach come tankers, oil tankers, and you know, like bringing stuff from China and the east, you know, Japan, everywhere, Hawaii, all the places.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_02: They um so they have this big old ship, it's 105 feet long, it's 45 feet tall, it's amazing.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_02: And my friend arranged for us to take a tour.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_02: So myself, my wife, and then this other couple that we know.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: And the couple that we know, he's a retired fire chief, and so this was like gonna be a thrill, and worked actually down at a refinery near Long Beach, and so it was gonna be like we were so excited, and we went down.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: They said we got to go to the engine room first before we turn on the engines, because then you'll never be able to hear us.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: They have seven massive diesel engines.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: If you're an engine person, you gotta get there because they're unbelievably out of control.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_02: But the woman that we were with felt a little uh hot and it was warm down there, and she's like, I'm gonna go get some fresh air.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: So she goes up to get fresh air.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: By the time we finish our tour, we get to the top of the stairs, and she is laying out on the ground.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: She's the whitest thing I've ever seen in my life.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: Now we happen to be with firefighters, and then our friend and his fire company were over there just hanging out, talking, and they were shooting the breeze.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: So she's surrounded by like eight EMTs or paramedics, and they're all attending to her, and they were great.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: A shout out to Long Beach Fire because they were fantastic, professional, kind, courteous, respectful, and asking her all these questions, and they're you know, loading up this information and blabbadah.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know, blah blah de blah is the technical term for I don't know what they were doing.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: But at the end of that, they ended up taking her by um by transport by ambulance to the hospital, and I think for just sort of uh routine stuff.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: And her husband followed the ambulance, and um we were gonna go too, and he and the fire company were saying, Listen, it may be an hour before she gets to bed.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_02: You should finish the tour.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: We didn't get to go out on the harbor like we had hoped.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: I hope Long Beach Fire that I get to come back and do that part of the tour.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_02: Shout out to anything, and I'll bring ice cream, I promise.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_02: But we did the tour, and the boat's amazing.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: We drive over to the hospital, and this is part of the crazy story is that we could only have two visitors at a time.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_02: So her husband came out, my wife and I went in, and then after a while, um, I came out, talked to the husband for a while, he went back in, and I'm reading out in the lobby, and Susie comes running out.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: She goes, Steve, the doctor wants to talk to you.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, What?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: The doctor wants to talk to you?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_02: Hurry! And I'm like, This is the weirdest thing ever.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we walk in, the doctor is still finishing his exam.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: He turns to me, he says, Hi, Steve, because it's a guy I used to coach in soccer, like his little brother and my son in Northern California were in kindergarten together, and we've been to parties at their house.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: We've been to like it was a small world kind of moment.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, Adam?
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: He's like, and so as soon as he's done with his exam, and he was very professional.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: He turns to me and he goes, How's Caleb?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: How's Noah, my son's?
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: How are you doing?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: What are you doing?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, can I take a selfie?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna send it to my parents.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: So by the way, he looks like he's 19.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: If you're really old, you remember a show called Doogie Hauser.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_02: This was Doogie Hauser, and um so we ended up, you know, spending the afternoon there, and and after a while, he he had ordered a CT scan, and after a while the CT scan came back.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh, and they found that she has a brain tumor.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: And they believe, based on where it is, that it's not cancerous, but they won't know anything to pathology.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_02: But it was sort of this moment of we were going from this really great tour to you've got a brain tumor and your life just changed forever, and there was something so um magnetic and so uh so all-encompassing about that to us that just is still really heavy on my heart, and it's it reminds me that um, you know, there were I'm so sorry that she fell, and she it left a pretty good knot.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you hit a steel deck of a boat and uh it's gonna hurt, but at the same time, how much longer would she have had to go before they found out she had a tumor?
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so today, actually, as we're recording, they're hoping to get some more imaging and maybe do surgery today.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but I I know that on this show sometimes we end with funny stories and whatnot, and it just reminds me that our faith, you know, Faith Rehab podcast, we talk about real talk about church hurt healing and and rebuilding faith.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_02: And it reminds me that our faith is a 24-7 kind of thing, that our faith is in the hospital rooms and in the waiting room and in the phone call as we're driving home into her husband and and double checking with how he's doing and you know his frustration with the hospital because they hadn't gotten a room yet, and you know, just walking through that.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_02: And my faith is um can be pummeled by bad news, but it can also be strengthened in knowing that God didn't cause it, but God walks with us, and I know that this is a season of life where I'll be walking with my friend and kind of um you know proverbially wrapping my arm around his shoulder since we're 500 miles away, it's a proverb, not actual.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: And um, just kind of walking through prayerfully and respectfully and hopefully, not trying to fix it, but just kind of being present.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: And I love that the Bible talks about the Holy Spirit just being present with us.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: And was he present on that boat tour?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_02: Was he present with the doctor?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: Is he present now, even though we don't know the outcome?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely, and I think that's been part of my healing is that my faith is not about church, it's about Christ and about you know, God's trinity, and and the faith has to make sense to me in the hospital and at my job and on this podcast, or else it's it's not real or it's not deep.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's interesting to me because in some way, the hardest part of ministry for me when Josh and I were married were the late-night phone calls, the everything's going normal, and then you kind of get stopped in your tracks, and your breath gets taken from you because you realize that someone's life is being completely turned upside down.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: And there's something called secondhand trauma that a lot of first responders experience, and I think people in ministry also experience, and I wished it was talked about more because we had so much of those kinds of things happening pretty consistently.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And but it was through that, even though it was like the hardest part of ministry for me, where I think I met God the deepest, because I had moments in hospital rooms looking in the faces of people that didn't even look the same because of brain aneurysms or cancer.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: But seeing Christ in that still.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And not in a trite fix-it sort of a sense, but in a deeper communal sense, like you your friends weren't alone.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: You got to experience that with them.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: You've been at the bedside of your son when he was hospitalized, and you you were the first person, I think, that my family called when April had her car accident and then Rich had his.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like, and and there's something sacred about being invited into someone's most vulnerable moments, not to fix it, but to just hold space.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's that ministry of presence that is that makes such a lasting impact on the people who are actually experiencing the devastation, the loss, the fear, the unknown.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's looming around the corner for all of us.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And all we can hope is that we have someone to put their arms around us, whether whether it's you know, from 500 miles away or up close, to remind us that the reasons that we're here are beyond the hard stuff.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that makes sense.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, it makes total sense.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_02: And I I guess I want to kind of end with this because this is advice I'm giving myself, and so the rest of you might as well listen.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: That sometimes the least, the least returned phone call is the one that says, if you need anything, call me.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because people going through stuff are not going to call you.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: They might, if they need their dog, you know, put inside for the night or something.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_02: But for the most part, if you know somebody going through something, will you just prayerfully think about something you can do for them?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_02: Take them flowers, make them brownies.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_02: You don't need to wait for permission, just show up.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, I've I've mentioned this on this podcast before that one of my favorite stories is when Job leaves, loses everything, and his friends show up and they don't talk for a week.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_02: They do nothing but are present for an entire week.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: And when they finally start talking, they're giving advice.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: And Job says to them, Why did you abandon the ministry of silence?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I think friends, sometimes just showing up, not fixing anything, except maybe brownies, or in my case, cookies, um, and my case pie, but to just show up and just go, I'm present, I'm walking with you, I don't know what I'm doing, you don't know what you're gonna need me for, but just to be there.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so I just want to end with that.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: If you know somebody going through something, would you this week, would you just commit to reaching out, doing something cool for them, and um see what happens?
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: And with that, I'm gonna sign off and just say, We'll see you next time.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_02: And be blessed.