Lindsey Wheeler: Chris and I found this verse that immediately when we saw it, we were like, “This is our life verse.” And it’s Proverbs 14:13: “Even in laughter the heart may ache, and the end of joy may be grief.” And that sums up the last sixteen years. We have walked through some of the darkest moments of our life, and there have been a lot of days that we thought we couldn’t make it. And then five minutes later, we will be laughing uncontrollably about something. And that’s the kindness of Jesus. 

The Sustaining Kindness of God: Chris & Lindsey Wheeler & Bryan Crum – Episode #413

Narrator: Welcome to the Jesus Calling Podcast. When kindness is shown to us—whether it’s as small as a smile from a stranger, or as big as someone meeting a need at a desperate time in our lives—we see and feel goodness that is often unexplainable. If we look for them, we can find these divine kindnesses each day, those big and little nods from God that bring us hope and comfort, even in the darkest of hours. These moments are powerful reminders of the sustaining force of divine kindness and the enduring faith it nurtures. 

Founders of the ministry Bottle of Tears Chris and Lindsey Wheeler share the challenges they faced after adopting their daughter, Eliana, from Guatemala, all while navigating Lindsey’s development of a rare autoimmune disease, and how the kindness of God kept them from despairing. 

Later in the episode, we’ll hear from Bryan Crum, a hospice chaplain, who shares what he has learned from spending time with people in their final days and how God showed up in their last moments to demonstrate His sustaining kindness.

Let’s begin with the Wheelers’ story.

Chris Wheeler: Hey there, I’m Chris Wheeler, and this is my beautiful wife of twenty years.  

Lindsey: Hi, I’m Lindsey Wheeler, and we have one daughter, her name is Eliana Wheeler.

Chris: And together we are the Wheelers. And we are super excited to be here today and get to share a little bit of our story.

Well, I’m from Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

Lindsey: And I’m from Little Rock. And Chris went to Oklahoma Baptist University and I went to the University of Arkansas. And I remember thinking after college, like, Gosh, I haven’t met my spouse, and, Lord, where is he? And anyway, I ended up moving to Cleburne, Texas, which is just a small little town south… 

Chris: …of Fort Worth. 

Lindsey: Yeah. And our friends were working the student ministries at that church, and they called and said, “Lindsey, I want you to come work the girls’ side of the youth group.” And then they also called Chris separately, asking him to be in charge of all the guys. And that is how we met. Literally, we became best friends. 

Chris: We became absolute best friends because we’re working together every single day at the church, and doing ministry together is a real quick way to get to know somebody. I remember getting to know Lindsey at the church, and I remember kind of starting to understand her heart for Guatemala and her passion for the people and the culture. And I remember thinking to myself, If she and I are going to work out, I need to know, how do I feel about Guatemala? 

After we got married, Lindsey and I went on a short term mission trip, and I fell head over heels in love with the country. I mean, I was ready to move there. I was ready to say, “Great, this is our new home.” 

Lindsey: I was like, “Oh, wow, you are taking it to another level.” 

Chris: I mean, I went from saying, “Well, that’s awesome. I love that you love Guatemala,” to “Oh my gosh, let’s move to Guatemala.” So it quickly became a big part of my heart as well.  

The Wheelers Adopt Their First Daughter

For us, adoption was plan A. We always had it in our hearts—and I think God put this in our hearts—a desire to start our little family with adoption first. And our original idea was that we would adopt and then perhaps try to have a biological child. But when we did meet Eliana, when we finally did meet her, it became really, really clear that she’s Eliana, the one and only.

Lindsey: We got to travel to Guatemala to meet her for the first time when she was three months old. The country of Guatemala was shutting down their adoption system, so I moved to Guatemala and got to live with Eliana as basically her foster mom until the adoption was finalized. 

I remember in Guatemala, I was with some other moms that were fostering their babies, and their babies would go to bed at 7:00 or 8:00. Eliana would be up until 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and she would sleep about two to three hours a day. She didn’t take naps, and Chris and I were like, “I guess this just is what it is,” because we didn’t know any different at that point. 

And fast forward, we went through the first seven years of her life going from doctor to doctor to doctor going, “Our sweet baby, there is something so not right here.” And we desperately wanted to find peace for her little brain. 

Chris would end up driving around the city of Franklin, Tennessee—that’s where we lived at the time—hours and hours on end, because something about her being in the car and her carseat made her feel safe. And so every single day, every single night, we drove and drove. And I remember people would ask us like, “How are y’all still standing?”

I started looking for Eliana’s biological family in Guatemala. We had a lot of questions and a lot of her health stuff, we just wondered if we could get some answers. And then also, we wanted to have the info for if Eliana ever wanted to connect with her biological family. And very quickly, a searcher in Guatemala was able to find Eliana’s biological brother. 

So many of the question marks we’ve had about Eliana started to fall into place, and we were able to piece together things that we never were able to piece together before. We found out that actually, Eliana has Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), and that her biological mom had struggled with alcoholism and actually passed away from it. So we were able to take that information and start diving even deeper into, What does that look like?

One of the sweetest parts of it was things that we didn’t even know we should be doing early on as Eliana’s parents, we were doing. And I think the biggest piece of that was this critter world that Chris created, and it was these animals that he was able to connect with Eliana.

Chris: When I was growing up, I spent most of my childhood in the backyard kind of playing pretend in a whole world that I created. 

Fast forward to when I’m a dad, suddenly I have all these stuffed animals with me, and I’m talking to Eliana when she’s little. And it became a very natural transition for me to kind of use some of those same character elements and use some of that same pretend imagination world that God gave me to create an imaginary pretend world for Eliana.

Kids with FASD often live in their own version of reality. And so when we began using stuffed animals to connect and talk with her about real things, it immediately made sense and we immediately connected.

Every night, we pray together as a family with the critters. Eliana has a little critter named Kenneth, and he’s a little raccoon. And he always has her hold his little paw, and then he will be one to lead us in prayer each night, thanking God for the day. So prayer is a part of our natural rhythm, praying together before bed, Lindsey and I, and praying with Eliana with the stuffed animals. But prayer is also a part of our daily living and breathing.   

When Things Are Hard, God Sends a Lifeline

We went on about seven years of a couple hours of sleep at night, and then at the same time, my body was feeling just unbelievably horrible and I knew something was wrong with me, too. So we were just kind of in this dark, dark valley of going, “God, what is going on, where are you, and how are we going to do this?” So as we’re parenting Eliana and we are walking through just year after year of unbelievably hard, painful, sleepless nights, my body started just truly crumbling. 

I remember going to my doctors and saying, “Look, I am twenty-eight years old, and I feel like I’m ninety. Something is so wrong with me. I feel like I’m dying.” So many doctors just kept saying, “Oh, you’re a first time mom, of course you’re tired.”

But this precious physician’s assistant came in and she listened to me and she heard all of my symptoms. And she goes, “You know what that sounds like? That sounds like Lyme Disease.” So she ran a test and immediately I got a call back and they said, “Lindsey, you are off the charts. You have Lyme disease.” And I remember thinking, Yes! We were both celebrating that we figured out the diagnosis and now we can fix it. 

And for those of you that know anything about autoimmune diseases, there is not a quick fix. And it has also just been this journey of going, Wow, my body feels so broken and Eliana is going through just night after night of trauma. 

I remember at the beginning of my diagnosis, just really fighting with the Lord, honestly, and going, God, why? Why is this my story? Why have you chosen us to be Eliana’s parents? We are not capable of this. Why did you choose me to have a disease at the same time? It just felt so unfair. And I remember I could barely open my Bible. I would read some Psalms, but even that was really hard. I was sad so much, really battling depression. And I remember opening Jesus Calling and it was a lifeline for me. It was the one thing I could read and just sit with God in these moments where I felt like my life was over. And then someone told me, “Hey, Lindsey, did you know Sarah Young has Lyme disease?” And just cannot tell you the comfort that brought me. And it made me dig into Jesus Calling even that much more. And I thought, Okay, if Sarah Young can write Jesus Calling and can love Jesus with all of her heart, if she can trust Him through all of her pain with Lyme disease, then I can too.  

“I remember at the beginning of my diagnosis, just really fighting with the Lord, honestly, and going, God, why? Why is this my story? Why have you chosen us to be Eliana’s parents? We are not capable of this. Why did you choose me to have a disease at the same time? It just felt so unfair.” – Lindsey Wheeler 

I was supposed to go to this women’s conference. And at the same time, I woke up and could not get out of the bed. I cried and cried and was just really angry at God. They also were doing the conference online, and I remember Chris saying, “Hey, Lindsey, why don’t you watch it from your bed?” And so I opened my laptop begrudgingly, and thought, Okay, fine, I’ll watch this even though my life is falling apart. And in it, one of my heroes of the faith and friend, Jennie Allen, she was speaking to the audience, but really, it felt like she was looking at me through the computer and she said, “Have you disqualified yourself from the race?” And I felt like she was saying that directly to my face. And so I laid on my bed crying and asking God, “How do I do this? How do I run this race when I am homebound?”

“I laid on my bed crying and asking God, ‘How do I do this? How do I run this race when I am homebound?’” – Lindsey Wheeler

And that is when God gave me the idea for a small business to help comfort and encourage people that are going through hard times, people that are grieving, and people that have lost loved ones. And I said, “I want to call it Bottle of Tears,” because I had always loved the verse, Psalm 56 that says, “You keep track of all my sorrows. You’ve collected all my tears in your bottle. You’ve recorded each one in your book.” And I also love vintage bottles. I love anything vintage. And so I thought, I can put the verse inside of a vintage bottle and I can mail them from our house. Maybe that’s what God wants to do with me. 

It kind of gave me my life back in a weird way. It was a place where I was able to look outside of my own circumstances, my own pain and suffering, and I had like an inside glimpse into people that were suffering all over the country. And I started getting orders. They were coming in and I thought, I don’t even know any of these people. I mean, Chris was my mail carrier, so he’d take all the mail to the post office and he would be like, “How do you know someone from Idaho?” And I’d be like, “I don’t.” But God was so cool that I got a front row seat to watch people comfort their friends and family, and I was able to read their letters of encouragement and hope to their friends and family, and it gave me encouragement. It helped me to push forward.

“God was so cool that I got a front row seat to watch people comfort their friends and family, and I was able to read their letters of encouragement and hope to their friends and family, and it gave me encouragement. It helped me to push forward.” – Lindsey Wheeler

My body continues to fail me, but God hasn’t. He has not failed me. And I feel just more confident and more alive than I have in a long time, knowing that He is using me still in the midst of my pain. 

“My body continues to fail me, but God hasn’t. He has not failed me. And I feel just more confident and more alive than I have in a long time, knowing that He is using me still in the midst of my pain.” – Lindsey Wheeler 

Lindsey: I ended up having some rare, rare, rare, like does not happen anymore in this lifetime bacterial infection that attacked my throat. And then over the last two months, I went in and I had gallbladder surgery and I had to get my appendix out. 

Chris: And literally my prayer in those moments is, ”Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Because sometimes that’s all you got. 

“My prayer in those moments is, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.’ Because sometimes that’s all you got.” – Chris Wheeler 

Lindsey: But in God’s kindness, again, He saved me. 

Chris: He knows what I need. He knows the desperation that I feel. He knows the fear that I am experiencing. And if I say His name, I’m just connecting to Him and with Him in the midst of the pain and the sorrow and the loss. 

And like we said before, Eliana’s disability and Lindsey’s diseases, those are kind of with us. And so we endure, but we don’t want to just endure. We want to also live the life God gave us to live. And so we do that by breathing our prayers, by literally saying, “Jesus, be with us and give us wisdom and guide us and direct us as we go into this next thing.”

Lindsey: The moments that I say, “Where are you God? Do you even care?” And then I will get an email from someone we’ve never met saying, “We heard that you drive your daughter around. We’d love to send you a car from California.” You know? And then I just laugh. I’m like, “God, you are incredible and hilarious and you love us so specifically.” We needed that. Our car at that point had like 280,000 miles and was falling apart. And we were sent this car with 40,000 miles on it. I mean, just unreal stories that He continues to give us. That’s a big part of the joy and the grief coexisting. Our life is still really, really hard. And He’s also really, really good. 

Narrator: To learn more about the Wheelers, visit www.bottleoftears.com, and check out their new children’s book, Kit and The Missing Notebook, wherever you buy books.

Stay tuned to Bryan Crum’s story after a brief message.

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Deepen Your Communication With God: Jesus Listens Notetaking Edition

Jesus Listens is the 365 day prayer devotional that people everywhere use to guide their prayer life and deepen their communication with God. Now, there’s a new way to keep up with your daily prayers, the Jesus Listens Notetaking Edition. This edition includes full text of Jesus Listens, written out scripture verses, and journaling space. Experience how intentional prayer connects you to God, changes your heart, and can even move mountains.

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Our next guest is former hospice chaplain Bryan Crum, who’s sat at the feet of those who are facing the end of their lives, along with their loved ones who are facing imminent loss. Bryan shares some powerful stories from patients he tended to, and how he’s learned the importance of soaking in the time we have today, while it’s still ours. 

Bryan Crum: My name is Bryan Crum. I am a public speaker and a Christian author, and currently I am m on this mission just to help people fall in love with God’s greatest creation. 

The Emotional Work of a Hospice Chaplain

I worked for many years as a hospice chaplain, and I was invited into the lives of people who were given six months or less to live. I would have the privilege of listening to hundreds of life stories, just to talk with people one on one. And it was all different kinds of folks, people that lived well and some that didn’t, people that had big careers and others that struggled financially. Some that had robust, loving families and some that were just all alone and I was the only one there to visit. But as I met with these people at this time, they all had one thing that they shared. They were all confronting mortality, and I was meeting with them at a time when I think the most important question for them is, “What comes next? What’s waiting in the next life?” And it’s been one of the most emotionally rewarding and at the same time, emotionally taxing things I’ve ever done.

It’s humbling just to be invited into people’s homes, into their lives at a time when each moment, each minute is just more valuable because you know they’re the final ones.

“It’s humbling just to be invited into people’s homes, into their lives at a time when each moment, each minute is just more valuable because you know they’re the final ones.” – Bryan Crum

I’ve found that when you get to those final moments, where you’re at in your faith is really just amplified. So if you are secure in your faith, a lot of times that was that security was multiplied. And then a lot of times if you were not, if you were afraid or nervous, some of those nerves and fears were amplified, too. I’ve helped people navigate conversations about faith and I’ve helped them face their doubts and uncertainties as they near the end of life. 

I’ve never pushed my personal beliefs on anyone who is near death. But when they would ask or when I felt it was appropriate, I would introduce people to Jesus because we know as followers, as believers, that Jesus takes care of our past and our mistakes. 

When you listen to life stories the way that I have, you learn that doubt has two favorite foods, it’s our past and our mistakes. And I’ve had the privilege of helping people learn to put doubt on a diet, to stop feeding our history and our failures to doubt. And so He’s really the perfect person to help us when we’re trying to stop feeding doubt in our lives. 

Letting Go of Regret at the End of Our Days

So many of us carry regret, and I was always surprised how much value words have when it comes to regret, especially regret at the end of our life.  

Near the end of life, the body just shuts down in stages, and usually this happens over a period of about three weeks. In hospice, we call that final stage actively dying. It’s basically a fancy term for describing when blood pressure drops and people slip into more of a semi-coma and they’re increasingly harder to wake. 

And I was visiting a man named Frank who was in that stage longer than most. There was no medical reason for Frank to be holding on. But he still was. And I remember calling Frank’s wife with an update and his wife and his daughter coming in and beginning to set up a vigil for Frank.  But one person hadn’t arrived yet. Frank’s son, Jimmy, had not joined the vigil. And as the hours passed and Frank didn’t, it became clear that he was waiting for his son. There were unsaid words between him and his son, and those unsaid words were holding in massive amounts of regret. And it was keeping Frank from letting go.

And I remember Jimmy finally makes it to his father’s room. It’s late in the evening, and when I saw Jimmy’s face, it looked like he had been crying the entire time it took to get to Frank’s room. His eyes were so red, and his grief was hanging off of him on his face, his posture. You could tell just this was years of bitterness, this wall built brick by brick that was standing between Jimmy and his father. They both had added bricks to that wall, for sure. But they were bricks of pain and regret, hurt. And they had cobbled these together and it was separating the two of them. 

Jimmy arrives, he sees his father on his deathbed, and he says the two words his father has been waiting to hear. He falls across his father’s bed. He’s crying, saying over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And Frank, having heard those words, passed very soon after. 

I think we all have regrets in life, and so many of them just center around things that are unsaid. We let unsaid words hold us in place. And it’s almost like this ancient, heavy anchor that ties us down. I’ve learned that we often need a little nudge to remind us we can untie our boats from that anchor and float away at any time. Regret hangs heavy on us for years if we let it. And it’s often just a few words that hold us back from experiencing that relief and that reconciliation between the people that we love. It’s this burden that we don’t have to carry. 

“We let unsaid words hold us in place. And it’s almost like this ancient, heavy anchor that ties us down. I’ve learned that we often need a little nudge to remind us we can untie our boats from that anchor and float away at any time.” – Bryan Crum

Now Is the Time to Share What’s In Our Hearts

The most important things that I’ve learned have come from sitting at the bedside of people that were dying. Time is just all around us every day. And all of us, without exception, take the minutes that we have for granted. We just do. And it’s not until the end when we really discover that each breath is a gift. Each moment is this blessing. You start to realize where priorities should fall when you get to the end.

I saw firsthand, there were books that people would talk about having wished they had written. There were songs that people said, “I wish I had gotten that music out into the world.” But they never took that step. We all have something to share. We all have talents and gifts, but too many of us never take that leap. We never go out in faith and chase those dreams. And I think that dreams that God has placed in our hearts are planted there, so that we will act on them, so that we’ll do something with them. That would be my one piece of advice to everybody is don’t take those really special things that you’ve been given with you. Share them with us now, you know?

We live unknowingly at half capacity. And there’s one person I visited that just has stuck with me for years, because I saw this really special encounter with her that brought this concept home. I visited a woman named Ruth. When I walked into Ruth’s hospital room, her daughters were there. You could see the fear on Ruth’s daughters’ faces as the doctor was telling them, “These are the last moments.” We were all surrounding Ruth’s bed. Her eyes were closed, her mouth was open, her breathing was shallow. Ruth’s daughters, Rachel and Emma, they basically just said, “Would you pray with us?”

By the end of the prayer, everybody, myself included, we are just bawling. Rachel’s holding her mom’s hand, and I can feel her shaking as she cries harder. As I end my prayer with an, “Amen,” all at once, Ruth says, “Amen,” too. Ruth has been in this semi-coma the entire time and for much time before I arrived. But she wakes and says “Amen,” and we look at her. And then Ruth holds out her hand, not to Rachel or Emma or me. Just holding this hand up. 

This is a ninety year old hand. It was tired. It was wrinkled, spotted with age. This is a hand that Rachel and Emma would know well, it’s the hand that stroked Rachel and Emma’s hair when they were sick. It patted their backs to quiet them when they were babies. This is the hand that taught them to sew and bake. This is the hand they held a lot when they were young, and now they’ve in recent days been holding it again. And Ruth’s hand is reaching for someone. And her fingers and thumb close slightly, and it looks like she’s holding someone’s hand. And Ruth breaks the silence in the room with something that’s so out of place at this moment. She giggles. 

It’s not a laugh of a ninety year old. It’s the sound of a child on a playground. It’s the sound of a child playing, splashing in the pool, skipping rope. It’s the sound of a carefreeness that we have only when we were children. That’s what we hear, coming from Ruth. And it’s such a sweet sound that we look at each other and we’re smiling.

There were two curtains in the room that day. There was that thin, blue curtain that the doctor pulled back, and there was a second curtain. There was one separating the world we see and the one we don’t. 

I like to ask people, “What do you imagine the end of your story will look like?” We don’t have to wait to see what our lives will be like at the end of our stories. Imagine now what you think that final scene of your life is going to be like. And if you don’t like what it looks like, make course corrections today. Make the changes now. There’s a welcoming home waiting for us.

“We don’t have to wait to see what our lives will be like at the end of our stories. Imagine now what you think that final scene of your life is going to be like. And if you don’t like what it looks like, make course corrections today. Make the changes now. There’s a welcoming home waiting for us.” – Bryan Crum  

I’d love to close our time with an excerpt of a prayer from Sarah Young’s prayer devotional, Jesus Listens, from February 12th:

Glorious God, 

The Bible tells me You created me in Your own image. Moreover, You made me a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned me with Glory. So please help me not to doubt my significance. You formed me with an amazing brain that can communicate with You, think rationally, create things, make decisions, and much more. You gave people dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and every living thing that moves on the earth. Among all that You have created, only human beings are made in Your image. This is a wonderful privilege and responsibility—making every moment of my life meaningful. 

Please teach me to enjoy You more and more. I’m grateful that You created me with boundless capacity for delighting in You. I know that the Joy I find in You here and now is just a foretaste of the vast eternal pleasures awaiting me in heaven! 

In Your awesome Name, Jesus, 

Amen

Narrator: To learn more about Bryan Crum, please visit www.bryancrum.com and be sure to check out his new book, Neighbor, Love Yourself, available at your favorite retailer.  

If you would like to hear more stories about relying on a God who will never fail us, check out our interview with Linda Davis and Lang Scott. 

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Next week:  Erin Loechner

Next time on the Jesus Calling Podcast, we’ll hear from founder of the Opt-Out Family movement, Erin Loechner. Erin challenges us to consider our relationship with technology and the role it plays in the daily lives of our family, and how we can be more intentional about spending time together. 

Erin Loechner: I want to kind of push back on the idea that technology is the future without asking ourselves, Is technology the future that we want? Because it’s very important to ask ourselves that question. It really, truly is.