Bob: The thing about the storms of life is that there is rarely any radar to detect them on the horizon. Here is Nancy Guthrie.

Nancy: Four or five years ago, I remember being on a trip with one of my college best friends, and we were singing along with a song that Crystal Lewis recorded, singing, "God's been good to me, always, always been good."[ Read Full Transcript ]

And she looked at me, and she said, "I can see why you could sing that, because your life has been really easy." And I remember – I didn't say it to her at the time, but I thought – "so far."

Bob: This is FamilyLife Today for Monday, December 18th. Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine. For Nancy and David Guthrie, there were storms ahead that would test the foundation of their marriage and their faith. Stay with us.

And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us on the program. I have a distinct memory, Dennis, of a night when Mary Ann and I – I guess we'd been married for four or five years at this point – we were out one evening, and we were pushing our daughter, Amy, in the stroller around the neighborhood. It was a beautiful spring night. The sun was warm, and it was starting to set, and it was just a beautiful night. I was looking back on the first four or five years of our marriage, and I was thinking, "You know, things have gone really good for us in those four or five years."

All of a sudden, the thought hit me – nobody goes through life without visiting the valley at some point.

Dennis: And it's interesting that a lot of those valleys occur to really teach about Himself. The Book of Job is an interesting book. If you go all the way out to the end, the real exclamation point occurs in Job 42 where Job, and I'm paraphrasing him now, you know, I've read about you, I've been told about you but now, after I have suffered, after I have been through a series of deep valleys for him, now my eye sees you, my ear hears you, and I know you, God.

And I think what more of life is all about than we realize, Bob, is it's about the Lord God of the Universe trying to get our attention. And over the next couple of days here on FamilyLife Today, I just want you, as a listener, to know we're going to take you into a story that is going to give you the privilege of entering into another couple's valley, and we have a pair of people with us here on FamilyLife Today, Nancy and David Guthrie, who are going to give us that privilege to peer into their lives. Nancy, David, thanks for coming and being on FamilyLife Today.

Nancy: Thanks for giving us this opportunity.

David: It's great to be with you.

Dennis: You know, Nancy and I go back, oh, about a decade, where I started writing books, and I ran into her, and she's a bright light. No matter what room she walks into, she's always an encouragement, full of hope. She was a publicist at that time – in fact, still is a publicist – in addition to being a wife and a mom, and her husband, David, joins us on FamilyLife Today.

David, you're a vice president for Print Music at Word in Nashville, and you actually produced some of the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir material?

David: We take all of the recordings that they put out and put it into printed form so that churches anywhere can attempt, at least, to sound like the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir.

Bob: There aren't many that get there, though, are there?

Dennis: No, that's for sure. Well, that group lights my fire, I tell you.

David: They're wonderful.

Dennis: First of all, I have to ask you, Nancy, how did you and David meet?

Nancy: Well, I got a job right out of college at Word Publishing, and I'd been there about a year and a half when this guy from Portland, Oregon, came to work in the music publishing, and his office was a couple of doors away, and another person there at Word told him, "You need to get to know that Nancy Jenks, she sings."

And he introduced us, and a year later we got married.

Dennis: So he just swept you off your feet?

Nancy: Well, at first, I thought he seemed a little boring, to be real honest with you, but then ...

David: I wore a lot of brown clothes, she says.

Nancy: Yeah.

David: I don't remember that.

Nancy: He moved from Oregon, you know, he had a beard, and he didn't just seem very happy but then I saw him get in his car one night, and he got in this little red Mazda RX-7. I thought, "He's more interesting than I thought."

Bob: Aw, see, I knew it was cars all the time.

David: It's all about the car.

Bob: That's why I never had any success in high school.

Dennis: You can wear brown as long as you're driving.

Bob: I drove a brown Nova. How bad can that be, see?

Dennis: I have to ask you, David, because I know the rest of the story here. When you stood before the pastor, and you said to Nancy, "I pledge to you my faithfulness in sickness and in health, in the good times and in the bad times." Did you have any idea what you were about to enter into?

David: Well, certainly – no, is the answer, of course, and I think that would be true of most of us when we're at that moment, because we're full of hope, and we're excited about this new life we're launching into together, as it should be.

I think, unlike Bob, I'm more of a pessimist, by nature, and so the thought of something bad happening to us at some point in our lives, sure, that crossed my mind.

Dennis: Really?

David: Oh, sure, yeah. Just because, again, I was almost 30 years old at the point that Nancy and I got married and, in fact, just about a year before we were married, I was unemployed, had no relationship that was meaningful in my life, I didn't know what I was going to do with the rest of my life and was feeling a little bit at the end of my rope. I was feeling a little disillusioned, actually, at that time.

And over the next 12 months, God took me from Portland, Oregon, to Waco, Texas, and I started a job that I absolutely loved, and then I met Nancy. So I remember, at that point in my life, feeling suddenly very hopeful and very excited about the future and our marriage and our life together. But it was not unusual for me to think that there were likely to be some difficulties for us ahead as there are with most couples.

Never, in my wildest dreams, would I predict what Nancy and I have walked through the last three or four years together, though.

Dennis: Nancy, what about you? Did you have a sense that similar, maybe not pessimism, but realistic approach that life was going to be full of moments that are both sweet and bitter?

Nancy: Well, I don't think I could speak for that day when I got married, that I remember very distinctly, probably four or five years ago, I remember being on a trip with one of my college best friends, and we were singing along with a song that Crystal Lewis recorded, singing, "God's been good to me, always, always been good."

And she looked at me, and she said, "I can see why you could sing that, because your life has been really easy." And I remember at the time feeling a little offended thinking, "Well, it hasn't been that easy," but did look at my life, and I thought, "I have had it pretty easy. I've not gone through any real significant, deep hurt.

But I also remember that day – I didn't say it to her at the time, but I thought about that a lot for weeks afterwards, and I thought – "so far."

Dennis: Did you feel like maybe there was a warning, a little bit of a warning?

Nancy: Not a warning, but I knew most people do not go through life without experiencing some significant difficulty at some point in their life, and when you look at Scripture you see it. You can't find someone in the Scripture who went through their whole life without going through extreme difficulty – suffering of some point or loss.

And as I looked at the world around me, most people I know, I didn't see anybody who went through their whole life without experiencing extreme difficulty at some point, and I certainly didn't think that I would be any different.

David: I graduated from Multnomah Bible College in Portland, Oregon, and I remember distinctly when I was a senior at Multnomah hearing another student speak in chapel one day, and we knew that he was bound for the mission field, and I remember him saying something to the effect that after studying Scripture, he was convinced that God could not use any of us in a powerful way for His glory until we had first suffered significantly.

And I was really bothered by that for a couple of reasons – I think I recognized in it a ring of truth. We had just – all of us had been studying the Bible and studying the great characters of the Bible, and over and over and over you see these people go through not just difficulties or challenges, but great suffering.

So I recognized that certainly there was something to what he was saying, but I think I was troubled mostly just by the fact that I wasn't interested in that, and that bothered me, and I never would have admitted it, but I think, looking back, I realized that I've spent a great portion of my life trying very hard to avoid anything difficult or painful.

Bob: You know, I remember hearing the same theme from a speaker who said God does not greatly use the man that He does not first greatly wound, you know, take him through a period of suffering. My immediate thought was, "Well, then, I don't want to be greatly used. I'll just be marginally used. You know, that will be fine with me."

Dennis: Use somebody else.

Bob: Yeah, you know, I hope He greatly uses lots of people, I hope I'm just kind of marginally used by the Lord, because I don't want to have to walk through that. Then I got to Philippians, chapter 3, where the Apostle Paul says "I want to know Him and the fellowship of His sufferings."

And I thought, "To know God, if you really want to know Him, then you get to enter into this unique fellowship of His sufferings, and there is a knowing Him there that you can't get to any other way, is there?

David: That's right.

Nancy: Isaiah described Jesus as a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, and we say we want to know God, but if we really do want to know Him, then it's uniquely in our suffering and our sorrow and our grief that we can know Him in a way that we can't without that.

Dennis: And you all truly came to one of those moments in 1998 with the birth of your first daughter. At the point where you were about to give birth, Nancy, you were full of hope.

Nancy: Definitely.

Dennis: Yeah.

Nancy: Yeah, you know, our son, Matt, was eight, so it had been a while, and I was anxiously anticipating having a daughter who looked like me and talked with her hands like me and would be my friend as I grew old. And for years ...

Dennis: Did you know you were going to have a daughter?

Nancy: We did, we did, and, you know, even when our son, Matt, was born, our name for him if he was going to be a girl was Hope. So we were anxiously awaiting a daughter and planned to name her Hope.

Dennis: How long after Hope's birth was it until you found out that there was something tragically wrong?

Nancy: Immediately when she was born, the doctor who delivered her told us he just saw a few small little problems that we'd want to get her looked over, and I kind of didn't hear that in the midst of afterbirth, but David took it to heart.

David: I heard that, and I also heard him say, "Now, don't worry, it's not Down's or anything."

Nancy: And he saw the look in their eyes as the nurse and the doctor looked at each other.

Bob: There was something in her immediate appearance that gave doctors and nurses a sign. What was it?

Nancy: Well, that night, the pediatrician, after he had examined her closely, came to our room, and he had made a list, basically, he said, "I don't see anything large, I just see lots of little problems," and what he saw primarily – she was born with club feet. She was very lethargic, she didn't move much, she didn't cry much, she had a very large soft spot, and a couple of other small, little things.

Dennis: But, other than that, her appearance, her face ...

Nancy: She looked very normal to me, although I would have to admit to you, which I haven't wanted to admit very much, when I looked deep into her eyes that night, when we were finally just me and her in the room, deep down inside I thought, "Something's wrong."

And he went through a long list of a lot of little things that were wrong, and he told us that most often, when there are a lot of little things, they add up to a big thing. And so they fed those into a computer, and it spit out for them a list of possibilities of what Hope's problem might be and included on that list was a syndrome called Zellweger syndrome. But he quickly discounted that because he said that was most often evidenced by severe liver and heart problems, which they did not see in her.

Bob: How many things were on the list at that point, as he was talking about Zellweger as one of the options. Were there 20 or were there five?

David: Honestly, I don't remember, Bob. I had had an encounter with him earlier in the day where he had just begun to tell me that there were several things that they were looking at, and my recollections of that day are – I was running around doing the new father thing – escorting people back to the room, going to the nursery window to look in, and, boy, but I remember a growing knot in my stomach as the day went by because, as other babies in this busy hospital were brought in, cleaned up, moved over to a different area of the nursery, taken back to their mother's rooms, Hope was kind of kept on one little bed in there under the heating lamp, and they didn't seem to be in any hurry to run her through the process. And it was quite a few hours before the doctor could come, and I just remember that being a troubling time. All of my antennas were out, and the little warning alarms were starting to go off.

I was trying to entertain people and be cheerful and happy and, "Oh, come, look at Hope."

Bob: This is a day of celebration. A baby has been born to the Guthries and friends are coming to visit, and, at the same time, there is, in your soul, a growing sense that not all is right. But you're still trying to keep up the everything's – we're so happy, we're so excited.

David: That's right.

Bob: Was there anybody you could pull aside and say, you know, it may not be ...

David: No, I don't think so.

Nancy: You know, at that point, we didn't really discuss that with each other.

Dennis: That was what I was going to ask. When did you let on with each other that you both had some fear; that you both had some uneasiness?

Nancy: You know, people were there so much – you know how that is, you know, when you have a baby. I don't remember having a moment alone. I don't remember us discussing our greatest fears at that point.

David: I do remember not – intentionally not discussing every suspicion and thought that was going through my mind with Nancy. I just couldn't do that. I was mostly holding that in during that time because we didn't have much information yet from the doctors, and it came little by little throughout the course of that very long first day.

She was born around noon, and it wasn't until fairly late in the evening that the doctor came in and shared with us this list of anomalies that he'd identified, and let us know that tomorrow morning we'll begin doing a few more things and try to get it all figured out.

Nancy: And he said, "We're bringing in an orthopedic/pediatric specialist to look at her legs, the club feet, and I've also asked a geneticist from Vanderbilt to come over and give her a real careful going over.

Bob: Did all of that mean that your first night as a new mom and a new dad was a restless night for you?

David: For me, everything was just on hold. We just had to wait. It was just a time to wait. I prayed, but we looked to the next morning and realized that more tests would be done, and doctors would come in, and we would continue to see what they had to say.

Nancy: The significant moment came for us that second day when, at about 9:00 at night, a doctor named Marshall Summar, who was the geneticist from Vanderbilt, came into our room. My parents and our son, Matt, was there, and he asked them to leave, and he and the pediatric doctor from the neonatal ICU there at Baptist Hospital, came in and sat down to talk with us.

Bob: But when the doctor says, "I'd like to ask your parents and Matt to leave," that's when the knot in your stomach tightens.

David: Yes. Not immediately, I remember them coming in, and there were a few doctors we hadn't met before, so we were just making introductions and meeting. When the door closed, the air kind of went out of the room, and these doctors had very long faces and didn't want to make eye contact with us a lot, and I think I knew, and I'm sure Nancy probably did, too, at that moment, this is not going to be good news they are about to tell us.

Nancy: Actually, their first question confused us and kind of humored us. They looked at each of us, and they said, "Where were you born?" They were trying to figure out if we were related.

Dennis: Really?

Nancy: Yeah. Because, so often, genetic problems come from cousins or second cousins ...

Bob: ... from family represents.

Nancy: ... who are married to each other. We assured them we weren't related.

Dennis: You know, two times in my life I've been through a situation where I didn't know what a diagnosis was, or I didn't know what I was dealing with. That, in many regards, is a much more difficult situation to deal with by faith than it is to have the bad news or to have the conclusion where you can begin to strategize and determine how you're going to live.

That parenthesis that sometimes God gives us, where He keeps us in the dark, He doesn't explain what, He doesn't explain the how. We are simply left with trust, faith, obedience. That's what He's up to in our lives. I believe he is ultimately looking for us to obey Him and trust Him regardless of what we know because, ultimately, even when you do find out what the problem is, we move to another question – why?

We want to know why is God bringing this into my life? And that also demands faith.

Bob: We talked earlier about how we come to know God in the midst of suffering and, Nancy, you mentioned Isaiah, referring to Jesus as a man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief. Isaiah also said He has borne ours sorrows and carried our grief. Not that we don't experience sorrow and grief, but that He will bear it for us and with us and bear us through it.

And, you know, as David and Nancy have shared their story today, they have also shared it in a book that Nancy has written called "Holding On to Hope, a Pathway Through Suffering to the Heart of God."

We have this book available in our FamilyLife Resource Center, and I want to encourage our listeners, particularly those listeners who might know someone who has been through or been in ...

Dennis: ... or going through a challenging set of circumstances right now.

Bob: This is a book that will provide hope and encouragement and comfort. It's not a book of easy answers, because there aren't easy answers in the midst of these challenges.

Dennis: No, but I'll tell you what's in this book. This book is very honest about suffering, and I really – Nancy, I really appreciate the job you did of letting the reader into the interior of your heart and David's heart and being honest about the hurt.

Bob: And, in fact, it's interesting, Ravi Zacharias, who endorsed your book on the back says, "Seldom will you read anything with such candor and insight probing one of life's toughest questions – how can grief be a friend along life's journey?"

We've got copies of your book in our FamilyLife Resource Center. Again, the title of the book is "Holding On to Hope," and I appreciate the fact that since the time that that book came out, Nancy, you've also put together a year-long devotional called a "One Year Book of Hope," where you look carefully at what the Scriptures have to say about suffering and God's redemptive purposes in taking us down difficult paths.

We've got both of these books in our FamilyLife Resource Center, and maybe someone you know needs a copy of both of these or maybe they would be profitable in your own spiritual journey. Go to our website, FamilyLife.com. In the middle of the home page, you'll see a red button that says "Go," and if you click that button it will take you to the page where you can get more information about the book, "Holding On to Hope" by Nancy Guthrie, and "The One Year Book of Hope" by Nancy as well.

Again, our website is FamilyLife.com. You can also order by calling 1-800-FLTODAY. That's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY, and someone on our team can let you know how you can get these resources sent out to you.

When you get in touch with us this week or next week, can we ask you a favor? I know that many of you make year-end contributions or donations to ministries like ours and to your local church and, by the way, we want you to know that we think your local church ought to be your first priority when it comes to financial giving.

But we are hoping that this year many of our listeners will be able to make a financial gift to FamilyLife at year-end as well. One of the reasons for that is because of a matching gift that was made available to us earlier this year by some friends of our ministry. They agreed that they would match each donation we receive during December on a dollar-for-dollar basis up to a total of $500,000, and they did that hoping it would inspire many of you to either go to our website to make a donation or to call 1-800-FLTODAY so that FamilyLife Today can continue to grow and move forward in 2007.

Now, we have already heard from a lot of our listeners. Many of you have called to make a donation, and I don't have the exact tally of where we are right now, but I know we still need to hear from more of you if we are going to take full advantage of this matching gift opportunity.

So can we ask you to consider either going online at FamilyLife.com or calling 1-800-FLTODAY to make a year-end contribution to the ministry of FamilyLife Today, and let me say ahead of time thanks for considering this prayerfully and thanks for whatever you are able to do in helping with our ongoing financial needs. We appreciate you.

Well, tomorrow we're going to continue our ongoing conversation with David and Nancy Guthrie, and we're going to hear tomorrow how you first received the diagnosis from your doctor about Hope's condition and how you received that news. I hope our listeners can be with us for that.

I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team. On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine. We'll see you next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.

FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.