Finding Faith After a Tragedy: Cameron Cole

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Finding Faith After a Tragedy

Guest:Cameron Cole

From the series:Heavenward (Day 1 of 2)

Air date:December 26, 2024

Dave:Alright, Ann, let me read you something.

Ann:I like it when you do this.

Dave:It’s short, but it’s good stuff. Here it is. God very literally used all of you to answer my prayers about my marriage. This was beautiful and humbling, and I praise the Lord for all of your faithfulness. Thank you. Sincerely, thank you.

Ann:Is that from a listener?

Dave:Yeah, and it’s simple, but it’s amazing. It blows my mind that God can use the conversations we have here in this studio. It’s just amazing and it helps meet people right where they are with practical biblical help.

Ann:And it just never gets old, does it?

Dave:Nope.

Ann:And if reaching more families with the hope of the gospel is something that excites you too—

Dave:I hope it does.

Ann:—here’s what we would love. We would love it if you would pray about and become a part of what’s happening here at FamilyLife Today. So we’re asking you, will you partner financially with us? Will you help reach more families with conversations that offer encouragement? Because these relationships matter. Maybe you’re in a position where your kids are gone or you’re empty nesters, it’d be amazing if you could bless another generation of younger people that aren’t in a place that they could give financially.

Dave:That would be awesome. And if you want to do that, you can do that right now. Right now today, just go to FamilyLifeToday.com. Or you can give us a call at 1-800-358-6329. Again, the number is 800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY.

Ann:And we want to sincerely thank you.

Cameron:That’s where the Lord wants us in good times and bad times. Totally dependent day by day in the moment, depending on his grace, depending on the movement of the spirit, the wisdom of the word.

Ann:And he is with you.

Cameron:He is.

Ann:He’s with you.

Cameron:He’s with you.

Ann:Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.

Dave:And I’m Dave Wilson. And you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

So I think we might have the tallest guest we’ve ever had on FamilyLife Today.

Ann:I don’t know. He and JP Pokluda are kind of similar.

Dave:Yeah, that’s true. Cameron Cole is with us. Cameron, how tall are you?

Cameron:I’m six-foot-five.

Dave:I wonder what JP is. Somebody look up what JP is.

Ann:I think he six-five or six-six.

Dave:Yeah. I mean you look like a NFL football player. And we found out at lunch you weren’t allowed to play football.

Cameron:I did not.

Ann: But you were a swimmer.

Cameron:I was a swimmer. That is true.

Dave:But what is also funny, did you just tell me you literally go to sleep at night listening to Alabama football podcasts?

Cameron:I do every night.

Dave:No, this isn’t true.

Cameron:It’s true.

Dave:What’s your wife think of that?

Cameron:Oh, my wife is usually—

Dave:—not too romantic.

Cameron:—usually up doing mom things when I go to sleep.

Dave:So you really, I mean, you’re from Birmingham, Alabama, so it’s like the center of the universe for college football.

Cameron:We didn’t invent college football, but we did invent the national title.

Ann:You said that before,

Cameron:I mean between Alabama and Auburn from 2009 through 2021, I think it all but two seasons. There was a team from the state of Alabama—

Ann:Do you see how proud he is?

Cameron:—in the national title game.

Dave:Well, the only thing that matters right now is the national championship is from Michigan.

Cameron:This is true.

Ann:That’s right.

Cameron:That’s true.

Dave:And we’re from Michigan.

Cameron:Hats off to the wolves. Great, great, great team, great program.

Dave:I don’t think it’s going to happen again, but it happened one time in the last year. But anyway, tell our listeners a little bit about what you do because you have multiple hats that you wear, including being an author.

Cameron:That’s right. Yeah. I’m tri vocational. Maybe, yeah. So first off, I have a wife and one wife.

Ann:That’s good.

Dave:You’re not tri—

Ann:That’s important.

Cameron:I have a wonderful wife. She’s dear.

Dave:How many years?

Cameron:Seventeen years.

Dave:Wow.

Cameron:And then we have four children; one who’s with the Lord, that’s Cam. And then a seven-year-old, a nine-year-old, and an eleven-year-old. And as I love to gloat, we have really cute kids who have spectacular hair.

Dave:You do have good hair.

Cameron:My kids, my kids have got amazing hair.

Ann:They’re cute too.

Cameron:They’re really cute. They’re really sweet. They, because they have a great mom. They have a great mom.

Dave:Hair is way overrated. I’m just telling you. And what do you do? What’s your vocation?

Cameron:Yeah, so primarily I work at a church. I’ve done youth and family ministry for 20 years. And then the other part of my job is that I am the chairman of a ministry called Rooted. We promote gospel centered youth and family ministry. So we provide content, training, conferences, curriculum. And then finally I write, I like to write.

Ann:This book is number how many?

Cameron:This is book number four. When your parents spend a fortune for you to major in Latin and English, you’ve got to find some way to justify that expensive education.

Dave:And part of what we’re going to talk about today, your book Heavenward: How Eternity Can Change Your Life on Earth. I’m guessing I know a little bit of why heaven is really important to you and it’s important to everybody, but especially you. Walk us through sort of the journey behind this idea.

Cameron:Yeah, thanks for asking. So as I mentioned, I have a child who’s with the Lord. And so on November 10, 2013, my son was playing with his Legos, and he lost his Lego axe and he said—

Dave:He lost his what?

Cameron:Lego axe.

Dave:What’s that?

Cameron:Like the axe. It was like a fireman set.

Ann:An axe that they put in their hand.

Cameron:Like tear down the door as a fireman. Anyhow, and so this was an apocalyptic moment that he had lost his Lego axe and he said, “Can we ask Jesus to help me find my Lego axe?”

Dave:He did? At three years old?

Cameron:I’m like, “We sure can.” So I prayed “Lord,”—

Ann:And he was the oldest.

Cameron:He is the oldest. That’s right. I said, “Lord, nothing is lost in your eyes, so please help us find the Lego axe.” And internally I’m like, “No, Lord, really help us find this. My child’s confidence in you rests on this Lego axe.” Anyhow, just joking. But anyhow, so we find the Lego axe and he just, out of nowhere goes, “Can we go see Jesus today?” It’s like, “Well, we can’t go see Jesus. He’s here through the Holy Spirit, but we can’t actually go see Him.” He goes, “Well, let’s get in the car and go see Jesus.”

Dave:Really?

Cameron:Yeah, very concrete.

Ann:Were you interested in that question? Like, “That’s an interesting thing to ask.”

Cameron:Oh, at the moment, honestly, in the moment it was just another day being a parent, just a three-year-old, being curious. And he was pretty precocious and very inquisitive. And so I said, “You’ll see Jesus when you go to heaven, but until then He’s with us. We just can’t see Him. We just live by faith that He’s here through the Spirit.” And he said, “Well, will I see Adam and Eve in heaven?” And for whatever reason he—

Ann:Good question.

Camron:Good question, yeah, totally man, totally. I was like, “Yeah, seems like God forgives their sins in Genesis 3, and so yes, you will see Adam and Eve in heaven.” He goes, “Well, I’m not going to eat from the tree. I’m not going to eat the apple.” And we’re like, “Buddy, that ship sailed a long time ago.” My wife’s like—

Ann:But you’ve already been discipling this boy.

Cameron:Right, yeah.

Ann:As a three-year-old, he knows these things.

Cameron:He knows it. And we’re like, “Well, we all eat from the tree every day all the time.” And my wife said, “That’s why Jesus came.” And he goes, “Jesus died on cross. Jesus died my sins.” And we’re like, “Amen.“ And that was really the last conversation I had with him.

That night I was on a youth ministry retreat and I got a call from my wife the next morning and it was obviously like a horrific phone call, but she had just found him dead in his bed, which for children over the age of one is exceedingly rare. Children who die between the ages of one and eighteen, one in a hundred thousand will die in their sleep. On a given night when a child over the age of one goes to sleep, there’s like a one in six hundred twenty-five million chance that they will die in their sleep. And he was the one. And so it’s interesting you ask in that moment, did I recognize that we were having this transcendent conversation? This the conversation of my whole life and I can remember getting in the car to drive to the hospital and—

Ann:Where were you when you got the call?

Cameron:I was about 45 minutes away on a youth retreat.

Ann:Did your wife call just crying?

Cameron:Yes.

Dave:That was in the morning?

Cameron:That was in the morning at 7:36.

Dave:Like she went in to wake him up?

Cameron:He was just, I think she knew the moment she saw him.

Ann:Oh my goodness.

Cameron:Awful, awful, awful for my poor wife to have to encounter that by herself.

Ann:What did you feel?

Cameron:I mean, the first thing I felt was just complete horror, complete horror and just surreal.

Dave:I mean, she’s not calling and saying something’s wrong. She’s calling and saying that he’s gone.

Cameron:He is dead. Yeah. There was no question. There was no equivocation. It was not it’s touch and go. He is dead.

And so I had had this previous fear that of losing my faith. I’ve had a really, really charmed life. I grew up, my parents were really nice Christian people who told me they love me every day and supported everything. My parents had plenty of money. I always got to do really cool things and travel internationally and school came really easy, and friends were easy, and sports were easy.

And I really, as a youth pastor had this fear. Of course I believe in Jesus. If you have my life and you don’t believe in the goodness of God, then you’re crazy. But what if something really bad happens? And so I identified that I thought that the one thing that could cause me to lose my faith is if my child died.

Ann:You actually had that thought.

Cameron:I did. And honestly, I had somewhat of an obsessive fear about it. I would have wake up in the middle of the night with a fear that he had died and I’m losing my faith.

Dave:Had you ever shared that with anybody or your wife?

Cameron:I really had not shared it with anybody.

Ann:What was their cause of death? What was the reason?

Cameron:So the cause of death is SUDC, Sudden Unexplained Death in Childhood, which is a diagnosis of we don’t know.

Ann:They don’t know.

Cameron:Yeah, we did all the proper things that you would do in terms of autopsy and a couple of genetic tests and things like that. And yeah, they just don’t know.

Ann:So your nightmare has—

Cameron:My nightmare has occurred, and then this is when I’d had these kinds of fearful premonitions that this would be the point of departure between me and the Lord. And there was just this Holy Spirit moment where I said, “Lauren, this is Jesus rose from the dead and that means that God is good and this does not change that fact.” And what I started to see over the course of the next month, but really over the next year, is that while I had this fear, God had in fact been preparing me for this moment. And He had been preparing me through the truth of His Word. It was biblical doctrine, especially the hard stuff that was holding me together.

And so while it was horrific pain and still you never outrun it. Now I will say to people who’ve lost children, your life’s not over. I’m a happy person and I’m just as happy today as I was before. And in fact, I really like the person that I today more than the person before.

Dave:Yeah, you carry a joy.

Cameron:Yeah, I think, and part of it too is the worst thing has happened, and you see the faithfulness of God and that makes you less afraid.

Ann:What about Lauren? How was it for her?

Cameron:People grieve differently, especially a mom and a dad. But yeah, I mean just horrible. But she’s a very faithful woman and the Lord sustained both of us spiritually.

Ann:Were any of your other kids born yet?

Cameron:So our baby girl, Mary Matthews love of my life was 361 days. So he died four days before her first birthday. And so then we three months later got accidentally pregnant and our son Hutch was born on the one-year anniversary of our son’s funeral. So Cam died on November 11, 2013. His funeral was November 13, 2013. And Hutch was born, no scheduled c-section, rushed to the hospital, all natural 52 minutes from water breaking to delivery in the hospital, 17 minutes from entering the hospital delivery. Yes. So we got there in time, but he was born on November 13, 2014. So it was very much like a picture of death and resurrection. So the Lord’s really, has been really kind to us.

Dave:Now, when you go back to finding out about Cam your son and the challenge to your faith, was there a lament? Was there a valley? Was there anger? Was there complaining, questioning God? Did you walk through that kind of thing?

Cameron:Yeah, I think that certainly, I mean there was lament. There’s unbelievable sadness. You can still trust the Lord and be miserably sad. And that was true. I think one thing that was very helpful for me is like I said, difficult doctrine. If you truly accept what the Bible has to say about sin and the penalty for sin, you know that you’re completely not entitled to anything from God. The second that we sin, we should die. We’ve cut ourself off from the life source, so that we physically survive any of our sins is a product of God’s mercy. And that was just incredibly helpful to protect me from being bitter. Or because that bitterness would be an expression of like, “God, you owe me better.”

And so just the good old fashioned theological doctrine of the cross and the atonement and the full price of what Jesus paid was massively helpful in protecting me from that.

Ann:It sounds like that was your foundation.

Cameron:Yeah, I’ve been really blessed.

Ann:That’s your rock; it’s the rock of the gospel of Jesus. His death and resurrection for us was your hope.

Cameron:That was a hundred percent my hope because especially if you think in terms of the theology of the cross, which is this notion that if you are unified with Christ, you’re then unified with him in death and resurrection, and that is the cycle of life. It is, we suffer, and the Lord heals us and restores us. And so that suffering, cross, cross experience, cross seasons, they’re followed by resurrection. And so you can always, when you look at the cross, you can’t look at the resurrection without seeing the cross and you can’t look at the cross without seeing Easter Sunday beyond it. So that really held me together.

Ann:Have you talked to people that have lost kids? I’m sure—didn’t you write a book about this?

Cameron:So my first book on this topic was called Therefore I Have Hope: 12 Truths That Comfort, Sustain, and Redeem in Tragedy. And the basis of that book was in the month after he died, I kept on saying to my wife, “I have no idea how a person could survive something like this if they did not trust in the sovereignty of God or if they did not know about the bodily resurrection of Jesus, if they did not know about the presence of God, the empathy of God, the possibility to have joy in the midst of suffering, if they didn’t have the hope of eternity.” And I kept on saying these kinds of things: “I don’t know how anyone could survive.”

And after about a month I was like, “I need to write all these things down because these are the truths that are instrumental in me surviving and me having hope day to day.” Because I mean honestly, when you’ve lost a child, it’s like in the morning you’re just trying to make it to lunchtime; and at lunchtime you’re just trying to make it to dinnertime; and at dinnertime you’re just trying to make it to bedtime. At bedtime you’re just praying you can sleep.

Ann:Have you talked to anybody that’s experienced that, and they went the opposite way. They lived out your fear.

Cameron:Yeah.

Ann:They turned away.

Cameron:There are plenty of people who have turned away from the Lord. I think people either cling or they run, and that is typically how it tends to go.

Ann:What would you say to the person that is running?

Cameron:Oh man, your only hope is in Christ. If you’re running away from Christ, then you’re hoping that you can redeem yourself or that the world can redeem you. The world cannot redeem you. The world cannot heal you. Healing is only found in Jesus.

And I would also say the true God, the actual God who made the world that is represented in the Bible, that God knows what it’s like. I mean no disrespect to people of other faiths, but I just don’t know how if you were following a god who did not suffer, and particularly in my shoes, if you were following a god who did not know what it’s like to have your child die, how you could trust that god? Because there is very few things that are more painful than losing a child. And to know that your God can identify with that kind of pain, that’s someone then that you can trust. That’s someone you can have confidence in, that you can walk with.

Because honestly, I think different people have different sufferings and different experiences of sufferings. And people who’ve gone through cancer, they really connect with people who’ve gone through cancer, or people who are victims of abuse really because you have that common story and that common experience. And that’s our God. He has that common experience of suffering so deeply, but particularly for me, having lost a child.

Dave:Now, how long was it, if you remember, between Cam’s death and going from just trying to get to lunch, just trying to get to dinner, to maybe a sense of, I don’t know, hope, joy? I know Ann lost her sister who was 44 of lung cancer and I could remember the day I heard Anne laugh like a belly laugh, and it was over a year. It was like, “Oh, there’s a spark coming back.” It wasn’t like she was depressed, but man, it was a grieving journey that took a long time. Was yours a long time? Do you remember?

Cameron:Yeah, for me, and I think it was a little bit longer for, maybe a lot bit longer for my wife, but for me it was about two years of just pretty perpetual misery most days.

Dave:Really.

Cameron:I still had hope. Here’s the thing though; you can be emotionally very, very sad, but still have hope. And I always said I can handle pain. I cannot handle despair. I cannot handle life without hope. And that’s how Dante in the Inferno defines hell is the place where all hope goes to die. There is no hope there. I wrote, and therefore I have hope at the beginning. Hope is what convinces you that life is worth living, that it’s worth getting out of bed in the morning. It’s that little thing that tells you not to jump when you’re standing on the ledge, either physically or metaphorically.

And yeah, because hope there is this possibility of this can get better and if you have that you can take the next step. And the resurrection of Christ does give us that confidence that things can get better. It was really dismal on Good Friday. It was really dismal, and yet we are witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. If you’re a believer, you’re a witness to the resurrection in your own life. You’ve seen the resurrection, the way that Christ has raised you from the dead.

Ann:When you look back, I’m thinking about just that day before he died and the conversation. That probably ministered to your soul because the way you’re recalling it, that was important to you. His questions about Jesus; “Can we go see Jesus today? Can we get in the car and go?” Did God bring those, just that conversation back to you?

Cameron:I would say that the Lord brought that conversation back to me ten minutes after I learned that he died.

Ann:Whoa.

Cameron:One of my best friends who’s actually Cam’s godfather was on the camp out with me and I pulled him away from the boys and I told him what had happened. He got in the driver’s seat of my car and started to drive me to the Children’s Hospital. And honestly, that drive, it’s like honestly, I can’t even remember it very well. It’s just like there was this bright light in front of my eyes. It was so hazy. But I can remember about ten minutes later being like, wait a minute. That conversation, he was asking about heaven. He wanted to go see Jesus.

Dave:—yesterday.

Cameron:He demonstrated that he knew that Christ had died for his sins, that Christ was his Savior. And that right there was this incredible affirmation that this was God’s intent. This was God’s plan.

Ann:Were you mad about it though? Like, “Lord, the dude’s three years old.”

Cameron:I don’t want to sound like hyper spiritual here because the Lord had just really prepared us and He had given, I think He’d given me an extra measure of grace through that conversation. Because as time continued to go on, it’s like Cameron is winning. Cam is winning here. He is going—he had a really happy life. He had parents who loved him. He had just the sweetest mother anyone could ever have. And he loved his little sister. I mean, he lived life full throttle for a three-year-old.

He’s not going to have to deal with the rejections of middle school and final exams and people dying and funeral, all that kind of stuff. I mean, he has got a good situation at the feet of the Lord, and he’s parented by God the Father, which is substantially better than being parented by Cameron Cole.

I think one thing that has been really sanctifying in having a child who’s died like this is to know, this child is a gift. This child is a gift and it’s not a gift on my terms. This child belongs to the Lord. And some of that creates a sense of responsibility to be a good steward of the gift, to be faithful in discipling this child. But some of it too is I parent my other children with a much more perspective.

Ann:What do you mean by that?

Cameron:Yeah, I think that one of the best pieces of parenting advice ever got was enjoy your children. Enjoy your children. I mean, if a person enjoys you, don’t you just feel so loved if a person enjoys you. And so think about that as a parent, just to enjoy your kids. What that conveys to them in terms of their value and their dignity and how precious and adored they are in your eyes.

So yeah, I mean we don’t live on edge worrying about other children dying. Some of that is the blessing of science; that we did different genetic tests, and we found that whatever he died from was unique to him. It’s not congenital. The congenital things that could explain it were ruled out. And so part of that was science, but a part of it is just an acceptance that we just don’t have control. This child was perfectly healthy, had gone to all the checkups, and there’s nothing within our control that we could do to prevent this.

Dave:How have your other kids dealt with it?

Cameron:So we’ve had two of them were born after Cam and then Mary Matthews really doesn’t remember him because she was less than a year old; but I’ll tell you what, we talk about him every single day in our house. He comes up every day. He does, and he is talked about as like a member of the family. His birthday was September 17th, and every year we’ll go get donuts from his favorite place and we’ll go take them to the fire station where we used to for him. I know you had access as a chaplain of the Detroit Lions. So for him, access to the firemen was big. So I would go buy a dozen donuts as a way to get into the fire station. Because for him that was like meeting LeBron James. But anyhow, we buy donuts, we take them to the fire station. We have donuts at a park that’s named after him.

Ann:Sweet.

Cameron:We put a balloon for how old he would be.

Dave:You had a park named after him.

Cameron:There’s a section of the park that’s about 400 yards from our house named after him, Cam’s Corner.

Ann:He would’ve turned how old?

Cameron:He’d be 14, yeah, 14 this year. So yeah. But here’s something that is a real blessing in this and that is my kids are crystal clear on eternity. I think a big problem, and the research validates this, that a lot of young people just really live with this sense of invincibility, and they really don’t think about death. To the extent that in Kara Powell’s book Growing Young, they talk about in terms of Christianity and salvation in the gospel, kids don’t even—it doesn’t register with them that they need a Savior, you know knowing that they will die one day, and they will face the Lord in all of His holiness and all of His justice.

But that is not true in the Cole household because our kids, they have a brother who has died and who is with the Lord. So my children are blessed with a unique sense of heavenly mindedness as a product to that.

And I’ll say I, as a child, was blessed in this way in the sense that my mom had four miscarriages before she had me. My mom would talk about that, and I was very aware of it. I have siblings in heaven. And so I think it’s really refining for our kids to have not only a brother who’s with the Lord, but also a brother who has professed faith in Christ and also a brother whose life is bringing glory to the name of Jesus. And they see that. And I think it’s a really sanctifying thing for our children.

Dave:I mean, if you were, I’m sure you’ve done this a lot, able to talk to a parent who’s lost a child or maybe their child is in a hospital and it’s dire. What do you say to them? How do you help them wrestle with the heartbreak and the trial and the struggle?

Cameron:Yeah, so I’ll tell you one of the first things I say, and this is something that one of my pastors said to me when I was like 22 years old, and I was having a real crash and burn right out of graduate school teaching the inner city. And that is I think one of the hardest things when you’re sitting in that position, especially say you have a terminally ill child or you have a child who’s died and you’re just in the first days is you start to project forward and you start to think, what is my life going to look like in a week or a month or a year or 10 years or 20 years? What is my daughter’s rehearsal dinner going to look like? My daughter is one year old and I’m thinking about her rehearsal dinner and the absence of her brother. What would that be like? And so what was told to me; I had a pastor whose wife had a serious medical condition that would come and go. And she was very dependent for different short seasons on him. And she’d say, “What would happen if you died? I can’t imagine if you died. I could not survive,” because she was totally dependent upon him when her health would fail. And he said, “Well, you can’t imagine because you’re not in that situation and God doesn’t give us grace for situations that we’re not going to be in.”

I sit here and I think about what would it be like? I can’t imagine what it would be like to parent a child with severe special needs. You see people who labor, and they pour their heart out day and night for a child who’s totally dependent upon them, and that’s how it’s going to be for the child’s whole life. I personally, I can’t imagine that, and that’s because God hasn’t called me to that. The people who are in that place like God will give you the grace for what you’re called into. And so the thing I say is, “Hey, yeah, you see that your child may be moving towards death, and you can’t imagine what it’s going to be like and that’s because it hasn’t happened.”

But when it happens, he will give you the bread that you need. He’ll give you the provisional grace. That’s a term I use, and therefore I have hope. He’ll give you the provisional grace that you need to survive, and he will give you the faith. We need to ask him, and we need to beg him for the grace and the faith, but he’ll give you that to trust him through that. And so yeah, that advice.

And then I’ve already mentioned this, but this is the day after Cam’s funeral. I can remember when I was 23 being at a church and there was a couple; they were about eight years older than I, and they had a child die. And it was just this, it was a small church. It was a church plant, and it was just so tragic. I can remember watching them. I didn’t really know them personally, but I just watched them. Well, I remember them the day my son died. I remembered them.

So I was like, those people looked really, really sad. But somehow those people were moving forward. Well, I’m walking down the road and there she was.

Ann:Come on.

Cameron:There she was. And you want to know what her name was, is?

Ann:What?

Cameron:Angel. Her name is Angel. And she said, what she said to me, she says, “Cameron, what you’re going to have to do is ask God for the grace to make it to lunchtime, and then at lunchtime you’re going to have to ask Him for the grace to make it to dinner. At dinner, you’re going to have to ask Him for the grace to make it to bedtime. And at bedtime you’re going to have to pray for the grace to sleep at night.” She’s like, “That’s going to be the rhythm of your life.” And that’s where the Lord wants us in good times and bad times; totally dependent day by day in the moment, depending on His grace, depending on the movement of the Spirit, the wisdom of the Word.

Ann:And He is with you.

Cameron:He is.

Ann:He is with you.

Cameron:He is with you.

Dave:I lost my little brother when I was seven. He was five. And everything you’re saying, Cameron, I’m like, I can remember watching my mom—single mom; dad was gone—

Cameron:Oh, wow.

Dave:—sort of make it to breakfast, sort of make it to lunch. I mean sort of. It was like, is she going to, and I think maybe because of my age, I was more of an observer. I think I felt the grief later. But I think what you’re saying is so true.

And I would just add this for our listeners. If you’d like somebody to pray for you, we can pray for you. And we have a simple way to do that. You go to FamilyLife.com/Prayforme and someone on our team will pray. And I know you know somebody praying for you in the middle of a valley—

Ann:Yes.

Dave:—somebody you can talk to and say, “This is where I am. I’m not sure I can make it to lunch today.” And somebody will pray for you, could just get you to lunch.

Cameron:That’s true.

Dave:And you may have to call again at three o’clock in the afternoon but go ahead and do it. Click that link and we’ll pray for you.

Ann:This is FamilyLife Today, and we’re Ann and Dave Wilson. We’ve been talking to Cameron Cole about his book, Heavenward: How Eternity Can Change Your Life on Earth. And you can get a copy of his book at FamilyLifeToday.com or by calling us at 800-358-6329. That’s 800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY.

Dave:And let me just stop and say, man, I hope you had a great Christmas yesterday.

Ann:Me too.

Dave:We certainly did. And we spent way more money than we should have.

Ann:And we spent time with our family, and that’s what matters.

Dave:I know that’s what you remember. I remember the money part. And speaking of money, this is a critical time for us as FamilyLife. It is year-end. Donations are really important for us. I know if you’re like us, we give a year-end gift to ministries we believe in. And I hope you believe in FamilyLife and FamilyLife Today. I hope it’s a blessing for you and you share it with others.

And so we’d love to invite you to become a financial partner with us in this year-end time. I mean, it would mean the world to us. And here’s the amazing thing. If you give a gift to FamilyLife of any amount, it will be doubled. We have generous donors who have provided a match program up to $3 million. So your gift is going to be doubled. And if you’d like to jump in and become a partner with us, you can simply go to FamilyLifeToday.com and make a gift right there. Or if you want, you can give us a call at 800-358-6329. That’s 800-F as in Family, L as in Life, and then the word TODAY.

Ann:And also when you give to help families, we want to send you two books as our thanks. The first one is A Devotional by Katie Davis Majors called Our Faithful God Devotional: 52 Weeks of Leaning on His Unchanging Character. And the second one is a children’s book by Ruth Chou Simons. It’s called Home is Right Where You Are, and it is beautifully illustrated. It’s a kid’s book based on Psalm 23. And both of these books are our thanks to you when you give a donation of any amount this month.

Again, you can give online at FamilyLifeToday.com or you can give us a call at 800-358-6329. Or you can mail us your donation at FamilyLife, 100 Lake Hart Drive, Orlando, Florida 32832. And just make sure you let us know that you’d like your copies of Our Faithful God Devotional and Home is Right Where You Are.

Dave:Now, coming up tomorrow, we’ve got Cameron Cole back with us, so you’ll hear a lot more. That’s coming up tomorrow. We’ll see you back next time for another edition of FamilyLife Today.

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