Ep37—Biblical Comfort for Men Grieving Miscarriage, with Eric Schumacher
On this episode, pastor and author Eric Schumacher joins host Marty Duren in a coversation about the challenges men have grieving miscarriages. Transcript Marty Duren: Welcome to Launch-The GCC Podcast. I'm your host, Marty Duren, director of communications for the Great Commission Collective. We're a global network of churches partnering together to plant churches and strengthen leaders. My guest today on Launch is Eric Schumacher. He's a pastor and author. We're going to be talking about his book, Ours: Biblical Comfort for Men Grieving Miscarriage. This is a timely subject. It's always applicable, whether you're dealing with miscarriage in your own family, or whether you're a pastor and you're dealing with people who are struggling through the aftermath of having had a miscarriage. This is a timely and helpful book. Paul David Tripp says "This book is full of helpful insights and answers, but the best thing it gives you is Jesus." I hope both this book and this conversation are helpful to you. Marty Duren: Welcome back to Launch. As previously mentioned in the intro section, my guest is Eric Schumacher, and he has written a really, really helpful book. If you're a pastor, you possibly have been through this yourself. If not, you definitely have counseled someone who has been through, a couple who's been through miscarriage. The unique thing about Eric's book is its biblical comfort for men grieving miscarriage. This is just recently out, right? Eric Schumacher: Yeah. It releases July 1. Marty Duren: Oh, so it's recently not out. Eric Schumacher: We're recently not out. Marty Duren: We're recording just before it releases. Eric Schumacher: For a limited time only, it's not out. Marty Duren: That's right. So prayerfully by the time you get this, you can pre-order it on your favorite online website. So welcome to Launch, man. It's really great to have you here. Eric Schumacher: Yeah. Thanks, Marty, for having me. I've enjoyed knowing you over Twitter for quite some time. So it's good to put a face and a voice with the account. Marty Duren: Oh, okay. So putting a voice with it means you've never listened to my other podcast, right? Eric Schumacher: Well, whoa, whoa. Yeah. Let's talk about my book, shall we? Marty Duren: Okay. Truth comes out. We're not editing this part either, dude. Hey, for folks who don't know who Eric Schumacher is, take a couple minutes to...you're a pastor, but what else? Eric Schumacher: I'm a husband of Jenny for almost 24 years. So next month we'll celebrate 24 years. Marty Duren: Congrats on that. Eric Schumacher: We have five kids in our home, four teenagers right now. Oldest will be 20 next month. The youngest is 10; four boys and a girl. That keeps life very busy. And my wife, Jenny, is a... She's my better 9/10. She's tremendous. Marty Duren: That's awesome. I can believe that. I can believe that she's 9/10 of the better. Eric Schumacher: Yeah. Although, don't multiply me by nine and think that's all she is. I'm being very generous with myself. Marty Duren: So, you got all these kids. You got a 10-year age range with five kids. Are they at least involved and interested, that like all play soccer one game after another? Or is like one in dance, one in piano, one in soccer, one in archery, that kind of thing? Eric Schumacher: The oldest one's in college, so he's pretty self-sufficient. And the 17-year-old has a really nice girlfriend, and that keeps him busy. And he has a summer job, so I'm thankful for that. The 15-year-old, he is involved in soccer and just started in a robotics competition team, that they went to the world championships in Houston. He was the robot driver for the whole team. Marty Duren: That's cool. Eric Schumacher: He's our outdoorsman. He's always outside doing something. He took over the shop in our garage when we moved to this new-to-us house. And he, unknown to any of us, discovered he had some kind of saw that would cut metal. So he started cutting circular saw blades, strips out of them, and making knives and like a [inaudible 00:04:19], throwing bat-sharpened things that could probably do a lot of harm to somebody. Marty Duren: Do the robots throw those? Eric Schumacher: No, he hasn't figured that out yet. I'm trying not to suggest that idea. Right now his dream is, he says when he turns 18 and graduates high school, he's going to be moving to Alaska and living as a survivalist. And he thinks he's prepared for that because he watches Life Below Zero and Bear Grylls. Marty Duren: Okay. I mean, what could go wrong? Eric Schumacher: I know. Buddy, there's a little bit more- Marty Duren: Has he read Into the Wild? Eric Schumacher: No, he has not. And I'm thinking about showing him that film. Marty Duren: Yes. Eric Schumacher: Buddy, there's a little bit more than knowing how to skin an animal and drink your own urine to living in Alaska. Although he was out at a friend's acreage a year or two ago, and their dog ran up with a rabbit that it had just caught. He was probably 13, pulled his pocket knife out and he skinned the rabbit, gutted it right there, and put her on a spit and built a fire and cooked it over it and ate it. Marty Duren: Wow. He went [inaudible 00:05:27] Castaway in about 10 seconds there, didn't he? Eric Schumacher: Yeah, he did. I'm going to get him a volleyball just to keep him company. Marty Duren: That's awesome. Eric Schumacher: Our daughter's 13. She's wonderful. She's a budding author. She's 50,000 words into a novel she's working on, and it's good. Better than I've written as an adult. Our 10-year-old, he's the sweetest and friendliest of all of our kids. And we're just trying to desperately figure out how to keep him that way. Marty Duren: Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. That's fantastic. Well, let's talk about Ours: Biblical Comfort for Men Grieving Miscarriage. I'm going to open up by saying that my wife and I never went through this, so I don't know how common or uncommon that makes us, and as a pastor, and I was in full-time pastoral ministry for 20-plus years I think, I can barely remember one or two incidences. So I think I'm somewhat of an anomaly that this is not a thing that I dealt with in ministry a lot. Of course, there's the possibility that people didn't even talk about it. You know, it happened in our church and people didn't say anything about it. But you're addressing the men in the story, so the dad-to-be and the unique struggles. What I love about your book is that you relate it to so many things were happening in the life of Jesus. So let's talk about it. First of all, how did you come to write this book? Eric Schumacher: Years ago, for your listeners' sake, my wife and I have experienced four miscarriages. I believe the statistic is one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. As a pastor, one of the reasons you don't often hear about it is because people don't talk about it. I had written for Risen Motherhood, an article about my experience with miscarriage in order... They asked me to write it in order to help women understand what their husbands are going through. And so a few years back then, Abbey Wedgeworth asked me if I would include a testimony as a father in her book, Held. It's actually a companion volume to ours, but a 31-day resource, journaling resource, with devotions, walking through a Psalm. I got the book, and it's just fantastic. Eric Schumacher: It became immediately my go-to resource on miscarriage. And I just loved everything the Good Book Company did with it. All through our miscarriages, one of the things I talk about in the book is that I just never heard men talk about miscarriage, and I experienced firsthand how unprepared other men in the church were to care for a man walking through miscarriage, and even hospitals, just everywhere. For obvious reasons, miscarriage is thought about as a woman's thing, which it is, because they're the ones that are miscarrying, they're the ones that were pregnant. But every child has a mother and a father, and every mother wants the father to be involved in the pregnancy and wants the father to rejoice over the birth of the child. Eric Schumacher: I don't know who picked the title of the book at the Good Book Company, but that's what the name Ours is all about, is that this is ours. And so I just wrote Carl at the Good Book Company an email and said, "Hey, fantastic work on this volume. It's really good, and you really need to write one. You need to publish one for men, and I want to write it." They were gracious enough to do it, take a risk on it. Marty Duren: Is that how that works? Is that how that works, I just find a book and say "This is a great book and you need to write a companion and I need to write it." Is that how it works? Eric Schumacher: Sometimes, I guess. I don't know. First time I've tried it, but it won't be the last. Marty Duren: Worked for you. What I want to do is read some of the chapter titles and just let you comment, because it's set up with really short chapters. There's 31. So it's a month's worth of brief devotions with some opportunity for reflection. So it's not just, "Hey, I'm going to read this and go to work," it's "I'm going to sit with this a little bit. I'm going to process this and process myself as I process this." Let's hit just a few of the chapter titles, give everybody an idea of what's going on. And then I think this is going to become a go-to for a lot of folks, to be honest with you. Second chapter, Have I Really Lost a Child? What is that? And why is it significant? Eric Schumacher: What you mentioned earlier about incidents from the life of Jesus for your listeners, the book walks through the book of Luke in over 31 days. What I did before I wrote it is, I wrote down questions that are common for people to ask as they're going through miscarriage, and then put them together with the Suffering Servant and how he cared for
