Lisa Appelo shares how she saw who God is through the shattering loss of her husband. Lisa describes how she was desperate for God in those hard moments, and how her family grieved together but in their own separate ways.

Welcome to the I Witness Podcast. I’m your host, Kelly Jo Wilson, and this is the show for women who struggle to accept their worth but want to embrace their gifts and share their witness for Jesus. We have a great show today about life after shattering loss.

Listen to Part 1 of the interview here:

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My Interview with Lisa Appelo

Kelly: Our guest is my friend and fellow author, Lisa Appelo. Lisa inspires women to deepen faith in life’s storms and is an ECPA bestselling author. A former litigating attorney, Lisa is passionate about rich Bible teaching. Lisa founded a team of writers at HopeinGrief.com and currently serves on the executive team for Compel with Proverbs 31 Ministries. Her work has been featured at Life Today, Insight for Living, and many more. As a single mom of seven, Lisa’s days are filled with parenting ministry and long walks to justify lots of dark chocolate. Welcome to the I Witness podcast, Lisa. I’m so happy to have you here.

Lisa: Thank you so much, Kelly Jo. I’m happy to be with you.

Kelly: Yes, yes. Thank you. So, today I just wanted to talk about the wonderful but challenging journey you’ve traveled. Your faith and walk with God over these past few years. So I just wanted to share or wanted our listeners to hear a little bit more about your background and family and then go from there about your faith journey.

You’re really passionate about helping women through shattering loss and grief. I think it’s just so inspiring, and you have such a wonderful story to tell. So why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your family, background, and even how you came to know Jesus. Like how old you were and just a little bit of what that looks like.

Lisa met God early in her life

Lisa: Sure, when you were asking that question, I was thinking about my story, and I thought, even now, it’s hard to believe this is the story that God has written. This is not what I would’ve expected. And I think so many of us can identify that we are living out a life that we didn’t expect things that have happened or that we wanted to happen that never happened.

I’ll start with when I came to Christ. I was a young girl. I was raised in the church, and I was in Sunday school from the youngest I can remember. In church, you know, things weren’t perfect. Even in my home, there wasn’t much teaching about Jesus.

Most of that was coming to church on Sundays, but I knew I needed a savior at eight. So I count that at eight years old, but we weren’t a family that wrote the date in the Bible or anything like that. So that’s really as best I can remember that I was eight, going forward and pastor, and getting baptized and all that.

But then, in my teen years, I did some teen things as a 15-year-old but rededicated my life. So, from that time on, owned my faith as an adult. You understand what you can as an eight-year-old. Then we grow older and almost have to make those decisions over again as an adult wrestling through some of these issues that seem so simple at eight years old, right?

Kelly: Oh, absolutely. Yes.

God’s unexpected journey for Lisa

Lisa: But, fast forward, I married my college, well, I married my high school sweetheart, so we actually were in Sunday school together. We met in seventh grade, but he was just another boy across the room, and then by high school, we were in a big group of friends. He was a surfer.

We’d go to the beach together, and he was my first date. He was my only date. We went to college together very intentionally because we knew we had a future together. We married sometime in college and ended up with seven children, which is another unexpected thing.

This was not in the plan, but God will tender our hearts and ask us to step out in faith in ways we never thought we could.

So, I have seven children. Five are launched and have their own families, and I am still actively parenting two. My two youngest are at home. My story … I think when we talk about shattering loss and how God really gave me a heart for the woman who’s walking that started 11 years ago.

Shattering loss changed everything

I went to bed happily married and woke up a widow and single mom to my seven children. There were no signs of symptoms, but I woke up in the early morning to my husband’s funny breathing on the pillow next to me and called 911 and started CPR.

The paramedics were there within minutes, and I thought, “okay, he’s in good hands. He’s going to be mad when he wakes up and finds out he has to miss work today.”

But he never recovered.

I went into the ER, and they called me into that room you never wanna go into, and the ER doctor said, “we’ve worked on him for over two hours and have never been able to revive him.”

I went home to tell my kids that was it, that their dad was in heaven. After that, life in every sense fell apart, just shattered into a thousand pieces. It would never be the same again.

Kelly: Wow. That definitely would cause your life to absolutely shatter. Being so young and loving him so much pretty much immediately. You went on a date, and you both were so young and full of life and dedicated your lives to one another. Then you have this family, and like you said, your life took a completely unexpected turn, which is even more of a blessing once you’re walking that path.

But then you wake up in the middle of the night, and oh my goodness, as you put it, you went to bed married and woke up a widow. Happily married and woke up a widow.

Brokenness led her back

But, first, I’m just so sorry you had to deal with that, Lisa. I just can’t imagine, and I’m sure you’ve had many people say that to you.

I will say, though, the encouragement, inspiration, and help just even by being here today as we talk through your story. And knowing you and your passion for writing and reaching women, I’m sure that you’ve provided a lot of comfort to a lot of people, and have really blessed them.

I’m so gracious that you’re here today to talk about this. Going back quickly, whenever you’re young, I just wanna point out one thing, which I think is neat. So you’re eight years old and like, yes, I love Jesus. Your family is going to church and you know about him, but it’s not like writing it in a calendar.

I completely identify with that. I feel like my family had always talked about Jesus, that it was kind of like well-known that you’re Christian, right? That you just know him, say prayers and that’s it. So you can’t really pinpoint the day. But like you said, when you were a teenager, after you come to know him a little bit as you were young, but it never left you just like he tells us it never departs from you.

But once you make some mistakes, dealing with all the hormones and teenage everything, you know? I completely identify with you there. Once you realize, once you see a little bit of the brokenness that you are and then go back, it has a little bit of a different meaning right?

Lisa made a choice

Lisa: Yeah, for sure.

I was doing things I shouldn’t have been doing, and I really felt the before and after, and I didn’t get saved at 15. I was saved at eight but wasn’t living fully for the Lord. I was wandering from him, and was really at a point where I could have kept wandering.

Maybe not come back, or I could say, “no, this is the truth.” So he is my savior, and I desperately need him. It’s interesting because I was actually at a youth camp. It was one of those things where everybody was emotional, and I never went forward. They were like, “come forward or pray.”

I never went forward. I stayed right in my seat.

But I remember praying, “Lord, do not let this be a mountaintop experience.” Just praying that over and over. Then I went home.

Dan and I were not dating. We were really good friends. Then, a few weeks after returning school had started in the fall, he said, “You’re so different. You’re so different.” So isn’t that interesting? Somebody who knew me so well could see the difference.

God puts people together for a purpose

Kelly: Wow. That is interesting. And you weren’t dating him then, he already saw the change in you, though, being your friend. Wow. And especially him too, you know, seeing that change in you maybe sparked a little something extra in him too. You never know. I feel like God really does put people together. It just seems like he really put you together for a wonderful purpose.

It’s just amazing how he can work in our lives. So, I definitely did not want to pass over what happened with Dan in that story. I just wanted to talk a bit about you returning to God when you were a teenager.

That’s so funny that you say that Dan really recognized it. I think that’s great. But you started your life together and had seven children, so that’s completely devastating. So share what you feel comfortable sharing.

Grief was different for each family member

I don’t wanna take you too much through every step of that, but how was the family unit?

How did you guys pray together?

Did your kids embrace Jesus, or was it kind of like they were questioning things?

Or do you feel like you were a very tight unit?

Lisa: When Dan died, my children were four years old, and then my oldest had just finished his freshman year of college. So they were at all different points and after he died, you know, it’s hard enough walking through your own grief, but then trying to navigate and shepherd your children through theirs, it’s really just overwhelming.

People will ask me, “how do I do this?”

I think the only answer I can give you because every family is different and looks different, is to just authentically grieve together.

Whatever that looks like, don’t feel like you have to show up all put together for your children. Don’t feel like that or make them feel like they have to, either.

I remember sitting down with my kids and saying, grief is going to look different for each of us, and we’ll have to have a lot of grace with each other this year. That’s how naive I was. Thinking it would just be a year until we got back on our feet. And it did look different for each of us.

Every day in the car, my four-year-old would randomly start crying and saying, “I miss daddy. I miss daddy.” Sometimes at very ironic times.

Grief struck in both dark and happy moments

I remember a few months after Dan died, my daughter went to a Florida event, it used to be called Junior Miss, but now it’s distinguished young women. It’s a scholarship program (slightly a pageant). She won for Florida. We had never done pageants, but this had streamers coming down and the flowers being handed to her. All the kids are going up on stage, and I’m holding my daughter on my hip.

With all this music and confetti coming down, she is whispering in my ear, saying, “I miss Daddy. I miss Daddy.”

That is such a picture of grief. These events are happening, these milestone events, and then in the midst of that is this gaping, painful loss.

It’s never one or the other. It is both coexisting.

How did my family react to that? I think I just tried to walk them through as best I could. We did a lot of reading aloud together. We were a homeschooling family and had the opportunity and the time to have that Bible time together every morning.

I remember we started reading books on heaven. Everything from picture books, from my little ones to bigger books with my older ones.

I kept an open conversation. I tried to keep a safe place for them to just be able to share and talk however it looked. It looked different for my daughter than for my teen sons and my six-year-old and four-year-old.

Grief still looks different

Kelly: Oh my goodness. I am sure it looks so different and probably still looks different for them in every stage you go through together.

I love that you pointed out that you have to authentically grieve together. Because there is no way that you’re going to have that strength for all of them, right?

You want to make sure that you can because you want to shelter them from all these big feelings and all this pain. But, like you said, the perfect picture of grief … wonderful thing happening, missing her father and whispering it. But I think that’s amazing.

I think that you guided them in such a wonderful way and I bet that a lot of women listening to this are probably thinking the same thing. “I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I’m just going to do it with them, and that’s it.”

 That’s just a wonderful guide for somebody who’s kind of lost, because it would be impossible to really carry them through each thing while you’re feeling it yourself.

How did you handle that? How did you handle those really tough moments and maybe even angry at God or frustrated with him?

Totally overwhelmed, Lisa met God every day

Lisa: I was overwhelmed in every sense of the word, and I think when life falls apart, you know, we get to a place of overwhelm where we’re having decisions and massive change, hard emotions, and questions. I would get up every morning and get them settled and started for the day.

Then I would get into my minivan.

I say some people have a prayer closet, but I have a minivan. I would go around the corner to this little park and just park. In that quiet minivan where nobody could slip a note under the door or come into my room, I would just cry out to God. Sometimes I cried out audibly. Sometimes, I would journal. Every day I journaled.

But I would have that time to unburden my heart with everything I had been carrying. All the worries I had, all the fears, the missing, and the loneliness, just all of it. I never went through anger.

Desperate for God

I did go through questioning God, saying, “Why would you take such a good dad?”

Some of the ironies of the situation were that his mom, who was not in very good health at all, the last thing he had been doing was paperwork for her. Not that I wanted anything to happen to her, but just the irony of life. He died suddenly so young, and she was there with us for several more years, which was a grace.

I would get alone in my car. I would cry out to God and pour that out to him then open the Bible.

I happened to be reading through the Bible for a year, but I had not started that year doing that, Dan had actually been doing it.

I was just desperate for the Lord. I was desperate for the word more than I needed my own food.

I wouldn’t look for a passage that would meet or speak to me, but I would just open to that day’s reading. It never ceased to amaze me how God would meet me wherever I was reading, whether it was Leviticus, Psalms, or one of the gospels.

God reminded her of who he is

God would meet me on the words of that page.  He would remind me who he is and how he cares for us, and it would give me enough hope to go back into the house and parent for that day. It was not enough for the week. I would have to go back the next day and do it over. It became like that daily manna.

I would go out and pick up my daily manna, which was enough for that day.

When we say God is enough, that’s what it looks like. It’s not like God is enough, and we never have to go through anything hard. It’s that God is enough to get through this moment, to get through this difficulty, get through this day, and it won’t always feel like this.

I kept telling myself that it won’t always feel like this, but I did have to have that hope to get through each day. Until we got our fitting and until my smile came back.

Daily walk through the pain

Kelly: Wow. That is so perfect to say how he’s given it to you for that day in the daily walk with him. Because it’s so unknown. When you say you were overwhelmed in every sense, I think that is an overwhelming piece of it. You think, when is this going to go away? When is it going to lighten up? When is it ever going to get better?

But I think you made a good point that you surrendered every day. You made that time, no matter how busy you were, no matter how intense or overwhelmed you felt. You made that time in the morning or whenever it was and took everything to him. Which I think is a really great thing.

Many women who listen to this podcast struggle with making time and even feeling good enough for God to meet them where they are. A lot of them feel broken and that they don’t deserve it. But also, especially if they’re angry at God for something that has happened.

How can you surrender your pain to God?

What would you say helped you to be able to lay it at his feet whenever you went there? Did it come very easy to you because you had been in the scriptures and walking with God through it? Or was there something or anything extra that you did to maybe help the woman listening now who says, “It’s so hard for me to just surrender?”

Lisa: It is for sure too hard for us. We were not made for death, divorce, disease, or devastation like this. We weren’t made for it. So when these things happen, it does overwhelm us. That old saying that God won’t give you more than you can handle. That’s just not true.

We can absolutely find ourselves in circumstances that are too hard for us.

I remember writing at the top of my journal every day for well over a year,

 THIS IS TOO HARD. I CANNOT DO THIS.

All caps, bold, underlined. That was the reality of my heart. I’m sure people looked at me and thought, you’re so strong.

But I knew what was going on inside. I knew the war raging in my thoughts and my emotions.

I could feel the enemy and felt like the enemy was trying to get his toe into our family and just pull it apart.

This was not Lisa, who had everything together and was doing everything right. This was Lisa, who was desperate for the Lord.

Listen to God’s nudge

Sometimes I think we can feel that nudge to meet with the Lord, open the word, meet with him in prayer, maybe read a devotion or read the Bible, and we think it’s guilt. You think God is guilting us like, “You haven’t met with me. You’re so bad.”

But it’s not, it’s wooing us like somebody who loves us, somebody who is holding out their hands and says, “I have everything you need. Come to me.”

It makes me weep. Because I remember … I remember those days when I just was desperate. And he says, “Come to me.”

So I think for the woman listening to this right now and saying, “I’ve stayed away from God, and I haven’t opened the word. I am mad,” to just listen to that nudge. Open it and give God a chance to meet you where you are.

 It won’t look all tidy, and everything won’t be wrapped up with the bow that first day. God will meet you where you are.

He will give you hope. He will encourage you and remind you how much he loves you. He will remind you of his promises and his faithfulness, and that’s how we do life.

We’re not promised that life will be easy. But, we’re promised that God will be faithful.

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Bible Verses for Encouragement

Matthew 11:28, NKJV, “Come to Me all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

Resources for You

Lisa’s book Life Can Be Good Again helps women to put their world back together after it falls apart.

Lisa also has a free devotional, 7 Days of Hope for Your Shattered Heart, to help women walking through devastation focus on hope.  

Where to find Lisa Appelo:

Visit Lisa on her website www.LisaAppelo.com

Connect with Lisa on the following social media sites:

Instagram

Facebook

Pinterest

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