About David & Nancy Guthrie

David & Nancy Guthrie have a twenty-something son, Matt. They’ve had two children, a daughter, Hope, and a son, Gabriel. They were born with a rare genetic disorder called Zellweger Syndrome and each lived six months.

They host weekend “Respite Retreats” for married couples to spend unhurried time with other couples who understand the devastation of losing a child, to learn from each other, encourage each other, and experience together renewed hope for the future.

Nancy has written a number of books, including Holding On to Hope: A Pathway of Suffering to the Heart of God in 2002, where she offered many of the lessons she learned from this sorrowful experience. Since then, she has continued to write books that reflect her compassion for hurting people and her passion for applying God’s Word to real life.

After more than 20 years with Word Music, David Guthrie launched the very first “church musical publisher just for kids,” Little Big Stuff Music.

The Host of Emotions Another Pregnancy Brought to Nancy and David

“As hard as it is to lose a child, I think perhaps it’s doubly difficult to watch your child lose a child. You have nothing in your bag to pull out to fix it and so we decided to take surgical steps to prevent another pregnancy. So you can imagine our surprise to put it mildly to learn a year and a half after Hope died that I was pregnant, but we weren’t just surprised we were afraid.

When I first discovered it there was a cautious sense of joy, like here’s this thing we have ruled out and God has clearly overruled it. Perhaps He’s done this because He’s going to give us another healthy child to raise and enjoy which we didn’t expect, which honestly at that point our family didn’t feel complete and so that possibility was a joyous possibility but significant. But then there’s also this hit in the gut like, “Wow, you mean He might be asking us to love and lose another child? To go through this again?” And that seemed overwhelming. So we went through prenatal testing because we felt like it’s going to be helpful to know which way we’re going. We discovered the child I was carrying was a boy who would also have the fatal syndrome.”

Early Testing For The New Baby

“We had arranged with the geneticist when he had the results of the tests, that he would call us. I was working at the office, Nancy was at home. We decided I’d drive home and we’ll talk to him on the phone and we’d get that news together. Actually, this was a really cool thing for me; my drive home was so intense as you can imagine. I was thinking, “Wow, what if? Can we do this again?”

On the drive home for some reason I had this thought, “What if this phone call were a different kind of call? What if it were our pastor for example calling and saying, “There’s a young mother giving birth, a single mother giving birth to a child. They’ve just discovered that the child will have Zellweger’s Syndrome and she can’t possibly care for the child. Could there possibly be parents who would adopt such a child?”

I thought in that moment we would do it. Yes! I thought we had been down that road before; we know both the joys and the challenges, the devastating sorrow of it. What a calling! Would we do it? Yes, we’d do it. By the time I got home, my heart was prepared for the news we got. Indeed, the doctor got us on the phone and said, “Well the tests are in and they’re positive.”

The Pregnancy Experience For David and Nancy

“It was very different this time going through nine months of pregnancy knowing we were going to have a child that was going to die. In some ways it made it more precious. It was part of his life that we wanted to cherish. It was awkward at times, you know we would see people who knew we had had a child who died, and they’d see I was pregnant and they’d say, “Oh.” But to over and over again say, “Yes, but this child’s going to die too.” Talk about a conversation stopper, you know that was awkward.

We had already begun during Hopes life, after her death to sense that God wanted to use us in the lives of other people. Somewhere along the way, early on in Hopes life and shortly after her death, I became very caught up in resentment toward people in the way they responded or didn’t respond to me to somehow God doing a work of grace in my life so I could see what a privilege it was that this experience opened up a door for us to minister to and bless other people.”

How The Lord Gave David and Nancy The Strength To Try Again

“I would say there are several things at work. For me I would say this idea that we discussed before,that God can and does have good purpose even in suffering, helped me face this with a sense of, “I want this to be purposeful in my life.” We had the benefit, the blessing of looking back, just a year and a half, two years before and we could prove that.

I went away for a few days after we got that diagnosis from the doctor. I had to go on a business trip and I thought, “I need sometime to think, and pray, and cry,” and I can remember doing that. Looking out the window, I said to God, “Okay, if you’re going to ask me to do this again, then you must have something really good that you want to do with it that outways, out glorifies, the suffering aspect of it. If that’s so, I want you to do it!”

To me at that point, the greatest tragedy would be, if we walk through it again and if somehow we were so resentful, resistant to God, that in a sense it was just wasted pain. I just said, “Okay God, if you’re going to do something, then do it and keep me from being resistant to whatever it is you want to do through it, even if the work you want to do is only in me. Just don’t let this pain go to waste. Let it not be for nothing.” So when you ask how do we get to that place? I think that’s it; you know that sense in which we didn’t want it to be for nothing.”

How David and Nancy Navigate Identity Amidst Their Experiences

“I suppose to some people, the bigger thing is that there have been times on this journey I have felt like maybe it is my identity, and even greater than that, that certain people that are around me see that as, it’s who’ve I’ve become and that being embarrassing to me. We only want to identify with our connection to Jesus Christ. I think over the years now we’ve interacted with enough grieving people. Especially for those whom it became their identity, we’ve gotten a close view and it’s not pretty.

Everyone has those things that come along and it redefines us or we’re forced to look again at who we are and how we identify, and define ourselves, and what makes our life worthwhile, and I would say that’s not a bad thing. It’s a hard thing and it really hurts. I’ll just mention these retreats that Nancy and I do, these Respite Retreats; retreats for eleven couples that get with us; eleven other couples who have lost a child.

We find people at all points on that journey and some are entrenched, quite honestly in that identity and are finding it difficult to move on or move forward, or move at all and that’s one of the challenges that grief presents, but honestly it’s a beautiful thing to see God be faithful when we throw our confidence and our trust in Him so that we won’t be sunk by this heavy grief. But we go to Him; He invites us to throw our cares on Him; He cares for us and He walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death and it’s a beautiful thing to see people making these halting steps forward.”

The Birth Story of Gabriel Guthrie

“Our son, Gabriel was born July 16, 2001. He looked like Hope and he was impacted in many of the same ways as Hope. Like Hope, they both had, at about three months developed seizures which we had to medicate them heavily for. The sweet thing about Gabriel was that we weren’t shocked when he was born, like we had been with Hope. Neither of us had to reckon with the fact that he was going to die when he was born.

We also didn’t have to research anything about this syndrome. We felt prepared for what it was going to take to care for him. All of those things, that helped us to just begin his life, seeking to enjoy it, resting in it, and making the most of it. We thought actually he might be with us a little longer than Hope was because he seemed a little stronger than she was, but he was with us a few days less. He was with us one hundred and eighty-three days and then we said, ‘Goodbye’ to him.”

The Difference in Gabriel and Hope’s Life

“Gabe’s life was a little different in that even more people were watching, I guess. The day of his birth there was a story about him in Time Magazine. It was on the News Stands there in the hospital in the gift shop. At one point, I went out around the nursing station and I saw several nurses kind of hunched over and they were actually reading this story. It was not a medical story, it was a religious story, and it was a piece written by the Religion Editor at Time Magazine at that time, David Bambina.

You can still find it in the archives online. He called it When God Hides His Face, which is from the Job story. Can faith survive when hope has died? It talked about our experience with Hope up until the time that Nancy was pregnant with Gabe and then the story came out in that edition. So it was interesting from the beginning of his life; I think we had a heightened sense that we had to fight to not treat his brief life as if it were a big sermon illustration or a TV show. Again, from the lessons of Hope’s life we learned to grab every moment that we could.”

The Identity of a Steward

You asked earlier if grief had become our identity, and I think what we had chosen instead, and I think grief would be related to that, is that we see ourselves as stewards. As believers God entrusts us with many different things. We read the parable of The Talents in the Scriptures. They’re entrusted to us for one purpose: a return for His Kingdom. What has helped us from taking on that identity and what helped us pretty immediately during Gabe’s life, and the years since his death, is to see that this is what God entrusted to us.

It’s not what we would have asked for. Even being here with you around the microphone, I mean David and I are comfortable in front of microphones so we further see this is what God has entrusted to us so we are seeking to be good stewards with it.”

The Respite Retreat

“Similarly, the Respite Retreat weekends we do for couples who’ve lost children, we do these retreats and the couples walk in and they’re so sad and over the weekend they experience the relief of being in a room where everybody in the room gets it and understands it. They’ve come from places where they feel like everybody walks on eggshells when they get near them and it’s so awkward to go into a crowd, and they get in this room and they hear other couples articulating things they have felt and thought and they think ‘Oh, I’m not crazy and I’m not alone.’

Then by the time the weekends over they don’t want to go home, so that has been an incredible way for David and I to be good stewards. People ask us all the time, “Why would you want to do that?” Honestly, sometimes we’re driving out there on the weekend and we’re thinking we’re spending the weekend with eleven couples who are in so much pain. Why would we want to do that? But then on Sunday when we drive away we say, ‘That’s why.”

David and Nancy Guthrie’s Encouragement For Parents Who Have Lost Children

“In your incredible loneliness of grief, lean toward and give grace to that one person who ties you most closely to that child you have lost. Give each other a lot of grace to grieve in your own way and in your own timing. Nancy and I actually wrote a little book together called When Your Family’s Lost a Loved One. It’s a great little book, mainly because it’s got contributors from all different walks and experiences of loss, but one thing that I wrote in there; it’s a tiny portion of the book, and it’s not worth buying the book for this, but it seems to really help guys and couples.

It encourages men who are going through grief, fathers who are going through grief, and trying to get their wife through it and get themselves through it, and get their family through it is: just show up; step up; this is an opportunity to be that husband, to be that father, and you don’t have to get it perfect. Us guys, we like to know how to do stuff; we like to do it right. Just step up and be willing to walk through this with your wife and you’re not a jerk; you’re not doing it wrong. It will feel like that, but just keep going, keep moving, and stay present and be there.”

For more inContext interviews, click here.