He was already taking care of a church congregation as a pastor and being a good dad and husband. But nothing had prepared Chuck Tate for what it would be like when his wife became sick and he and the kids became her caregivers. The AllMomDoes Podcast host Julie Lyles Carr sits down with Chuck for a candid conversation about his family’s journey through a medical mystery and complicated recovery and what he learned about his marriage, his ministry, and his relationship to God.
Show Notes:
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Transcription:
Julie Lyles Carr:
A quick programming note for this episode, my guest and I are going to discuss some female medical issues. And while I know that there are a lot of parents out there who would have no problem with the verbiage that we use in the description of the medical situation that was going on, they’d have no problem with their kids hearing that, I know that’s not everybody’s preference for their kids. So I just wanted to give you a heads-up that you might want to put in those earbuds if that is something that you might not want your kids overhearing. Alrighty. And onto the episode.
Sometimes you get to meet somebody that you connect with so quickly, it’s just that moment where you’re like, “Hey, I know you live halfway across the country, but we’re going to be friends. We’re going to be friends for a long time.” And that is my friend, Chuck Tate. Chuck and I got to meet years ago at a writing conference that I was MCing and he won this contest that was part of that experience where it allowed him to get his first book published called 41 Will Come. It’s an amazing book. Chuck is a pastor in the middle part of the country. I’m going to have him talk about that. And if you are a listener of the AllMomDoes Podcast, you got to hear just a few weeks ago where I was a guest on Chuck’s show and he was so gracious to have me on. I’ve been on a couple of times and we’ve had such great conversations every time. So Chuck, I am just delighted to introduce you to my listeners here at the AllMomDoes Podcast. Thanks so much for joining me.
Chuck Tate:
Thank you, Julie. Honored to be here. Love what you’re doing. I love watching all that goes on in your life and in your family’s life. And like you said, so happy that we became fast friends. And man, I can’t believe it’s been…
Julie Lyles Carr:
It’s been a while.
Chuck Tate:
From 2016, that’s been a long, long time ago. Actually, 2015. The book was released in 2016. Here we are still friends. And look what I got, look what I have right here, look what I brought.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Oh, that is… Look at that. You brought your own copy of Raising an Original.
Chuck Tate:
You were on my podcast, 41 Strong, and Revival Talent. So love the book. I know it’s helped so many people.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Thank you. Chuck, you’re just an amazing guy and you wear so many hats. One of the things that we connected on that I thought was really cool is one of my children has significant hearing loss and you yourself are a hearing aid wearer, and it was so amazing to get to chat with you about more of your experience. She’s now fully launched into adulthood, but when you and I met, that was this place where I was going, “Okay, how’s this launch going to go? How is this going to be?” And you really brought a lot of encouragement along the way. When was your hearing loss first identified?
Chuck Tate:
Third grade is from what I remember, but I didn’t get hearing aids until I was, I think, close to 40. And truthfully, looking back, I’ve shared this with some others, I don’t know why my parents didn’t get me into an audiologist later on in life. Looking back, I did struggle and I struggled in school, and I know it’s because I didn’t hear, I didn’t know what was going on. Funny story with that, sophomore year, science class, my teacher took about half of the period to answer questions, the second half of the period, and somebody asked this question and he went on for about 20 minutes answering this question. He finished up and he said, “We only have two minutes left, so we’ll take one more quick question.” So I raised my hand and I asked the exact same question that he had just spent 20 minutes answering, and he laughed out loud, everybody laughed.
Everybody thought I was just trying to get a laugh. And he is like, “Chuck.” And I was like, “Ah, okay.” And I was like, “Oh man, I need help.” But it was really years and years later where my wife realized that I was withdrawing whenever there were groups of people and I didn’t really know what was going on. And so I didn’t get hearing aids until right around 40, but it’s been life-changing, and I have a newer pair now. Just technology keeps advancing, so I love being able just to stream music and videos and everything, and I pretty much can function at all times unless I’m at the beach.
Julie Lyles Carr:
It really is amazing where technology has brought us. My daughter keeps saying that she’ll come on the show and talk about her journey, and I would love for people to know about it. It’s one of the most common challenges that kids today face and are diagnosed with, and yet we don’t always know a whole lot about it. And so whenever I’m able to meet an individual who has navigated those waters… I have another good friend who is with a nonprofit organization, and, Chuck, I had no idea, I’ve known her for quite a while, we’ve worked on some projects together, and I am the mom of someone who was absolutely deep in the weeds with this entire thing, and I had no idea that Jackie herself had experienced hearing loss. So it’s really a great thing when I’m able to meet others and hear about their journeys. It’s helped me as a mom, helped navigate with my daughter. And then, again, I’m going to try and get her on because I would love for the audience to know more about her experience.
Chuck Tate:
I would definitely listen to that.
Julie Lyles Carr:
She’s got a lot to say. So now you mentioned that it was your wife…
Chuck Tate:
Does she read lips?
Julie Lyles Carr:
She does. Now, we did a form of therapy that really focused on using her residual hearing, so she does read lips very well now. When she was a child, we worked very hard on helping her use the hearing that she does have, and so it was a pretty fascinating path to work with her in that way. And then she’s been in bilateral hearing aids since she was two and a half, so it’s been quite a path.
Chuck Tate:
Her whole life. So COVID was hard for her, because the mask thing was so, so challenging.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Very. COVID was very difficult in that way. And it even has made adjustments to some of her career decisions because she really loves the medical field and is having to think a lot about that, because you wear masks in that environment and really discovered during COVID how challenging that was. So things like that that you don’t often think of. And as the primary person when she was a kid overseeing all of those things, I was having to onboard really fast and learn some things really, really fast. And you yourself have been through a season where you had to become something of a medical expert in a medical mystery. You mentioned your precious wife, Annette, and you guys have been married for quite a while now, she went through a season, Chuck, and you and I connected at some point during this journey, where she was really struggling health-wise.
Back me up to when all of that began and what that was like for you, because when you have a marriage and you’re partners and you’re raising kids and you’ve got a ministry together and all this kind of stuff, all of a sudden one of you to be taken out to a certain degree and sidelined with health concerns, that had to be really challenging when things first kicked off as to determine what to do and how to navigate fresh territory. So start us back when you guys realized that she was having some health issues.
Chuck Tate:
So it was really frustrating because it took several months for her to even get diagnosed. It was probably five years ago when she started experiencing pelvic floor pain and she couldn’t get relief. And I remember we were at a pastor’s retreat in Oklahoma and she was just struggling the entire time we were there, and we knew something was off, something was wrong, and we started seeking answers. And the one thing that we learned through the whole four or five year journey is you have to advocate for yourself. And we were grateful when she did receive a diagnosis, and that diagnosis is a disease that is called interstitial cystitis, the short name is IC, and the common name is painful bladder syndrome.
And there’s no cure for IC, but most people after receiving treatment go into remission to where there’s minimal to no pain unless something triggers it like stress or diet. But with Annette, she couldn’t get relief. And it was an eight to 10 level pain that was constant that she could not get relief from. So it was debilitating. It pretty much stopped her whole world. And we just kept seeking help. And we went to several different urologists and neurologists and every kind of ologist you could think of. We were going to Cleveland Clinic and she had a surgery in Indiana, and we were just trying everything to get some relief, nothing worked. And it began she was getting this thing called rescue treatments. Most women diagnosed with IC, after one or two rescue treatments are fine. For her, nothing. She had several rescue treatments, then they tried these vaginal steroid injections that were super painful, no relief. Then they tried Botox, these vaginal Botox injections. She had just a slight relief from one of those, but then after that just nothing.
So we were just trying everything. We tried to get her into Mayo Clinic because they’re the miracle workers, but because there’s not a cure for IC, she couldn’t get in. And I don’t know if it skewed their numbers or why. So then one of the hospitals that we had been taking her to removed her diagnosis and they tried to get her into Mayo and she was still flagged in the system, rejected. So we were really frustrated. This is now two or three years in and we just can’t get any help, can’t get any relief, and it’s affecting our family at this point. We live in Illinois, driving to Ohio a couple of times to Cleveland Clinic, going to have surgery in Indiana, and then finally just through advocating for ourselves we found a surgeon in Phoenix in Arizona who had a very high success rate of helping women with pelvic floor pain, so we decided to give it a shot. We didn’t have anything else to lose, so we borrowed an RV. Are you ready for this?
AllMomDoes:
Okay.
Chuck Tate:
I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie RV with Robin Williams, but it was like that, but it was my wife and I, both of our kids, and my mother-in-law in a motor home, and we drove to Arizona and then we ended up parking it and we were in a Airbnb and she had to have surgery. And it was just a crazy journey out there, crazy journey back. I had to have a tooth extracted as soon as we got there. It was crazy. I was preaching at a church there while we were in town, I borrowed their church van, it broke down in the hot sun in I think it was August in Phoenix. Just crazy stuff, but she had the surgery. And when she came out of surgery, she had no pain. And it was unbelievable. And we sat there and just wept so happy that God showed up and moved through this surgeon to remove this pain.
Literally, eight to 10 level pain every day, no relief. Up to that point, I think it was close to four years, we were four years in, and so we were just praying that the pain was not going to come back. And she was in a hospital a couple of days and we got her out and she still had relief, but then she started having severe back pain and all of a sudden she started having other pain. And long story short, even though the surgery was successful, the anesthesiologist punctured her spinal membrane in the process. And that sent us on a tailspin.
She had to have some more care, we had to extend our trip, and we were sent home. And by the time we got home, the pain had gotten worse, she was admitted in the hospital. I think she spent 12 or 13 days in the hospital. And they could not fix this spinal leak, at least the symptoms from the spinal leak. It was just really crazy. So all of a sudden she had memory loss and these severe migraines, she was having a hard time even walking. And so we ended up, when they released her, they didn’t really have any answers. And we were seeing neurologists and receiving all kinds of care. And then we had this hospitalist that implied that it was just in her head, and that was just so devastating because she couldn’t function. Like, “Something’s wrong, we have to figure this out. Maybe she doesn’t have a spinal leak, but something is up. She’s not functioning.” And so we ended up renting a hospital bed and putting it in our living room, and she was in that bed, Julie, for 17 months.
And she ended up the only way she could walk was with a walker and she was on all kinds of medications. She always in this brain fog. And it was just really, really challenging. Obviously it was really hard to see her go through this, being on bed rest for 17 months, and when she’s using the restroom, taking a walker, and just still in pain. Even though the pelvic floor pain was gone, she had severe back pain, she couldn’t get rid of the headaches, and it was really, really tough. It really was. So we had to pull my daughter out of school, so she was a junior. And she had started the year out in school and she just got too far behind, so we were homeschooling her. We were already homeschooling my son at that point, but my daughter, she had to drop out. She became the primary caregiver. I was her primary caregiver, but my daughter, we had to put a mattress in our living room next to the hospital bed because of my hearing in the middle of the night.
Julie Lyles Carr:
You weren’t hearing her.
Chuck Tate:
I couldn’t help. So my daughter, Savannah, would have to sleep on the floor. And together, both of us, man, we’re just trying to help her get better. And it wasn’t until we finally went to a new neurologist and he said, “You got to get out of bed. You can’t stay in bed. You’ve been on bed rest, you’re never going to get out of that bed if you don’t just start going.” So we ended up in physical therapy. She did aquatic therapy, every kind of therapy you can think of. And, honestly, she did have one other surgery and God just moved. And it was last November that we decided to get rid of the hospital bed. And she had been going to physical therapy and try to help her get up the stairs, which is why we had to put the hospital bed in our living room because our bedroom was upstairs, she couldn’t do stairs, she couldn’t get up there. So it was 17 months where she wasn’t even in her own bedroom. She lived downstairs, bringing clothes downstairs, suitcases, stuff. It was just crazy.
But last November we got rid of the hospital bed and she started getting stronger and kept going to physical therapy, and she was able to get rid of the walker. So fast-forward today, she got her license renewed, now she’s driving herself around, she’s coming to church almost every week, she uses stairs, she’s been back upstairs since the holidays, and really she’s lost about 60 pounds, because she gained close to about 100 pounds during this whole process. It just really rocked our family to the core, but she is on her way. Her and my daughter, they do Planet Fitness two to three times a week.
Julie Lyles Carr:
That’s awesome.
Chuck Tate:
So God has touched her in a miraculous way.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Chuck, what really strikes me as you’re talking about this is we often when we think about the marriage vow, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, a lot of times we’re thinking about, well, when we hit our 90s we’ll just help each other as this little couple. We don’t really have a lot of structure or thought or modeling in our culture about a spouse having to transition into this place in the more active years of becoming someone’s caregiver in such a significant way. We certainly don’t have modeling in our culture today for children and teenagers needing to come alongside and also help in this way. We found in the course of our two kids who are differently abled that we were having to be very intentional to try to find resources or people we could talk to or whatever, who could help us understand how to come alongside as a family and do everything we could to not build resentment because of caregiving.
And one of the trends that we see in our culture today is that for the most part the majority of people doing that caregiving when it comes to family, when it comes to kids, when it comes to a spouse, is often women. What I find really compelling in your story is in addition to the fact we don’t have a lot of modeling broadly in our culture, there aren’t a lot of guys who end up in your situation. So what were some of the things that you found the most challenging, and what were some of the things that you began to realize, man, if I’m going to survive some of this, there’s got to be some caregiving for me? What did that look like in terms of identifying the challenges interpersonally and then figuring out a way to keep yourself solid in the midst of all this?
Chuck Tate:
Well, I moved out. No, I’m kidding. Joking.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I’m sure there were days that it seemed like that’d be the way to go.
Chuck Tate:
There were days that she wanted me to move out, but this is no joke, she kept her joy through this whole time. Obviously she had her moments where she was broken because of the pain and all the above. She’s the one suffering, but it almost appeared as if it was harder for myself and my kids. She couldn’t go to my son’s basketball games, my daughter was a cheerleader before, we had to pull her out, and she couldn’t go watch Savannah cheer. And as a dad, they wanted mom there, and it was so hard, mom can hardly walk, she’s in the bed. And so for me it was I wanted my wife back, but I also wanted my kids to have their mom back, and I could see that they needed that and that just made it worse for me and stirred all kinds of things and different emotions. But reality is her word is joy, we have lots of things around our house that have the word joy. She just kept her joy.
And the reason I said I think it was at times more harder for me, there was times where she even would text me and say, “You need to read your own book. 41’s going to come. It really is. We believe this. We’re going to make it.” And so to answer how I made it really was some of the things, it sounds cliche, but I had to stay in the word of God, I had to surround myself with people that were going to hold up our arms, I had to focus on the good, I had to stop looking at this situation through a critical lens, through a negative lens, I had to give my permission to cry, I had to give myself permission to laugh, I had to exercise. I became an avid runner, that was my release, just, man, connected my phone to my hearing aids and just going and just running two to three miles at least four or five times a week during that time. That was an outlet, releasing those endorphins and not bottling all this stuff up.
And really, Revival Town Podcast was released out of all this because my co-host, Andy, his wife was having similar health issues. They didn’t have the same diagnosis. For a while they had the same physical therapist. It was crazy. So we both started Revival Town Podcast to highlight people and movements that are making a difference, people like you, but we also did it because it was therapeutic. It was something for us to pour ourselves into. We needed to do something. And not stay busy, pastoring consumed me, but I have an incredible team. We are blessed with not just an incredible team, but an incredible church family. And I’ve heard some horrible stories about pastors who feel alone and nobody’s been there for them, and not the case for us. We wouldn’t have made it without our church, we wouldn’t have made it without our staff, we wouldn’t have made it without our church family.
They had a meal train that was the longest train ever, constantly people bringing food and meals. And we have a couple of different ladies Bible studies at the church, they would send cards every week. There were people that were contributing to her monthly prescription cost. It was just we were embraced. We wouldn’t have made it without, really, all of that. I had to make sure that I was resting. And another thing that helped is I was willing to talk about my struggle. I was willing to get up on Sunday and say, “I’m hurting. I’m struggling. Our family’s going through it. We’re grateful for you guys that are helping us.” But I wasn’t afraid to talk about it, I wasn’t afraid to be transparent, because, again, it helped me. And then I guess the last thing was a lot of worship playlists, just worship. Not all the music I was listening to was worship, but really all those things combined it helped us get through. And my kids and I, we would talk about it. We would sit down and talk about it.
Julie Lyles Carr:
I think that’s very powerful because a lot of times what seems to get lost in that caregiving lane, the caregiving in and of itself I think can look very noble to those out there. And if you take those moments, you might even feel like you’re violating whatever that code of nobility is to take a pause, to take a beat, so your approach to it with such transparency and honesty the way in which you were working toward taking care of yourself, the way you engaged your kids. There are those who would say, “Oh, I don’t know if I would put my kids through that,” but you’re a family. And the lessons that your kids learned, as hard as it was, what a powerful thing in terms of bonding and community. I think that’s incredible.
Now, as a guy, I have to ask you this question because I know statistically we find that in the medical field women are often not believed as often, and particularly when it comes to issues that we would call, quote unquote, female problems. Now, there are amazing doctors out there, and there were doctors who definitely helped provide care and helped provide relief for your wife, but what did you notice as a man watching people interacting with your wife as she is describing this series of symptoms that people are having a hard time necessarily getting their heads around? What were your observations?
Chuck Tate:
Most people really want to help. We had some really great physicians and nurses, surgeons. Her urologist was a blessing, even though we were seeing multiple ones. And there were people that were truly trying to advocate for her. The part where it got difficult was when nothing was working, and sometimes there was a shift of maybe this is in her head. And they didn’t all say it, but that was for me the hardest part, because we’re living through it, we knew this is not in her head. Our family has been rocked to the core, she’s been rocked to the core, and it was just at time’s trying to talk to her and she’s falling asleep and her mouth’s open and she’s forgetting conversations that we had with her.
It was hard, but from the medical standpoint, most people were great. There were some that really made it even harder. There was one guy, and we ended up going to a different hospital just because of this guy, and I don’t know if it was because he couldn’t fix her that he decided to just dismiss her symptoms. But at one point, they were going to discharge her from the hospital, and she still had the exact same symptoms that she had when she went in. And we could just tell they wanted to get rid of her. They wanted to push her out. This is crazy, Julie, and she has a bladder condition, and so when she has to use the restroom, she would need help, they would have to get her up, and she couldn’t just get up and go to the bathroom by herself. They said, “Well, we’re out of toilet paper. There’s no more toilet paper.” This is crazy, this is a hospital, you’re not at a toilet paper. And this hospitalist told this nurse to go ahead and discharge her. And this was on a Saturday night.
He said, “We’re going to discharge her first thing tomorrow morning.” So my wife explained to the nurse and said, “Hey, my husband’s a pastor. He’s not going to be able to get here until about 01:00. Is there any way we can just wait until one o’clock?” And his response to the nurse was just put her in a cab and send her home. And I think I was probably the most angry, and so I went and got her that night, and we just got her out. I said, “We’re not receiving the care that we need,” and we ended up going to a different hospital where we got better care.
And it was through that new neurologist who said, “Okay, we got to get you out of bed. This is real. You’re having spinal leak symptoms, however, the spinal leak, there’s no spinal leak.” We knew that, but she was still having all these other symptoms. So it was just navigating to find out how to remedy the whole thing. Honestly, it was a head scratcher. And it didn’t happen often, but anytime someone just implied that, oh, this wasn’t real, that was so hard. It was like, “Let’s bring my kids in. Let’s all talk. Let’s talk about our week and what we go through every day and what Annette is going through. It’s crazy.”
Julie Lyles Carr:
It’s interesting, Chuck, my dad, part of why I have such a heart for this topic and this conversation is my dad had a very interesting set of medical circumstances. He had been a rocket scientist, literally, did tons of research, did all the things, was trying to figure out what was going on. My mom was his caregiver. The dynamics in their marriage shifted a lot when that change happened, and that was a very challenging season for them. But I will tell you this, as a man who was a big guy, six five, and who was known because of his work in the astrophysics area, nobody ever questioned my dad, his symptoms were real. He was believed right in the door.
And so when I hear stories of people who are having to fight to get someone to believe them, and particularly when they are women saying, “Hey, for real, this is going on,” that’s always an interesting dynamic to me along with the place of knowing how to partner with and work with medical staff, but then also knowing the line to which you have to say, “Okay, it’s time for us to move into a different realm, and now we’re going to have to take the reins back a little bit.” So I’m so thankful that Annette had you, had your family system, had your church to be able to walk alongside in that way. Chuck, do you find that sometimes, particularly in a prolonged illness like that, and one that’s not cleanly falling in the lines of, well, here’s the diagnosis and here’s the treatment and you’re going to be better in three months, when things are not going that way, did you find that within the faith community, within your friendship community, there were times that maybe a case of compassion fatigue set in for some people?
And if so, what are some encouraging things you can tell us in that place where sometimes things don’t wrap up as quickly or as neatly as we would like when we’re serving others? So was there a sense of compassion fatigue? How did that all shake out?
Chuck Tate:
Well, people were doing so much that it was, yeah, we were concerned like, “Listen, everybody has pitched into so much to help us and we’re still going through this.” There were times, honestly, Julie, where I was afraid to even tell people nothing’s changed every week. Hey Chuck, hey pastor, how’s it going? How’s Annette? Is she doing better? And like, “No, she’s not.” And I would say we’re still standing on the word, we’re believing in God, we’re speaking the word, we’re doing all those things, but the reality is it’s not better. It’s worse. So there was sometimes I didn’t even want somebody to ask me, “Hey, how’s she doing? How’s she doing?” Because they want to hear better, she’s doing great, things are turning, there’s been a shift, all that stuff, but it wasn’t like that for so long. It was challenging.
I guess it was a blessing that I’m a pastor of a church because there were different groups of people within the church that began to rotate and began to help, so it wasn’t all on a ladies group or a small group over here. We just had a lot of people that cared and that really made all the difference for us. But it was definitely difficult at times to say, “Hey, we need help.” There were two Christmases that I didn’t even shop. We had some families that adopted us that came to us and went… Honestly, it was unbelievable. I wouldn’t have made it without our church family.
Julie Lyles Carr:
And Chuck, I was just thinking too it’s interesting that I’m so thankful that you guys had that level of support, and I hope that that’s the same level of support that you would’ve received had you been the one in the hospital bed in the living room, and Annette had been the one caregiving, because I think sometimes in our communities of faith we forget that that burden it’s the same for the caregiver, regardless of if they’re the husband or the wife or the mom or the dad. Those needs for meals and for help with keeping the house up and all that kind of stuff, we can forget that a woman needs the same kind of support if she’s in that same area of caregiving.
And Chuck, how did you navigate in the faith space that you guys had been standing in prayer, you’d been faithful, here you are with your life given over to serving God and vocational ministry, the answers aren’t coming, they’re certainly not coming as quickly or as succinctly as you would like. And even Annette getting to the place she is now, and I’m so thankful for the level of functionality and the life she’s getting to live now, but it was this very cooperative miracle healing, if you will. Does that make sense?
Chuck Tate:
Yep.
Julie Lyles Carr:
She had a role that she was having to play in it that was tough. Did that whole scenario change the way you look at prayer, at healing, at what we’re asking for? What did you learn spiritually in watching this play out with such a specific prayer toward her physical situation and her healing?
Chuck Tate:
For me, it wasn’t about am I going to change how I believe? It was, all right, do I believe what I preach? Do I believe what I tell others? Am I going to put this into practice now? Do I believe my own book, 41 Will Come, when you’re in a season of waiting and you need the breakthrough? And my next book is all about breakthrough, and I’m going to share part of this story in that, and then we’ll wait for another book where I’ll unpack the whole thing, but I really did have to stand on the word and stay in the word and continue worshiping. And it wasn’t always easy. And there were times where I didn’t want to. There were times where I was just flushing out and just being vocal out loud in the house. Or Annette would be like, “Hey, you need to put on some worship. You need to put on some worship.” And I didn’t want to put on some worship. I wanted to vent. I wanted to kick and scream and like, “I’m mad.”
And obviously we need to be able to release all that stuff, but it was true, I needed to put on some worship, I needed to get back in the word. Psalms 34:6 says, “When I had nothing, desperate and defeated, I cried out to the Lord and he heard me bringing his miracle deliverance when I needed it most.” And so I believed the word. I was raised in church, I’m glad for that. So my theology didn’t shift or change, I just had to follow through with what I believe, this is it, God is still God. No matter what happens, if she doesn’t even receive her healing here on this side of heaven. Romans 8:18 says, “The suffering that we encounter today cannot be compared to the glory that will be revealed in the future.” I clung to that, I was believing that. I knew, okay, I might not get over this, but I’ll get through it.
Psalms 23:4 says, “Even though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” It doesn’t say that we stay in the valley, that we remain in the valley, that we live in the valley. He’s going to see us through. And that’s why in these kind of moments what I’ve told everybody is I had two choices, I could be ticked off at God or I could run to God. And being ticked off at God was not going to change Annette’s circumstance, that wasn’t going to make her better, it wasn’t going to make me feel better. It was only going to make things worse. By running to God, I’m running to the rescue or I’m running to the only one who can sustain me in my suffering. And that’s what she did, she stood in the word, she played worship every day, she read her Bible, she was doing all the things, and I believe that’s why we made it.
Julie Lyles Carr:
What sustained you. Chuck, that’s just incredible. I can’t thank you enough for sharing such a close story, such a story that is a picture of a marriage and a faith walk and a family who is having to navigate through a long-term caregiving situation. Chuck, tell listeners where they can find you in all the places, and we’ll have Rebecca put those in the show notes as well, but tell listeners where they can find you and hear more about your story and all the exciting things you have coming up.
Chuck Tate:
Okay, well, I think I’m on all the social media platforms that exist. And my username, or handle, if you will, is the same on all of them. It’s just @ChuckETate. Like Chuck E. Cheese, but not. Like Chuck Norris.
Julie Lyles Carr:
There you go. Let’s go with that.
Chuck Tate:
And my website’s chucketate.com. But whatever social platform, that’s where you can go. I’m on TikTok the most.
Julie Lyles Carr:
All right. Well, friend, I can’t thank you enough. I know you are in the midst of a crazy week as I asked you if you could come on and be interviewed today. You’ve got camp going on and all kinds of teaching and finishing up book proposals and all kinds of stuff, so I can’t thank you enough for your graciousness in being here today. You’re just the best.
Chuck Tate:
Thank you so much, Julie. Again, honored to be here. And shout out to all the moms out there that are still standing.
Julie Lyles Carr:
That’s right.
Chuck Tate:
Thankful for all they do.
Julie Lyles Carr:
Thanks so much. And be sure and check out allmomdoes.com and AllMomDoes on the socials, because you’re going to find a great community of people walking through a lot of the same stuff you’re going through, or who have been there and have ideas for you about how to stand strong and how to hang in there, and practical tips too, so be sure and check that out. Rebecca has show notes, she puts them together every week, you’ll find all the links to the things that we’ve been talking about today.
And I love to hang out with you on the socials too, I’m Julie Lyles Carr all the places. This is the one thing I would ask you to do, I think this is so important, you probably have someone in your life who is navigating through a caregiving situation, whether that is for an aging parent or a spouse or a child who’s having some learning difficulties, would you please copy this link and send it to them? We want to make sure that people are encouraged, that they’re equipped, that they have hope, and I think that Chuck and Annette’s story is so powerful to do just that. So I would just love it if you grab this link and send it to a friend. And I’ll see you next time on The AllMomDoes Podcast.
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