Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now, with The Good News, here’s Angie.
SPEAKER 04 :
Hello there, friend. Angie Austin here with the good news. I love having authors on whose topics are of interest to me and hopefully you as well. And this really just caught my eye, the title. So I asked my PR friend, hey, can I get Dave and or Debbie Keene on? The book is titled Living in a Shadow of Grief, Enlarging Your Capacity to Grieve with Hope. And we are joined by Dave Keene. Hello, Dave. Hey, how you doing?
SPEAKER 05 :
i am doing quite well thank you so um give us first you know an overview of living in the shadow of grief enlarging your capacity to grieve with hope yeah so this book was a book i never wanted to write it came out of our our own grieving process of our son adam who passed away in june of 2022 he was 24 at the time he was a youth pastor married and had a child about to be born and he died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. And it’s the news that just you don’t expect. It’s a phone call that turns everything upside down and inside out. And as we were grieving our son, we were able to take hope in the reality of heaven. I would say I was a pastor and, for, for decades. Um, I’m, I’m still, uh, serving in a church, although my full-time job as a professor at Biola university in Los Angeles, California. Oh, and I’ve been a full-time faculty member for 16 years, but the reality of heaven in many ways was cartoonish to me, you know, as you know, it’s always that future hope, but never really thought much about it. And so, um, as we were grieving the reality of heaven became such a firm foundation. Not that everything was good, but that we had hope in the darkness and in the hardship. And after about two years of just working through grief and understanding that grief has changed us, like we are not the same people, we’re different, even though we might look the same and have some of the same characteristics, we are very different in how we view things. Our faith is much more, I would say… authentic where before i think it was easy to say well hey surrender it to god give to god now i know how difficult that really is to say god i still believe you’re good and loving but this isn’t easy and this wasn’t how i thought you would treat us or allow our lives to be and so about two years into that grieving journey my wife and i just talked with like you know we’re able to have good days like we can laugh we could worship god we could be intimate with each other. We have good days, but if we really pause to think about things, we would still feel that missing piece of our lives without them being gone. And we called it the shadow. We just said, like, it feels like we’re living in a shadow. And sometimes shadows are good because they provide coolness to you, but other times shadows are really difficult because it’s darkness and the unknown. And so we just looked at we’re always living in the shadow, but we don’t live without hope. And that’s where the subtitle of expanding your capacity to grieve with hope is the idea that grief never goes away. It’s not like time seals this wound. Um, grief is going to stay there, but it’s like grief is a ball in a jar. And instead of the ball getting smaller, the jar gets larger. And so you’re able to do other things and, um, and move forward. And in our case, we started a foundation to coach young youth pastors like Adam was, you know, so you’re able to do things that help your life move forward because you are expanding your capacity to grieve with hope.
SPEAKER 04 :
I think that’s so neat that you started a foundation to train other youth pastors because having three teenagers, they’re so influential on those kids’ lives, and those kids are searching for so much, and there’s so many things coming at them that I can’t even relate to anymore, just their lingo and the social media and the – when my kids tell me things, a relative said to them at our family reunion, you guys are such good kids. Do you think you’re good kids? And my youngest one who’s 17, she goes, uh, she said, um, if you met our friends or the kids we go to school with, you would know what great kids we really are. Like there’s so many things going on around us and so many temptations. And these youth pastors have had such an influence on my kids and they’re in young life and they go Sunday night after church, you know, to be around people. And I think about even when my daughter’s at a Christian college, one of them playing volleyball. And when she had to put down like who she wanted them to contact to ask about her, it was her. her youth pastor at church and, and, I don’t think there’s anyone other than parents and maybe grandparents who have as much influence on a kid. And sometimes I think more are these youth pastors. I mean, they can be life-changing. And sometimes when a kid’s in a really bad – I grew up in a really bad environment. If they just have one person that they can turn to to talk to or to model their behavior after, to aspire to be like, to have a mentor, a role model, that one person oftentimes I think is a youth pastor because – They’re so available to the kids and such great mentors to the kids. So I love that, that you’re training more kids like your son.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, we’re coming alongside the brand-new youth pastor and coaching up to stay in the game because ministry is not an easy journey sometimes. So it’s been very – It’s been very rewarding to come alongside. You can get more information at, it’s called the Adam Keene Foundation. If you go to Adam Keene, it’s spelled K-E-E-H-N, foundation.com, you can read more about the work that we’re doing and coaching youth pastors across the United States and Canada.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s so cool. Adam Keene, K-E-E-H-N, adamkeenefoundation.com. Correct. Yep. Perfect. All right. So in the book, Living in the Shadow of Grief, Enlarging Your Capacity to Grieve with Hope, a book you never wanted to write after losing your son. What was kind of the turning point that made you say, oh, boy, I’ve got to write this book? You know, because I think sometimes we feel like there’s one in us and we put it off and you’re like, well, I’ve got to do it. What was the turning point, you think?
SPEAKER 05 :
I think it was in talking to both my wife and other people that the reality of the shadow, like recognizing that grief changes you, was an aha moment. Because I think many people hold on to that five stages of grief where you have denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. That cycle is never meant to deal with death. That actual cycle was created by a psychologist How do you deal with bad news? How do you deal with a bad prognosis of health? And so you can go through a process that brings you to acceptance. And so for many people, because that’s all they know, they think, well, you should come to a point where you have accepted the laws and you’re moving forward. And we had a lot of people talk to us or our daughter-in-law out of his widow and think, hey, it’s been four months. It’s been six months. It’s been a year. Why aren’t you back to who you used to be? And the reality that we realized is, The person we were died the same moment Adam died. That person is never coming back, and many people, especially Christians, couldn’t recognize that. We had many people say very painful things with good intentions, like saying, well, at least your son’s in heaven. Why are you crying? Yes, I can rejoice that my son’s in heaven, but I lost what would have been. I’m grieving the dreams of his daughter being born in a few weeks and us having this journey as grandparents. People don’t realize how much grief changes. So when we wrote the book, we didn’t view that five-stage cycle of grief. We actually talked about things like reaction you have. In other words, when you first hear the devastating news, what do you do? So we talk about the suddenness of grief. We talk about the randomness of grief, the question of grief, which are all like, especially for those who are following Christ, they’re like, wait a minute, why would God allow this? You know, this question of grief, we actually talk about, do you have a theology of grief? Meaning like, What is your understanding of God in the midst of the suffering? And one of the things we talk about is that God and extreme hardship can coexist in the same place at the same time. So one doesn’t negate the other. You know, the Bible never directly says, here’s why suffering happens. We can look at theological ideas like the sin and the curse, but that really doesn’t comfort you when you’re going through such a great loss. You can recognize, yes, sin entered the world, and therefore death entered the world, but when death hits someone so unexpectedly and so young, that theological concept, even though true, doesn’t comfort. The reality is Christianity has the best answer for suffering, but it’s not the reason for suffering, meaning like all other worldviews would explain it as karma or God just wills what he wants to will. We actually, as Christians, say, God is brokenhearted for the suffering and offers the reality and hope of heaven, where he will reward those who have been forgiven by him, and he will punish the wicked still. And that might not be an answer to why suffering happens, but it gives us hope, and it’s the best we can do. And so helping the church recognize people when they go through great loss and death of a loved one they are going to be reacting in a certain way. And so part of every chapter was written to speak to the church, to say, if people within your church are grieving, here’s what to understand they’re going through. Here’s how to respond to them. Here’s how to help them. So each chapter is written both to the person who’s grieving as well as to those who are walking alongside the person in grief.
SPEAKER 04 :
I pulled up Adam Keene Foundation because I wanted to see who we were talking about. First of all, dying in his early 20s, he looks even younger than he was. He just looks like a kid. It’s so shocking that he died just before his daughter was born. I lost a brother. He was murdered, and I remember people, that whole thing of why they move on after a few weeks, and then their lives are obviously just the same. But so many things about you’re not picking up the phone to call him. He’s not coming over for dinner. You’re not seeing him at church. He’s not texting you every day with a joke or with, you know, a funny picture, or you would have been getting all kinds of texts from him about his baby that then you were getting from his widow. You know, so every aspect of your day, everywhere you turn, like you’re expecting to see him there and he’s not there. And, um, uh, I was reading about, um, Adam was a junior high youth pastor at Grace Church in Glendora and how quickly you got your mission of the Adam Keene Foundation going. Um, I’m assuming to, you know, help you deal with your grief and to make his life, you know, a purpose.
SPEAKER 05 :
Correct. Yeah. I would say, I mean, I was a teaching pastor when Adam passed out of church in San Clemente and, um, The church gave me a couple months off just to grieve and be with our family. And when I came back to the church, my first message was just that, like, I still believe in God, but I really have had my faith tested. And I told the church I likened myself to the man in Matthew 7 who built his house on the rock. And when the storms came, it was so significant that I wiped out other homes that were built on the sand. but this house stayed. And I think prior to this, I used to think, well, I meant the house was undamaged. It came out just fine. And no, the reality is now I picture that house with the windows blown out and there’s roof damage and grief has stripped, I would say, all the niceties away from my faith and has revealed the foundation that was built upon Christ. But man, I really did go through some struggles. And part of it is because I had to get to the understanding that God created Adam good, but with a weak blood vessel in his brain. There was no one to blame. It wasn’t like he made a choice or someone else did a violation. It simply was he was born with a weak blood vessel in his brain. And when it burst, the coroner told us it was so massive that Adam would have died instantly. And so I had to put my brain together. Like, how can God create Adam this way? Well, I am just part of that journey of, of coming to recognize, all right, God, I have to trust you in this, but that’s not an easy trust. That’s a, that’s a journey that I think.
SPEAKER 04 :
So for us, the foundation, would you stick around for another segment with us? Because we’re obviously still, you know, continuing our discussion. All right. We’ll be right back with the good news with Angie Austin and Dave Keene living in the shadow of grief.
SPEAKER 02 :
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SPEAKER 03 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
Hello there, friends. Angie Austin here with The Good News. We are continuing our discussion with Dave Keene. The book is Living in the Shadow of Grief, Enlarging Your Capacity to Grieve with Hope. Dave and Debbie Keene, the authors of the book, his wife, Debbie. And we’re talking about his son, Adam. He passed away from a brain aneurysm three weeks before his baby daughter died. It was due to be born, and they’ve started a foundation, the Adam Keene Foundation, to help to train up other youth pastors, as Adam was a youth pastor outside of L.A. in Glendora, California. And you’re still pastoring? Is it in San Clemente?
SPEAKER 05 :
When Adam passed, I was a teaching pastor, but I was part-time because my full-time job was being a professor. at Butler University, where I still am a professor, but I’m no longer at that church in San Clement, another church in Carlsbad, California. Oh, okay. But I was a youth pastor for 29 years, and so we started this foundation alongside brand-new youth pastors to continue the legacy of Adam’s passion for the gospel. And it has been partly cathartic, like this has helped us, understand his impact and continue in other people. And in that sense, that is the full definition of expanding your capacity to grieve with hope. That you can pour your love for someone into something else to honor that person.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, we’re discussing the book that you said you never wanted to write and that you and your wife felt compelled to write, Living in the Shadow of Grief, Enlarging Your Capacity to Grieve with Hope. What do you want people to take away from it? And by the way, you can get it on Kindle and paperback on Amazon. That’s where I am right now looking at the book. What do you want people to learn from the book?
SPEAKER 05 :
The journey of grief for us was one that didn’t, like I said earlier, reflect this pattern of anger, denial, you know, bargaining. depression, acceptance, because there was no bargaining with grief. And so we had to rethink of our grief in new terms. And that’s really what we’re hoping people see, that they can move from just that raw reaction of grief to responding in ways that help them work through grief to moving forward and living with the broken heart But that state of doesn’t have to be depression. That state of losing a broken heart can actually then become one that is built upon the reality of heaven and the hope that we have in Jesus Christ. And grief will always be part of us. I don’t think we will ever stop grieving in some ways. We’re not weepy every day. We don’t cry all the time. We’re no longer in the rawness of grief, but we still miss our son. And I think people need to recognize that. that living with grief doesn’t mean that you’re depressed. It doesn’t mean that you’re weepy, but it does mean that you recognize your life has changed. You recognize and remember the person that you miss. And that, in that sense, I think we need to stop trying to make people who are grieving get back to some kind of pre-death normalcy. That may be true for the older person who loses their spouse of 60 years and There’s a long illness. And so they had prepared themselves to let go. But even older widows that I’ve talked with, they still miss their spouse. And they still grieve the spouse, even though they’ve moved on into other types of relationships. There’s still… And I love the line from the Marvel show WandaVision that says, what is grief if not love persevering? And I think that’s the reality that, you know, you love somebody and so you still are going to miss them this side of heaven. And I think that should be recognized as part of the journey we have in faith. not our grief negating faith.
SPEAKER 04 :
I think it was Queen Elizabeth’s quote about grief, and it’s the price we pay for that great love that we’ve had in our lives. And in the book, you talk about living with grief. We discussed people assuming you to just be the same or be better, and you said the minute that your son died of the brain aneurysm, early 20s, almost ready to be to be a new father, that that life for you, your wife, his siblings and his his widow, that that that life was the way you were, that was over. So when you’re living with grief, you talk about grief and depression. Are they different? Does it feel the same? Because I can imagine that darkness that comes over you probably does feel like something that’s very difficult to get out of that cloud.
SPEAKER 05 :
Yeah, we actually do have a chapter in the book that was written by a friend of ours who’s a licensed therapist. And she actually writes a chapter on what’s the difference between prolonged grief and depression. And I think the difference, when you get into depression, there’s a hopelessness that you can’t move out of. It almost is like this complete, I’m buried by the grief. Where prolonged grief, I think… can look like depression at some degree but it also is like i i’m moving forward i’m making good choices for my my well-being and those that i have to care for um depression is almost like you’re disempowered to do anything and so we do have a discussion in the book to say what are some warning signs to look for that this has actually moved into like a clinical depression where you actually might need to get help we we got counseling from the very beginning both As a family, as a couple, we had multiple counseling people in our lives we were talking with. And so it’s going to feel like a depressive state in some ways, but I think through counseling, that’s where you’re starting to, you know, to kind of form that foundation of hope again, where depression, I think you’re just void of that. Where is my hope? And you’re just really in a sense of like, I don’t have a purpose in life anymore. And that’s why I think depression can be dangerous. And so that’s why we actually included a whole chapter so that you can differentiate between grief and depression.
SPEAKER 04 :
In Section 4 in the book, when you’re talking about dealing with grief, enlarging your capacity to grieve with hope, I do – Understand that creating the Dave, pardon me, Adam Keen Foundation to train up other youth pastors gave you guys a real sense of purpose and hope. And in section four, enlarging your capacity to agree with hope, you talk about where is the joy and turn to good. So help us out in that arena. Because I would think that feeling joy, experiencing joy, finding joy would be like a longer road to find that joy or, you know, more sporadic.
SPEAKER 05 :
Right. Yeah, so the idea of, you know, when you’re going through, you know, about our third year in, Debbie and I just felt like, why am I still, you know, feeling this? And it was almost like this frustration. It was almost like this discouragement that we came to this realization, this is a longer road and harder road than we thought it was going to be.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 05 :
You know, because you think, like, it should get easier, and it’s like, wait, we’re three years in, and it’s, in many ways, the rawness isn’t, as painful, but man, we still are dealing with stuff. And there was that discouragement that I had to recognize this is a hard road. And so the idea of Turn to Good is to start looking for things in your life that can restore an understanding of what you have to be grateful for. So my wife and I started a spiritual discipline that we call prayers of gratitude. And for us, we would use whenever we see a butterfly. And the reason for that is because, A, when Adam first passed, it was June, and we saw a lot of butterflies as we were outside grieving as a family. But secondly, where we live in Southern California, butterflies are frequent, but they’re kind of spontaneous. Like you can’t expect a butterfly at this place at this time all the time, right? So the idea was like, we were being surprised by the butterfly and that would then, we would mentally pause what we were doing and force ourselves to say, guys, thank you for Adam. And we would name something about Adam we were grateful for. And then we’d force ourselves to say, guys, thank you for, and we would name something else, something small, something that we’d see, God, you’re working here. And that was forcing us to turn to the good, to see that life wasn’t all negative and loss, but life was. did have good and love and joy. And that’s where you started to see, okay, God, where are you working around me? How have you been working silently, even though I missed it, you have been still very present. And I think that turning is what caused us to say, Adam was silent. You know, his journey to faith as some teenagers was difficult, right? When he was a pastor’s kid in middle school and high school, you know, he wasn’t living like passionately for God. You don’t want to be known as a pastor’s kid. He had a true coming to Jesus moment, you know, a senior of high school and going to Bible University and going into ministry. Like, I never thought that would be his journey. You just look and say, God, wow. God, thank you for what you did with Adam, and thank you for how our relationship was. And you start to look at, I want to continue his passion for life and for the gospel with other young men that were 24 years old and young women that are young and his age when he passed. And I think that’s what that practice is. You have to be intentional. And say, I want to look to the good. I want to turn to things that could honor my loved one in a way that, man, they’re being celebrated.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, I love the idea of you encouraging your readers to develop gratitude in spite of grief. One of my mentors, when he was going blind, he was planning on being an NFL player, and he went blind, and now he’s written 60 books, and he’s working on his ninth movie, and he’d go to his grandma, and he would want to complain about losing his vision and his future, and she’d say, I’ll listen to all your complaints, but do your golden list, which for them was 10 things that they’re grateful for, and then come back and then I’ll listen to all your complaints. And he said, by the time I did that, I didn’t really have that many complaints to come to her with because gratitude is such a powerful way to deal with everyday life and things that aren’t everyday like grief. We’ve got a little bit of time left. What was the hardest chapter of the book for you and your wife to write?
SPEAKER 05 :
on grief and losing your, it was actually the first chapter. We really, it was in chapter one, we tell Adam the story. And so we wrote that chapter last. We knew that would be too hard. I mean, the whole, it took us a year to write the book and every chapter was tears and every chapter was remembering our journey. But we waited until we actually went to Hawaii and kind of did a, like a retreat, just the two of us and, and wrote Adam’s story out. Um, Just because we knew it would be difficult to reflect on how much we still miss him. So, yeah, that was the hardest chapter. But it was needed to give people an understanding of who Adam was and the grief that we were feeling. So it was important that we addressed it.
SPEAKER 04 :
I think you do a really good job, too, on his website, Adam Keene Foundation, of describing him. And his widow says, if someone asked me to explain my husband, and she gives a description of him and how he dressed and his sense of humor and how warm he was and his tattoos and how welcoming he was. And as a youth pastor, inviting people to church and making them feel welcome. included. And I think you guys do a really good, I feel like I kind of know him after looking at his pictures and just kind of glancing over his website, Adam Keene Foundation. And what a great way to give yourself purpose through your grief to train up other youth pastors like your son that you lost at just 24. And, you know, now be helping to raise his daughter and training up other youth pastors to have an influence on kids, which with me having three teenagers, I greatly appreciate. We don’t have a lot of time left, but what advice would you give to someone who has recently experienced the loss of a loved one?
SPEAKER 05 :
Give yourself the grace to grieve fully, to allow yourself to cry when you feel like you need to cry. Don’t feel like you have to measure up or conform to someone else’s timeline. choose wisely who you invite into your inner circle. There’s going to be a lot of people who feel like they need to do something for you, but they’re experiencing their own grief and they want to do something, but the reality is you’re probably going to have to pick two or three, maybe four people and that’s your inner circle and they’re meant to lift you up and protect you from other people. So just grieve as you need to grieve for as long as you need to grieve, but keep your focus on where our hope lies, that it’s not in this world, but it’s what Christ has done.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, Dave, I really appreciate you coming on the program, Living in the Shadow of Grief, Enlarging Your Capacity to Grieve with Hope. Dave and Debbie Keene, and again, the Adam Keene Foundation, Adam and then Keene, K-E-E-H-N, K-E-E-H-N, if you want to find out more about their program to raise up other youth pastors in Adam’s name. Thank you. Real blessing to have you on the show, Dave. My pleasure. God bless. God bless you.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
