Reckless Faith in Action: Beth Guckenberger #160

Highlights

• Beth’s early years in idyllic circumstances (4:11)
• Her dad’s cancer diagnosis, and the crisis of faith it triggered (5:51)
• Looking for the “precious” in life (7:22)
• The gift of hope her dad gave her (12:09)
• “Spiritual bruises” (15:19)
• The beginnings of Back2Back Ministries (23:06)
• The burr in her saddle (31:16)
• Refined faith versus reckless faith (33:41)
• A tragic statistic about orphans (43:41)
• Her five-point child development plan (46:58)
• Beth’s message of hope to listeners (54:48)

Transcript

Warwick Fairfax:

Welcome to Beyond the Crucible. I’m Warwick Fairfax, the founder of Beyond the Crucible.

Beth Guckenberger:

I keep saying we all have little banks of testimonies and some of those testimonies in our banks are stories other people tell us about the things that have happened in their life. This is why we have podcasts like this so people can put someone else’s story in their bank of testimonies, and some of the stories in our bank of testimonies come from our own life, things we eyewitness that have happened. When we’re in maybe one of those crucible moments, we’re in one of those moments where like, “Man, I do not know which way this is going to go,” then we withdraw from that bank of testimonies and we can pull from it hope, perspective, encouragement, discernment, wisdom, whatever we need.

Gary Schneeberger:

We’ve welcomed about a hundred guests to be on The Crucible since our first episode three and a half years ago. That perspective from this week’s guest, Beth Guckenberger, could serve as the mission statement for why we produce this show week in and week out, to provide listeners like you a bank of testimonies from which you can withdraw insights and action steps to help you move from tragedy to triumph. Hi, I’m Gary Schneeberger, co-host of the show. In this conversation with Warwick, Guckenberger explains how the death of her father when she was certain he would pull through knocked her off balance, making her question the faith in which her life was rooted.

But when she realized God’s ways were not her way, that they were grander and more mysterious than she had ever imagined, that knowledge was fuel for her journey to care for the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of orphans through Back2Back Ministries, which she and her husband started by writing a personal check and which now has 400 employees rescuing the most vulnerable all across the globe. “If you know what you’re going to be doing 50 Sundays from now, your faith is not reckless enough,” she says. A bold perspective you just may decide to deposit in your bank of testimony.

Warwick Fairfax:

Well, Beth, I’m so excited to have you here. I first met you and your husband Todd at a Taylor event, just, I don’t know, back in February and you spoke a few times and I was just blown away by your story. In particular, you talked about reckless faith. I mean, I just could not get that word out of my mind because I’m not… I mean, I’ve done some pretty bold things I suppose, including a somewhat stupid $2.25 billion takeover of my family’s media company, which I guess that was bold, but it wasn’t the smartest move, which listeners are pretty well aware of. That concept of reckless faith, I mean, you talk in your book about a burr in your saddle, you’ve written a lot of books and this is the first one, but I had to read that book. There was something about it that’s like, “What does that mean? That does not feel like me, but I need to understand it.”

It was almost haunting. I know you don’t like people saying your book’s haunted them, but in the best sense of the word, haunting. All that’s to say it’s a privilege to have you here, and I kind of just wanted to start a bit, Beth, with a bit of the backstory, the origin story of kind of where you grew up, your parents, and maybe even… Obviously, you’re a very missional person having spent 15 years in Mexico with orphan ministry and now Back2Back Ministries, but as you’re telling your story of growing up, I wonder if there’s any threads that looking back now you can see how you ended up where you did. Just tell us a bit about a young Beth and growing up and your family and all.

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me, both of you, on this conversation. I always like to imagine that a listener is sitting at the table with us. When I think about telling my family’s story, it was, gosh, it was very idyllic for most of my childhood. My parents loved each other, they loved God, they loved my siblings and I. We had only safe adults around us, so I certainly grew to understand that there were dark forces in the world, there were people doing bad things, but I never interacted really with any of them. While that made for healthy self-esteem and it made for a healthy understanding of connection and attachment and communication, it also… One of the unintended consequences of that kind of idyllic childhood is that I formed a theology around this idea that if you do your thing, if you do right by God, he’ll do right by you because that’s certainly what I had seen.

I had watched… I had been encouraged by my parents and I had watched God do some big things even as a teenager, then through college. We started a Young Life ministry when I was a freshman in high school, and I remember the club leaders saying, “If we get 50 people in your parents’ basement, that would be killer.” I immediately thought to myself, “We need to get a hundred people in that basement.” We had well more than a hundred that first day, and just that spirit of asking God for big things, bold things. I would later use phrases like “assignments that outsized me,” wanted to stretch bigger than anyone thought was possible, and then giving God credit for it. I had those muscles pretty well-exercised all through college. Lots of mission trip experiences. Lots of thinking, “Man, I have God on my side, nothing is impossible.”

It was just a little speed bump when the year I got married, I was 22, and my Dad was 51. He was diagnosed with cancer and I told him, “Hey, no worries. We know God. It doesn’t matter what the cancer counts say. It doesn’t matter what a doctors says. It’s going to be okay. God, he lets water get pooled on an office and still lights it up on fire. There’s still like anything is possible, and even before I should have, I was standing in front of churches telling people, “Don’t be crying about my Dad. God’s going to do something really amazing in the end.”

The last weeks of his life, he could see that the crash was coming because he knew he was dying and he knew I was not facing that. He knew that once reality hit me, it was going to be bad and it was. I remember the moment my father passed, my brothers and mother and I were in the room and all of a sudden you could tell when he was gone. I looked at my brothers and I’m like, “Dad just moved. Heaven’s not a theory. It’s actually like an address and he moved there.” I had assumed I wanted my GPS set to where my parents’ GPS had been set to because that looked like a pretty good life, but all of a sudden the GPS got moved. I thought, “How do I live a life that’s based on things that are still to come and not on the things that are in the here and now?”

It was conflicting with this deep disappointment that God had failed me and I broke up with him for a while. I walked away from my faith for a season. It wasn’t comfortable for me because it’s really all I’d ever known, but it was this like, “Can bad things happen and God still be good?” A pretty primal, primary question to ask, but it just took my breath away, and so when God and I got back together again, I had to accept that He was sovereign and if He was doing something, regardless if I didn’t like it, or worse, didn’t understand it, I could trust it. Later, I would find a verse in the Book of Jeremiah that says, “When you extract the precious from the worthless, then you can be spokesman.” That’s in the 15th chapter of the Book of Jeremiah.

I didn’t know that verse, but that was what I was busy doing there in the aftermath, trying to figure out in the midst of something that felt worthless to me. Death feels worthless, like that should not have happened. How can I find precious in the midst of it? It really set me up for then what would become a lifetime of working in some of the hardest and darkest stories around our globe. I had my eyes now peeled for precious.

Warwick Fairfax:

You know what’s interesting, Beth, is on this podcast and, I don’t know, I’ve had like 150 episodes or so, we hear a lot of really tough origin stories. I mean, the stuff you experience on a daily basis with the orphanage, that’s not uncommon. Victims of abuse, abandonment, physical challenges, quadriplegics, paraplegics, financial failures, drug addiction, I mean, we’ve had pretty much them all, but your origin story is unusual because it was a good, loving family and yet some… I mean, I haven’t thought of this before, but sometimes there can be challenges when you grow up with a seemingly perfect, almost Disneyland kind of experience.

I mean, how could that be challenging? Every child wants that. Probably every orphan you’ve ever ministered to has said, “Boy, I wish I could have grew up the way you did, Beth. That just sounds a life I can’t even imagine. I can’t even contemplate.” Does that makes sense? Talk about how-

Beth Guckenberger:

Yes.

Warwick Fairfax:

… I think you’ve really explained even growing up in the so-called “perfect family” with loving, wonderful, God-loving parents, that can set you up, well, I don’t want to say not for failure, but that can have its own unintended consequences. Does that make sense at all?

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah, I mean, for sure. Just no one’s immune and I would love to have God who taught me the lessons that I learned in that season in a hundred other ways, but I certainly had to metabolize at the most basic level, do I trust God? Do I really believe this life is about that one? Because if I do, then I believe that God created my Dad for eternity and his plan was not thwarted when he only had a little over 50 of those years here on Earth. He was still created for eternity and will live for eternity. Am I going to really believe that I’m living for a world to come? When I work… so I work, I don’t know if we’ve mentioned it yet, but I work with orphaned and vulnerable children around the world and they have some really hard stories. Some of those stories, those knots are not going to get untied here on Earth.

The consequences of the choices that other people have made ad that they have to face, they’ll carry with them forever here on Earth. There are some miracle stories. There are ways in which you can’t believe it how stories get turned around, but for a lot of kids, they have to live with the consequences of choices parents made before they even got to raise their hand and say, “This isn’t fair.” I think… so I’ve been doing that work 26 years now. I think if you were to poll some of the communities where I serve, I think what they’d say that I bring to the table is a sense of hope, and hope is a pretty… it’s a powerful gift to bring into a conversation, a hope that things can still be good even when they’re hard, a hope that your questions can remain unanswered and you can still find peace. A hope that there are good days still ahead, even when it’s something that feels devastating.

There’s a lot of messages of hope out there, and I think that probably walking through my Dad’s death and the aftermath of that impact on my family, his parting gift to me was God is sovereign and He’s going to have hope. That’s… I will forever carry those inside of me and all the kind of complications that life threw in the aftermath of that, the adult-sized problems that I had not yet experienced.

Warwick Fairfax:

Maybe one of the other gifts maybe he gave in your upbringing even before all that, you always had hope. We’re not going to have 50 people for Young Life. We’re going to have a hundred, 150. You have, I guess, a sense of hope ingrained, whether it’s God-given or parents or family. It sounds like that is something that you came out of the box or through your parents regard, if that makes sense, that sense of optimism. There’s probably a few dents along the way, but sure seems like you came out of the box that way, right?

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah, I do think it’s a part… It’s part of it’s temperament, whether you the Enneagram or your Myers-Briggs or whatever your personality profile is, I always tend to skew that way, so some of that is just part of who how I was made to be. Part of it is having seen things, seeing marriages that look like there was no hope for them getting resurrected, watching prodigals come home, watching sicknesses get reversed. I keep saying we all have little banks of testimonies and some of those testimonies in our banks are stories other people tell us about the things that have happened in their life. This is why we have podcasts like this so people can put someone else’s story in their bank of testimonies. Some of the stories in our bank of testimonies come from our own life, things we eyewitness that have happened.

When we’re in maybe one of those crucible moments, we’re in one of those moments where like, “Man, I do not know which way this is going to go,” then we withdraw from that bank of testimonies and we can pull from it hope, perspective, encouragement, discernment, wisdom, whatever we need from the things that we have accrued. When I think about particularly my childhood and kind of early adult life, the way it set me up for some of the challenges we would have in international orphan care ministry and community development around the world is like kind of make me. You tell me it’s not possible? All things are possible. Really, anything can happen.

When most people tell me something can’t work, it feels frankly like a dare to me. In fact, someone asked me the other day if… Reckless Faith came out almost 15 years ago and they were asking me, “Do you think the older you get the less reckless you are because the stakes are higher and you realize?” I said, “No, actually, it’s quite the opposite. The older I get the more reckless I become because I now have more deposits in my bank of testimonies and I now can tell you with even more certainty that I’ll be just fine.” Even more than I ever imagined is possible is possible, and so Reckless Faith is a relevant… it’s a relevant message for me still today.

Warwick Fairfax:

That’s mind-blowing. I want to fully hit the bounce back because you mentioned it a couple of times. You’ve very kindly said it to me, so I’ll hold up for people. This is the original one, Reckless Faith. That is mind-blowing. I love the subtitle, Let Go and be Led. I mean, that is just… yeah, that says it all. Before we kind of talk a little bit about how you bounced back through this, one of the talks you gave at the Taylor event, I think you mentioned there was another challenge and you’ve adopted some kids. It was an adoption challenge that was not easy, and you used the words “spiritual bruises.” I think you used that phrase, and a bit like reckless faith, it’s like, “Gosh, I think I know what that word means.” What an incredible phrase, spiritual bruises. Again, it was just swimming around in my brain that phrase. I think you talked about I believe just the experience with your Dad left you, I don’t know, more prone to be triggered by different things. I don’t know if that makes sense at all. I remember-

Beth Guckenberger:

Mm-hmm.

Warwick Fairfax:

… something like that. Talk about what you meant by that, that part of the talk and maybe it was another-

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah.

Warwick Fairfax:

… crucible, if you will.

Beth Guckenberger:

Like a year or two after my Dad was gone, Todd and I tried to, my husband and I tried to adopt a set of sisters that were one and three at one of the orphanages that we served. We felt like God told us to do it, and we started that arduous process of an international adoption and the paperwork it requires. Then, halfway through that process it got disrupted, and maybe if I had been in a healthier place, it would’ve just felt like something along the lines of this just wasn’t meant to be, but instead because I was tender, I was mad. Like, “Here I am again feeling like I thought you were powerful. You’re obviously not that powerful or this thing would have happened. Why didn’t you stop what stopped it?” I now know because of the work we do in trauma training in our organization that anger and all of its forms is a secondary emotion sitting on the primary emotion of fear.

I was actually scared. I just didn’t have the words to say that, so it came out like anger. Then, I got pregnant with my first child and in the process of that pregnancy delivered her in Mexico where we were living at the time. Pretty fast after, about six weeks after her birth, I got a call about a little boy who was her exact same age and who had been moved from Mexican state into another and his international adoption eligibility was shrinking. Someone was just looking for an American family who was paperwork-ready who would execute an adoption that very week. I was paperwork-ready because I’d gotten ready for those two sisters the year before and we kind of sprung into action and felt like God was opening this crazy door for us and, is this what he always meant to have happen?

We brought my son home that week and he and my daughter are the same age, and it was really exciting for a hot second until I realized that he had some kind of disability. I didn’t have any expertise in disabilities, so I didn’t know what it was. It turns out he was diagnosed eventually with severe cerebral palsy and the physician was able to let us know he’ll never walk or talk or live independently.

While we at that point already were pretty crazy about him, we loved him like a son, it was another pressing in on that spiritual bruise like, “Gosh, I don’t even know what to do at this point. I’m definitely not going to pray for healing because that did not work. I’m supposed to trust You, God, but is this really what You had in mind? Now, this young boy needs a lot of medical attention that would require us to live in the United States, and I thought you wanted us to live as missionaries in another country, so which one is it? Are You asking me to do that or this? Could You just make up Your mind?”

Again, a lot of anger coming out, but it was not really anger, it was actually just fear. I just didn’t know how to say it. Then, the way God healed my spiritual bruise 18 months later, my son still had met none of his developmental milestones. One afternoon just started to move across the floor and, I mean, I didn’t even know what I was looking at. I left the room for just a minute to get a camera to video him, and when I came back in the room he was all the way across the floor. He pulled himself up on a couch and turned around and walked across the room into my arms. I realized I was looking at a miracle. I’d never seen a miracle before. I never even knew anybody who had seen a miracle, but I couldn’t deny what I was looking at.

Eventually, that young boy, my son never again had any other signs of cerebral palsy. He was considered medically healed. Went on to become a pretty tremendous athlete, played football for the university where our children attended. I got to share his story with his university campus, and at one point when I was telling the story and I got to the part of his healing, the students started to cheer because that’s what kids do. I tell them, “Listen, I’m not sharing this,” and the same thing is true for your listeners, “I’m not sharing this so that people know wildly personal things about my family. I’m just here to testify that what God taught me is that with Him, still all things are possible because I’m the same girl that prayed to the same God for two people that I loved, and one of those stories did not turn out the way that I wanted it and one of them turned out better than I even asked it for.

The way that God healed my spiritual bruise is He basically whispered to my very soul, “Just trust Me. No matter what happens, I am good and I am to be trusted.” That lesson I have carried with me, my son is 25, I’ve carried with me the last 25 years because there were lots of stories when I find myself subsequently there were lots of crucible moments, disappointments. I thought I heard you. Did you want this or that? Just let me know. This is not turning out the way I thought it was. I don’t like this circumstance. I can’t control this circumstance. The reminder of that God is good and He can be trusted has carried me through a lot of hard seasons.

Warwick Fairfax:

I mean, there’s so much from what you just said. That is remarkable stories you share in your book, your daughter Amber and your son Evan. You mentioned looking back that whole artificial twinning that your daughter is significantly responsible being used by God for your son walking. I don’t know if kids tease each other about that saying, “Hey-

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah-

Warwick Fairfax:

… “you know-

Beth Guckenberger:

… very much so all the time.

Warwick Fairfax:

… just remember it’s all me.

Beth Guckenberger:

Every touchdown she said, “Those are my seven points, by the way.”

Warwick Fairfax:

I’m sure it’s all-

Beth Guckenberger:

Yes it’s all…

Warwick Fairfax:

… in good nature and fun-

Beth Guckenberger:

Fun, yes.

Warwick Fairfax:

… you know?

Beth Guckenberger:

Yes, yes.

Warwick Fairfax:

That’s just remarkable, and I think what you said is sort of deposits in the bank is that sometimes things will work out he way we hope they would, and God is sovereign in a way we hope it’d be. Sometimes He’s sovereign in ways that it’s hard to understand, but those drops of grace, that manna from Heaven as sort of the Israelites had, sort of that whatever, that sort of sweet bread that came from Heaven to get them through the desert as they were fleeing Egypt, those do get you through. You remember when God really showed up, and there are other times you can’t understand, but you now He’s sovereign, so it’s those are the drops of grace that help us to go through and carry on and trust and believe. He doesn’t have to, but He does, which is remarkable.

I want to talk a bit about your ministry with Back2Back Ministries and it kind of, at least reading the book, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it felt like it all started in Albania. You’d say, “Well-

Beth Guckenberger:

Mm-hmm.

Warwick Fairfax:

… “it all started in Mexico, didn’t it?” Well, yes and no. Right? You were there with Cru in ’94 with Todd and you saw this child on the street, so talk about how there was something about that event that, I don’t know, you talk about defining moments. Maybe that was a defining moment that altered the course of your life, so talk about that story. I think later you talk about… I believe it’s about this, the… Is that, well, I was going to say burr under the saddle. That’s probably a different story.

Beth Guckenberger:

Mm-hmm.

Warwick Fairfax:

Forgive me.

Beth Guckenberger:

It’s all connected. I mean, it’s okay-

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah-

Beth Guckenberger:

… this is not a book report, yeah.

Warwick Fairfax:

Thank you.

Beth Guckenberger:

I think-

Warwick Fairfax:

Yeah, that… We’ll-

Beth Guckenberger:

… I-

Warwick Fairfax:

… get to that other story in a second, but talk about the Albanian kid and thank you. I’m glad it’s not a book report, even though I’ve got lots of notes, but still, yeah, talk about that Albanian kid.

Beth Guckenberger:

I was going to say you would still pass. Yeah. You know, when you look at your life at any point in hindsight, you realize how there were these inciting incidents that happened that set you on a course that you don’t know at the time, “Hey, my whole life is changing.” You just are living the life that you’re living, but you can look back and realize, “That’s why that happened.” I think we were college students at Indiana University and Albania had been under a pretty difficult government for about two generations. They were essentially couped and we knew that they had about a month and a half where they would be reorganizing and probably shut out the Western world again and, therefore, all evangelical influences. They were asking college students if anybody could afford to take an additional week out of classes and we’d go for two weeks to Albania.

They were just trying to blitz the country to expose as many people as possible to the Gospel. Obviously, I mean, as you know, I like to say yes. I’m like, “Yes, sign me up,” so we went… He was my current husband, but at the time he was just my boyfriend, and we were going around to university campuses and government buildings and local parks and telling people about Jesus. Then, I think now looking back, there probably was a miscommunication and there was an afternoon free and they were trying to figure out something to do with us. They took us to an orphanage and it gave me a sensitivity, it was the first orphanage I’d ever been to, to the idea that somebody… I mean, I had watched Little Orphan Annie. I knew the concept of an orphan, but I’d never actually met an orphan, and it was hard for me to imagine institutionalized orphans, like kids who were living in homes.

Then, the very next day we were walking down the main highway in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I saw a toddler that was asleep on the sidewalk without a single adult in sight. I kind of rushed over to that child with my newfound glasses that were seeing vulnerable kids in new ways since the day before. The translator hurried over to tell me to not touch the child and I said, “Well, I mean, he’s out here all by himself. Somebody needs to hold him.” He told me it was a gypsy child, that the gypsies were keeping kids awake all night long so they would sleep during the day. He said, “If you lift up his side, you’ll see people have been throwing money at him all day. They’ll come around at dusk, wake up the children, collect the money, and stay up all night.”

I mean, again, I literally grew up on a street that was called Sunday Lane. It was as picturesque and idyllic as you can possibly imagine for a street called Sunday Lane. I just didn’t have any worldview that somebody would treat a child like that. I understood and respected that they didn’t want me to touch the child, but I wasn’t quite ready to leave him, so I sat on the bench for a seat for a little bit with Todd and with this translator and just kept wondering out loud like, “Are there more kids like him? Does he know that this is being done? If somebody picked him up, is the parent miles away? Does anybody care?” Just kind of the hardest versions of those questions you could ask, I was just kind of outward-processing.

On the way home on the airplane, people were all buzzing on our plane about some of the crazy experiences we had in a country so far from the state we were living in in the United States and with a people group, a country that was in utter chaos trying to reorganize itself. Just remarkable stories we had seen, and honestly, all I could think about was that gypsy kid and that orphanage I had been in and, what did it mean? How many more kids out there were like that? What did that mean for us for the rest of our life? When I think about the story of the life I live today, it very much started on that park bench when I just felt kind of gobsmacked with the reality that kids are treated that way.

Warwick Fairfax:

I feel like in God’s providence, that was one moment he dropped in your life, and then I feel like a little bit after there was another moment he dropped, which was-

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah.

Warwick Fairfax:

… the story I was getting the two together in which you were visiting Mexico. I don’t think you’d moved there permanently yet. It was a missions trip and you were in an orphanage and you were providing toys and hamburgers to the kids, but yet one little girl did something unexpected with that hamburger. Talk about what she did and why it affected you much and why that was a defining moment that that little girl in that orphanage on that missions trip in Mexico.

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah, we were participating in a mission trip that someone else had organized, and we were painting a wall around the church from blue to green, which is kind of okay, except for the year before we’d been there and painted it from green to blue and people were just trying to keep us busy. I don’t think any… We weren’t swept up in anybody’s strategic plan or mission.

Warwick Fairfax:

Okay.

Beth Guckenberger:

In the back of my mind, I’d never left that gypsy child and what it had stirred in me, and so just pretty miserable on this experience and wanting kids to have a different kind of experience than the one we were having. I said to Todd, “Do you think there’s any orphans in this city?” He didn’t have any idea, but man, it was worth exploring, so we eventually found an orphanage and the director of that children’s home told us that the kids hadn’t had meat in over a year. The next day, we brought enough meat that we thought would feed those 50 kids for a month. I was serving the hamburgers from off of a griddle right into kids’ plates and hands. This little girl came up for the fifth time and Todd was like, “Hey, I don’t know a single preschooler who can eat five hamburgers, so something’s going on with the food. Why don’t you follow her and see if you can find out what’s going on?”

I followed her like up some stairs and down a hall and into the doorframe of what was her dorm room. I stopped because from that vantage point, I could see the other preschoolers. They were all waiting, helping each other lift up mattresses and they were sticking those burgers underneath them saving them for another day because they’d never tasted or seen anything like that really probably in their memories. I just kept thinking like, “Gosh, I know people who would buy hamburgers for orphans if they just knew how to get them here.”

The vision of the life that I live was born in that moment, like the idea that we could build a bridge. I didn’t realize at the time that things would flow in both directions over that bridge. I didn’t understand. I had a lot to learn about poverty and a lot to learn about nonprofit work. I had a lot to learn about the language and the culture, and there was still a lot of lessons ahead for me, but in that moment I thought, “Hmm, I think that God’s kids are supposed to do something about this, and I mean, it might as well be me.”

On the way home, we talked about, what would it look like for us to try to do that? I got back. Mission trips are usually a week. I went home and drove my same car, my same job, same condo, same friends, same life, but I kept saying like, “I feel like I got a burr in my saddle. I’m trying to sit down in the same place and I just feel something poking at me.” Eventually, that burr caused us to just want to do something now even though we weren’t really in a position to.

We decided we were double income, no kids. We are just going to live off of one of our teaching salaries and save the other one. At the end of that year, sitting on what we thought would be a pot of gold, we were going to ask God what He would have us do. Would we buy a bunch of hamburgers with that gold? Or would we buy a plane ticket with that gold? What would He want us to do? It turns out, He wanted us to go, and so that one year of a teaching salary basically supported us for a year of living in Mexico, and that’s the start of the organization that we still lead today.

Gary Schneeberger:

One of the things that you said to me when we talked earlier, Beth, was that you started Back2Back Ministries, right? It was birthed out of your checkbook.

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah.

Gary Schneeberger:

Fast forward, now you have… You told me it’s probably, and it could be more now, 400 employees, so from a line item in your checkbook to 400 employees, that is, as they say, money well spent, right? I mean, you have to look back on that and go that leap that you took was the right leap to take, and in all humility it’s made quite an impact.

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah, it’s again where you look back and you realize when you say yes to anything, “Yes, I’ll go; yes, I’ll give; yes, I’ll do; yes, I’ll say whatever, you really only see the step that you are about to take. You don’t have any idea where that step will lead you, what relationship it’ll put you into, what door it will open. You just don’t know, and if we spend too much time evaluating what’s going to happen after our yeses and nos, we might get kind of stunned to inactivity. I’ve found that I recognize a closed door pretty fast, so I tend to say yes first, and if the door shut, okay, it’s shut. If it’s not shut, who the heck knows what’s on the other side? That’s part of the adventure of life really.

Warwick Fairfax:

You know, Beth, that leads to there’s a lot of fascinating things in this book, but you talk in a number of places about a refined faith versus a reckless faith, and boy, I mean, I’m one of those people that, yes, I’ve made my leaps of faith. I’m one of these people that, I don’t know, I like to think I’m as fearful as the next person and very cautious, think, think, plan, and go think again before taking a baby step. The only thin that’s gotten me out of it, if I feel like the Lord’s telling me to do something, I will tend to do it come what may because I’ve got a fair amount of perseverance, so I guess God gave me that to balance out my innate caution and fear, which is another story.

I tend to be by nature a little bit in the refined faith category. Talk a bit about the difference because I’ve never heard it described that way. It’s like, again, that was haunted me a bit in the best sense of the word. I mean, this is not a thing that most listeners will be familiar with, reckless versus refined. Tell the listeners what the difference is.

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah, I mean, I have a more sophisticated answer in the book, but basically I say if you know what you’re going to be doing 50 Sundays from now, your faith is not reckless enough. There has to be some element of, “I’m not in control and I don’t know what he’s going to do, I don’t know where this is going to lead.” All of our faith fits in a frame, our understanding of God, what he can and cannot do, what he means in our lives, what… All of our theology, our orthodoxy, and orthopraxy and all of that, it fits in a frame. If we’re not willing for that frame to stretch and grow and break and get reframed, then we have a pretty refined faith. I mean, honestly, it’ll get you to heaven. I mean, we know what our Bible says about that kind of thing, but what kind of life do we miss out on when we don’t allow God to reintroduce Himself to us?

Warwick Fairfax:

I’ll just read just a couple of things you say about reckless faith just for the listeners. “A truly reckless faith, however, always expects change, and as a result, it’s eager to risk more and fear less. A reckless faith knows there is more to the story, more we can’t see, more than I experience. It is hungry.” I mean, there’s a lot of incidents that for people familiar with the Bible will be familiar with. The talks refers to the woman Mary, who used an expensive bottle of perfume to wash Jesus’ feet with her hairs. You have used that image and a bunch of others.

You say, “A reckless faith understands the best use of an expensive bottle of perfume maybe to wash somebody’s feet. A reckless faith charges into the sea before thinking that God may part the water. A reckless faith leaves 99 sheep to go after the one. It does not need man’s approval or man’s money. A reckless faith believes in death do us part.” I mean, yeah, that’s sort of just that sense of… You know, I think C.S. Lewis talks about that still small voice of God when you know that you know you know it’s Him just willing to step out in faith even when you don’t have all the answers and all the plans. That feels like what you’re talking about. Is that a reasonable summary?

Beth Guckenberger:

Yes. Yes, of course it is, and it just… We live in world so full of Yelp reviews, right? Amazon reviews. We need everyone else to tell it’s like, “This is a good idea. This is a really good idea. You should definitely buy this, and here’s exactly what my experience was, and I’m going to… You can make your choices based on what my choices were like.” I just… I don’t want to look left or right. I don’t want to make my choices based on what’s happening around me. I want to have a singular vision of what’s before me and attack it. I’m currently in the middle of a project. It’s with very high stakes and a huge possibility for failure.

In fact, we hired a consultant the other day and they said to me, “What kind of odds are you putting on this thing happening?” I said, “That actually does… It’s not the point. Even if what I’m hoping happened doesn’t end up happening, there’s something in this journey that I’ll take with me to the rest of my life. I’m not looking… I’m not – I’m not foolish. There’s a difference in my mind between reckless and foolish. I’m not foolish, but I am… I will not be held down by the opinion of others, and I think that’s what I was trying to summarize in that paragraph you just read.

Gary Schneeberger:

I want to jump in and, just for the listeners, pull some things together because both of you, again, this is my favorite part of the show, Beth, when what the guest says, the guest’s story and Warwick’s story kind of align. I found this article that you wrote on your blog from 2021, New Chapters in Your Life and How to Embrace Them. You list five steps to go through there, and two of those steps are things that if you go to beyondthecrucible.com right now, you’ll find the same things written there, right?

Beth Guckenberger:

Mm-hmm.

Gary Schneeberger:

What you’ve just described about not having to have all the answers, just take one step, that’s what you say in this article. One of the steps is to take one step. Warwick talks about it all the time here on the show. Guests here on the show talk about it all the time. Take that first small step. Trust that step, one foot in front of the other. That’s what you did. That’s what you’re doing. That’s what you’re doing right now is you’re facing that situation that you talked about where the consultant’s like, “SO what kind of odds are giving this?” Right? You’re not even probably-

Beth Guckenberger:

Mm-hmm.

Gary Schneeberger:

… thinking about that, right? You’re thinking about, “I’m taking this step because this is where I’m supposed to go.” That, I think-

Beth Guckenberger:

Mm-hmm.

Gary Schneeberger:

… is the great equalizer in what we have here with the show, what Warwick’s created and the guests that we bring on is regardless of background, regardless of crucible, regardless of story of coming back from that crucible, folks learn something from the crucible. They’ve applied that to their life moving forward and that is how they’re living their life, one step at a time. I just had to bring that up for folks who are listening in to say nope, you’re not crazy. That’s the same thing that you’ve heard 147 other times on this show as we’ve gone through it.

Beth Guckenberger:

Someone just asked me, an interviewer was asking me about a new book I wrote recently and said, “Tell me the distinctive, tell me what makes this message unique.” I said, “I actually don’t want it to be distinctive and I don’t want it to be unique. If I’m the only person that’s hearing that message, that means I heard it wrong.”

Warwick Fairfax:

Right.

Beth Guckenberger:

I get encouragement and comfort when I realize God’s told the same thing to other people, and so I love the fact that something that I felt compelled to write about is something that you all have found to be true, and may that just strengthen us each.

Warwick Fairfax:

You know, as we’re… I want to talk a little bit more about Back2Back Ministries, but one of the things you just talked about with this big initiative you are doing, another thought I think you’re implicitly saying, the journey is as if not more important than the destination. If you feel called to do it, you don’t necessarily know if it’s going to work or not, but you feel certain that the journey will be worth it irrespective-

Beth Guckenberger:

Yes.

Warwick Fairfax:

… of the result. That is counterintuitive for most people. It’s like, “It’s all about the result.” Well, no, it’s like the adage, “Does God care about what we are going to accomplish for Him?” Again, very brief segue, but in my naivete growing up in this 150-year-old very large family media business that was started by as strong a business person for Christ that I’ve ever come across, and then faith waned a bit as that power and money grew. I felt like, “Well, I know God’s plan. I’m a believer.” Oxford, Harvard Business School, became a believer at Oxford and evangelical Anglican church. I know God’s plan. It’s to resurrect the company in the image of the founder. It’s pretty obvious to me. That’d be a pretty good plan for God, wouldn’t it be? That must be God’s plan.

Well, clearly, despite my mistakes, if He wanted it to happen, God’s sovereign and it would have. It didn’t happen. The $2.25 billion takeover failed spectacularly after three years, so it’s like, “Okay, so does God really care about the size of what I could do for him? Or does He care more about me and my heart?” I’ve done some things since that maybe are not quite on that epic a scale, but I don’t think God really cares about the size of what we do. He cares about our heart. You’ve done a massive amount for orphans, but is there more? Of course there is. It’s a drop in the bucket in one sense, which could be depressing. Are there other organizations that do more? I don’t know, maybe, but that’s kind of irrelevant, right? It’s like you can get caught-

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah, yeah.

Warwick Fairfax:

… up in the size of it and, “Gosh, I did something big for God last year,” or, “Now’s it’s going to be small,” and you get caught up in numbers and impact rather than… It’s kind of irrelevant. Does that line of thinking make sense at all?

Beth Guckenberger:

It does, and I just had a large speaking opportunity and I was kind of excited about, oh, the size of the venue and the attention it would bring to what we were doing, and I had a very meaningful experience with the person that picked me up from the airport and that was supposed to be my host for that day. At the end of the night when I went to bed, I thought, “My gosh, this whole thing was actually about that conversation.”

God just… That was his plan A for the day. The rest of this was just gravy, and I hope God did something with that event, but I actually think the whole reason I went to that city was to have that conversation with that person. I think there’s something to training our eyes to not be impressed with style all the time and be more on the lookout for substance, and He can do substance in the middle of successes and in the middle of failures.

Warwick Fairfax:

Amen. I want to talk about just as we’re sort of rounding out the conversation Back2Back Ministries. You lived in Mexico for 15 years and now in Cincinnati. One of the statistics in the book that may not be surprising, but for those who are not that familiar with the world of orphan ministries maybe, and this statistic is out of date, but sadly it’s probably still true. You mentioned… I think you mentioned, what, 15 years ago there were 143.5 million orphans in the world. I’m guessing it’s probably larger than that probably by a lot-

Beth Guckenberger:

Yeah.

Warwick Fairfax:

… but then what you said here is, I mean, it’s hard to read to be honest, but it says, “Statistics say that 90% of orphans go into the black market or prostitution. They often lack family support.” You give lots of stories in this book and I’m sure others. I mean, it’s a pretty dark, depressing world and you save some. You can’t save all of them, be it spiritually, physically, and that’s got to be soul-crushing. Talk about just… This isn’t for the faint of heart, but talk about this ministry and it’s… it’d be easy to get depressed and say, “I saved one, but there are 30 abused kids who I didn’t save.” You know? “I saw them for a second and they left.”

Beth Guckenberger:

Mm-hmm.

Warwick Fairfax:

“I did everything I could.” How do you work in that area without it crushing your soul? Yeah, there’s some glimmers of hope, but there’s the darkness must feel overwhelming. How do you work in that kind of environment?

Beth Guckenberger:

Tenderly. I mean, there’s a pastor in the United States named Andy Stanley, and he has a phrase, he says, “Do for one what you wish you could do for them all.” There is this sense that you have to just realize, “I’m going to do for one,” and I hope that in my doing for one, I inspire or encourage or challenge someone else to do something for their one. There’s enough people in God’s family to turn around those numbers if everybody does there’s something for their one. I happen to make this my vocation, so I’m helping more than one, but if we would all have eyes to see, there’s a Greek word that sometimes is translated in our Bibles as look, like Peter looked at someone, John looked at someone. A better translation is like double taked or look look.

I’m always challenging myself, “Make sure you look look. Make sure you double take.” Don’t… Let your eye linger there even though it might make you sad or it might make you feel helpless or it might make you angry or you might feel afraid. Don’t be afraid to look look because it’s when we don’t look look that God gives us His heart and sight for things. To some of the listeners on your podcast who have experienced really, really worse days, they know what it feels like to have nobody look look at them. Sometimes our pain is so bad that people just avoid us because, “I don’t even know what I would do with that kind of thing. That is so hard.” We remember who look looked at us. We remember who came for us in those moments, and that’s exactly what it feels like to a child in their darkest day when someone comes for them.

Warwick Fairfax:

And somebody cares. One of the things you have on your website is this Five-Point Child Development Plan, and again, I’m not an expert and you know way more than I do, but I looked at that and I was blown away. It is so different. It’s just this holistic… You talk about the sustainability of the orphan, the spiritual, physical, educational, emotional, social. That just feels a lot different than meeting the physical needs, which is obviously-

Beth Guckenberger:

Yes.

Warwick Fairfax:

… important to talk about why that all those points are important to care for orphans and ultimately give them hope and a sustainable future. Talk about those five points because it just blew my mind reading them. It just seemed so wise.

Beth Guckenberger:

Well, in the beginning, we weren’t that wise. In the very beginning, we just met physical needs because that’s all we could see, and then our language skills caught up with us and we wanted to make sure people knew we were doing it in the name of Jesus, not in our own name. Then, our tagline was, “We provide care for today and hope for tomorrow,” but it didn’t feel like much hope for tomorrow when kids were leaving orphanages across the world around age 15 when the government stops giving it to them for free. They were chronologically 15, emotionally because of their trauma more like 10, 11, and 12. Not able to take care of themselves out in the world, finding each other, making babies they couldn’t take care of, and bringing them right back to the same places.

Then, we thought, “Education is the key. That’s it. We’re going to just make sure everybody gets a fabulous education and this will set them up for life.” We got a lot of attention when we did that. We were taking orphans all the way through Bachelor’s degrees in countries where not many people had that level of education. I was meeting country presidents and it was very exciting. Then, we graduated one of our first college graduates, a computer systems engineer, and after six weeks in his new job he told us he was going to quit because there was this guy who was following him around everywhere and he was driving him crazy because he was always telling him what to do. I said, “Is he your boss?” “Yeah, he’s our boss.”

I realized that this young man had all the intellectual capabilities of performing his responsibilities, but he had so much trauma in his heart. He hadn’t dealt with issues of men or authority or working in a team or asking for help. Then, we took a deep dive into trauma and eventually rounded out what we now call the Five-Point Child Development Plan where we want kids to be holistically… their needs holistically addressed so that we eventually release kids into the world who are able to financially be independent, still interdependent within their communities, and fully dependent on Jesus. That’s now the goal of the kids that we work with in Back2Back.

Warwick Fairfax:

Just maybe one final area to talk about. As you’ve been talking, sometimes we feel like there’s so much problems in the world. We’ve touched on this, but whether it’s orphans or whatever area we work in, it’s a drop in the bucket, so why bother? Or there can be a sense of guilt. “I didn’t save that one,” or, “I didn’t have that spiritual conversation with their family member or tribe, that things didn’t go the way I would hope.” It’s easy to just get depressed and say, “Well, why bother?” I feel like as the years go by, I guess I have this thought as, “I’m not responsible for solving every problem in the world. I’m just responsible for Lord Jesus, What are the things that you want me to do? What are the areas? What are the ministries? What are the people?” I’m just responsible for listening and doing that.

That might mean some might think I have a big ministry, a small ministry, which is irrelevant. The only person’s opinion that matters is God’s, and it’s not easy, but I’m trying to have that attitude of not being measured by numbers. When my book came out in the fall of 2021, Crucible Leadership: Embrace Your Trial to Lead a Life for Significance, I mean, I was pretty much on my knee saying, “Lord, I will not be defined by numbers. If it sells one, a thousand, 10,000, it’s irrelevant. All I’m called to be is faithful. I will not measure my sense of self-worth by numbers, even numbers of a book or numbers on a podcast.” Not that we don’t try to improve those numbers. We try to do all the things you can. I’m not foolish to use your words.

Beth Guckenberger:

Yep.

Warwick Fairfax:

I’m sensible. I’m a planner. I have a Harvard MBA. I get this stuff, but my sense of self-worth and identity will not be measured by numbers or the impact the world sees or places I speak at or what have you. I’m not responsible for solving every problem in the world. I’m not responsible for solving any of them. I just need to be faithful to what God has led me to and… Does any of that make any sense at all? I think… Put that in your words. Or what’s your sort of thoughts about that paradigm? Or how would you pit it in Beth Guckenberger phraseology, if you will?

Beth Guckenberger:

Yes, in my first language. A hundred percent, I mean, when I think, again, just circling back to the beginning of our conversation, when I think about what being in the presence of someone dying did for me, it made me realize this life that I live, it’s just… it’s mine. I give it back to God, but no one else should tell me what to do with my life. No one else should like… That doesn’t mean I’m not influenced by the right things, but at the end of the day, we only get this day one time and you exchange it for… What are exchanging today for? What conversations? What things have I labored towards? What have I given myself to my most important commodity?

We’ve learned how to budget our money and we’ve learned how to budget our time, but the most important thing for me to budget, frankly, is my energy, my capacity. What am I going to budget my energy towards? Am I just going to give it away all day to anybody who asks of it and we’ll figure out if there’s enough at the end of the day? Or am I going to think about… I’m going to… I want the bulk of my energy to go in this direction. I want the intentionality of a life that I’ve lived in a way that I’ve given it away, and I can just testify to your listeners that the more I have given my life away, the richer it’s become.

Gary Schneeberger:

That sound you just heard, listener, was the captain turning on the fasten seatbelt sign indicating that we have begun our descent to end our conversation, but we are not there yet. A couple things before we get there. One, Beth, I just want to be in full openness and honesty, say to you, I’m going to steal steal the look look viewpoint of the way that you do things. I love that, so-

Beth Guckenberger:

Of course, anyway.

Gary Schneeberger:

… I’ll be using that in conversation with friends. Very, very, very sterling insight into how we should regard those with whom we interact. Second thing, I would be remiss if I did not give you the opportunity to let listeners know how they can find out more about you and Back2Back Ministries, so how can they find out more?

Beth Guckenberger:

Absolutely. They can find us online at back2back.org. Certainly, we’re on all social media platforms, and you can find me every place. You can find me on social media platforms. I have my own website, but yeah, any of those locations back2back.org is probably a great place to start.

Gary Schneeberger:

Awesome. Warwick, you’re the one who brought Beth into our midst. You can be the one who asked Beth the final question as we wrap.

Warwick Fairfax:

Well, thank you, Beth. I mean, it was a privilege to hear you at that Taylor event back in February and read your book Reckless Faith, and maybe I have more reckless faith than I think, but I just feel like that’s so not me, but maybe it could be with God’s intervention. It’s given me a lot to think about. I almost hesitate to ask the last question because what you said before was just so fantastic, but a question we often ask is, there might be some listeners today listening to you, and today might be their worst day as we often say, they might be in the bottom of the pit and there’s all sorts of pits. That could be loss of a loved one, abuse, financial failure, physical loss. They might feel like there’s no hope. Any faith they had was squelched. What would be a word of hope for those who maybe today is their worst day?

Beth Guckenberger:

That they’re not alone. I think one of the things that can happen to us on bad days is we can feel shame and we can feel isolated, and those are dangerous mindsets to adopt that this happened to us because we’re not okay in our very core. There’s something about us broken and we’re not okay, and there’s… That shame is very insidious and isolation is where we don’t get any fresh air into our thinking. If our thinking is toxic because it’s our worst day, it can just make us sicker, and so I would just say to someone who’s in a really bad day, reach out and look up, and I’ll pray that someone is there for you in that place.

Gary Schneeberger:

I have been in the communication business long enough, listener, to know when the last words have been spoken on a topic, and Beth has just spoken it. Thank you for spending time with us, listener, in this episode of Beyond the Crucible. Please remember before we meet again, in the time that it takes for us to meet again, which will be next week, please remember that we understand that your crucible experiences are indeed difficult.

We described some of the difficulties of those crucibles right here in this episode, but we also know and we described that as well. We talked about that as well, but they’re not the end of your story. In fact, if you learn the lessons of what is being taught to you in those moments, you can move on, one step at a time. The direction that it will lead you can become the most fulfilling direction that you go, can become the most fulfilling destination that you end up at because that destination is a life of significance.

If you enjoyed this episode, learned something from it, we invite you to engage more deeply with those of us at Beyond the Crucible. Visit our website, beyondthecrucible.com, to explore a plethora of offerings to help you transform what’s been broken into breakthrough. A great place to start, our free online assessment, which will help you pinpoint where you are on your journey beyond your crucible and to chart a course forward. See you next week.