- It was terrifying 'cause
the last thing I wanted to do was to repeat the thing
that happened in my family and so, that panic attack
threw me into therapy which really opened up starting
to deal with the wounds. - [Ralph Martin] Can't
you just feel it? The conflict is becoming
apparent in our culture. It reminds me of those
words of John Paul II, we're now living in
the final confrontation between the gospel
and the anti-gospel, between the church
and the anti-church, between Christ and
the Antichrist. And if we don't choose
to know God's word, to believe God's word,
to follow God's word, we're gonna be a sitting duck
for all kinds of confusion and all kinds of
disorder, those are really important choices
that people have to make. And these choices are
difficult, whom I gonna marry? What kind of life
am I gonna live? How am I gonna raise my kids? What am I gonna do with my
time, my talent and my treasure? And I have to make
a choice today. Jesus says to each one of us,
I came that you might have life and have it to the full. The question is, do we want it? (intense music) - Welcome to another week
of The Choices We Face, my name is Peter Herbeck. We're here today with
Dr. Bob Schuchts. Bob's a very important
brother in the Church today, bringing healing to the
lives of many people, clergy and laity alike. And Bob is the founder of the John Paul II Healing Center
in Tallahassee, Florida. He's also the author of some very, very important
books on healing. First, a real foundational
book I think that launched a lot of the ministry
called Be Healed. It's one of the best books
I've ever read personally on healing and a brand new
book that just came out called Real Suffering, Finding
Hope and Healing in the Trials of Life. And in it, Bob shares
his own personal story as well as the wisdom
God has given him on how to deal with suffering,
how to deal with pain, how to deal with the wounds
that really all of us at some level
experience in our lives. We're gonna do two
shows with Bob today. We're gonna have Bob just
share his own testimony and next week, we're
gonna talk about the foundational
elements of the book. So, welcome Bob. - Thank you Peter,
great to be with you. - [Peter] I'm so glad
that you're here. - I've enjoyed
your show, thanks. - You have such an amazing
story and I want our listeners to be able to hear kind
of how the Lord worked in your own life, which
is the ultimate foundation of where all this wonderful
teaching has come from. - Yeah, thanks, just
starting at the beginning, I was one of seven
children, like you and I was second oldest and you
were second youngest, right? - [Peter] Right, yeah. - We were really a very
active Catholic family. We went to Catholic schools,
parents very involved in the beginning of
the renewal movement. Everywhere we went, you know, what a beautiful
Catholic family. Family was very open, you
know, prayed during the day. So, as things started to
fall apart in the family, it was a real shock, not only
to us, but to everybody around and back at that point,
nobody got divorced. Catholics didn't get divorced,
so this is the late 60s. My parents began
to have difficulty and ended up getting divorced
and my Dad was unfaithful and also had a
problem with alcohol. It just literally
shattered the family. It was devastating to
me, I just remember sitting and hearing the
news and just sobbing. Just sitting in a chair
like this and just sobbing. - How old were you at the time? - I was 13, the rest
of my life was great but it just kind of
disrupted our entire life because we left the
city and moved down to South Florida
from Pittsburgh. Lost all the friendships,
lost all the relatives that we were close to
and everything else. And so it was just a
really big disruption. But, rather than deal with it, at that age I don't know
how I would deal with it, but rather than deal with it,
I just kept going forward. I just kept playing sports,
doing well in school. Ended up going to
Columbia for education and then get my Graduate school. Thinkin' everything was fine, thinkin' there's not
a problem, I'm fine. In fact we still have got
the perfect family, right? - Yeah, you were
excelling so much, you were so driven and focused. Now you had some
of your brothers responded differently
to the situation, I think one of the
most impressive, or kind of insightful
things in your book that you bring out,
then you end up saying, it sounds like something
that you actually learned through the whole process
is how did we each deal with this crisis and this
wound that we sustained? So can you share a
little bit about that? - We all dealt with
it very differently. My older brother was really
my best friend growing up and we did everything together. Soon after my parents divorced,
he went just on the streets. He became a heroin addict
by the time he was 16. So I was 14, he was
16 and actually stayed addicted to heroin for 20 years. Off and on, he would try to
get free and he couldn't, never went to
treatment but to try and get free and he couldn't. And it was the conversion,
or his conversion started with the birth of his daughter. He ended up having a
daughter out of marriage. Actually, I remember
going and looking for him on the streets when his
daughter was being born. Just try to find
him to let him know his daughter was being born. Really a tragic situation,
but very helpless situation, you know, it's just people who
suffer with a drug addiction they're very caught up in
it and the family is just. - So it was your Dad leaving
that just something broke in your brother and
he was just like lost? - Yeah, he was already
experimenting, it
was the late 60s, you know, Woodstock generation. And so he was already
experimenting, but I think that was his
way of dealing with the pain which was just to get
high and not be in pain. - And you were kind of, I
remember part Of the story, but you were like taking care
of the family a little bit, taking care of your
Mom and you became the super responsible one. - I became the super
responsible one, still, I'm learning that. (laughing) - So you went off, you
made it through high school and then you went
off to Columbia where
you played football. Were you pretty good? - I was pretty good
in high school, college I kinda
a struggled more. I love playing football,
I love playing sports and so that was a
lot of my identity. And also, at the end of
college, I got married, my wife Margie, we
ended up having two kids when I was in graduate school. And so, everything looked
great on the outside and even on the
inside, I wasn't aware that I was running
from anything. - Is that right,
and then you started a counseling practice? - Yeah, I started a
counseling practice after my graduate training. I really didn't know
whether I wanted to teach or counsel and I
ended up doing both. And again, I was helping other
people with their problems. Now I look at that and there's
certainly a lot of pride in that thinkin' that I
haven't dealt with my own but I can help somebody
else with their's. - With so much success, I mean, you were a successful student
at an Ivy League school. You were a successful athlete, you were an excellent teacher, you went to a major university. All this stuff is happening,
how did you sort of wake up to the reality of your own
internal wounds and experience? - It actually happened
through a crisis. I had a panic attack
and had no idea that it was from all the
buried stuff in my life, but I had a panic attack and
it drove me into therapy. The panic attack was
actually around struggles in my own marriage
at that point. It was just terrifying,
I had this thought that I'm not in love anymore
after 10, 12 years of marriage and it was terrifying 'cause
the last thing I wanted to do was to repeat the thing
that happened in my family. That panic attack
threw me into therapy which really opened up starting
to deal with the wounds. And it was there that
I began to realize that there was a whole
lot of stuff back here that I hadn't even been aware
of that was affecting me right now in my marriage, the
reason why I wasn't in love because I closed my
heart off from the pain of what had happened and
I wasn't conscious of it. - And were you
frightened that, oh-oh, you had like a hidden fear, am
I gonna be just like my Dad? I'm I gonna inherit what
he did when you were perfectly managing your life? - [Bob] So that it
wouldn't happen. - Yeah, yeah, you had it all
and then all of a sudden, something is happening inside
you that you can't control. - Yeah, it's terrifying
at that point because you think you've
got your life in control. And I had a
relationship with God, but I was still in charge. - You were controlling
every aspect. You're a gifted guy,
you could control God, you control everything
kind of in your life, we think we can, right? - That was part of it, right? - And so then, what
happened in therapy and where did the Lord lead you? - In therapy, I
remember the first time my therapist started crying
listening to my story. It was the first time I had
ever felt anybody's compassion for what I had gone
through and it was not a big deal in my life. But as she was crying, it was
like, that must really hurt. I could see it in her, I
couldn't feel it in me. And then I remember the
first time we went through and relived the scene
where my Dad was visiting and then going
back on the airport and I remember sitting there
in the counseling session and reflecting on that
image and she said, what do you wanna say? And I said, Dad don't
leave, we need you. And just began to cry, that
was the first time in 20 years that even a tear came down. That was only the beginning,
it started to open things up. During that time I went on
a Life and Spirit seminar, began to open up spiritually. But even that, I had so much
control of my own emotions that I had a hard
time of even letting the Holy Spirit take over. It really wasn't til
three years later on a Christ Renews
His Parish weekend. It was in the
middle of the night, a group of my friends and I just got down and
decided to pray. It was a life
changing experience. It was what I had
been praying for in The Life and
the Spirit seminar. But it took me three
years to get there because of all the stuff
that I hadn't dealt with. It was between those three years I started dealing with
stuff, started opening up. So as we were praying
there together, just an incredible experience. You know, the Scripture says, rivers of living water will
flow up from your belly. It felt like an
explosion of life. You know the experience
and I didn't know whether to laugh or
cry, I literally felt like I was gonna
burst with the joy, with the experience
of God's love, the love of God poured
out into your heart and I did start to cry
but I also was laughing at the same time and it was
just this incredible joy. I think the most
joyous experience of
my life to that point and it changed everything. It was like the Father
really loves me, I really have a father,
he hears my prayers. I remember saying as
I walked out of there, I will go anywhere in the
world to tell the people how good God is because I
knew it in the depths of me. And I had, prior to that, formed
these judgements about God because I think because
of the judgements that I had towards my Dad. - It's easy to think about,
we often project on to God what we feel about ourselves
or from our experience that maybe God looks at me
the way my Dad looked at me, whatever it is, can I trust God, I couldn't trust my
Dad, can I trust God? It's deep in us, isn't
it, that sort of thing? - Very deep, and you're
not conscious of it. I didn't know I had any
judgements towards God. - So you were involved in
therapy for so many years helping people, counseling
people for so many years, and then, based on a description
of your own experience, here you had all that
stuff in you for so long and you're able to manage
life at a very high level for so long and
then, is it the Lord that sort of starts
bringing it up in us? - I think so because I
remember a lot of this started at a Bible study. And I remember going
back and going at night and just praying every
night, just saying, God I need you, God I
need you, God I need you. I know that was his movement
to bring me to that place because up until that point, I didn't think I needed
anything, I was fine. I was taking care of everything. And I think he just slowly
began to bring this up at a place where I was ready. It didn't feel like it at the
time with the panic attack, it felt like I wasn't
ready to deal with that. But it was the tip
of the iceberg. - A panic attack, is it like
total emotional response to a fear or something? - Yeah, it's like I had the
thought of I'm not in love, and then there was
this tremendous fear and then I tried to control
the fear, push it down. But the fear is so strong,
that your heart begins to race and your mind begins to race. - It's kind of volcanic? - Yeah it's like all the
stuff that's been pressed down is all not gonna be
pressed down anymore. - You said three years, how
long were you in counseling, may I ask, is that
okay if I ask? - Just for about
a year and a half. - And it just helped
you kind of open up and understand what was
going on in your life, just somebody to help you? - I got out of my head
and started to deal with my emotion a little more. - And as you opened
up, I was thinking of Romans Chapter
five where it says, God's love is poured
into our hearts through the Holy Spirit
and you just weren't encountering love and
opening yourself to love. Is there a connection, or
what is the relationship between the suffering, the
honesty about our own brokenness and the capacity
for God to reach us? - Great question 'cause I
think it's only in that place where we begin to open
up to the suffering, that our hearts
begin to open up. It's like we've got a lid on it. Sometimes the external
suffering, but a lot of times, that internat suffering
that begins to open and first of all, create
a desperation for God. But second of all, open our
hearts to be able to receive. If you've got a closed
heart like this, there's no room to
receive the love. It may be there, but
you're not receiving, you're not able
to experience it, you're not able to feel it. So being able to feel
the pain really opens up to be able to feel the love. And the thing that happened
right after that event, is I was able to go home
and see my wife differently. And love her differently. It was like my heart
had a capacity for love that I hadn't had before that . - What's the root of that
transformation was the encounter with God but what's the dynamic
that you're now free to give and not so afraid of
holding on in desperation, but there's a security there? How does that work? - I was so afraid and
again, I wasn't realizing, but I was so afraid that
my wife was gonna leave like my Dad did, and so I
closed off to protect myself of anything that
was threatening, I would close off
to protect myself. Once I had that experience,
it was like this deep sense of security, this
deep sense of I can trust and I'm loved and I don't
have to hold it all together, I can let it go, I can let go. And so I could love
and I could risk. - I think friends just
listening to Bob's share here, one of the thoughts that's
going through my mind and heart is we're all wounded in
some way aren't we Bob? The fall is real, the
effects of sin is real whether it came through our
family life or whatever, it's in us and it can be
easy for people to say, well, gee ya know, Bob doesn't
have any problems like that, he's like a superstar, a
teacher, successful, writer, all these kinds of things
and it's easy to imagine that when you're struggling
with it yourself, you're the only one who's going
through something like this. And this is kind of the
normal part of life, isn't it? - Yeah, sadly, we go to church
and think everybody's fine. And I gotta be fine too, and
yet it's not until we start dealing with those
areas of our life that we have a real
relationship with God. 'Cause up until then, it's
theology, it's not relationship, it's not real
depth relationship. It's really that struggling and that honesty in the
struggling, you know. We talked last night
about how hard it is when everybody else seems
okay, to be the one who is not. - Yeah, I'm hurting,
I'm broken, you know? Especially for guys, we always
wanna put a mask on to say, no, I'm fine, everything's
good, everything's great. - Yeah, it's my brother
who's got the problem. - Right,, right and I'm
here to fix it, help fix it. Now the Lord did an
amazing work in your family 'cause everybody was broken. Can you share a little bit
about all that happened there? I mean, I know it's big. - Yeah, there's just so much, but I'll give you some
of the highlights. First thing that happened
is one person after another started to have their own
spiritual experiences. And I also had a real healing
experience with my Dad where I was able to
really grieve his leaving and then begin to
talk to him about it. At one point after my Dad,
several of my brothers had gone on their own
spiritual renewal process. We went on a trip
to North Carolina to a place called Windy
Gap, a big men's retreat. And I remember sitting
underneath the big gazebo with my Dad and my brothers
and asking my Dad questions. Why did you leave, what was
going on, what were you feeling? So it was the first time
that he really opened up and shared very
vulnerably and apologized and recognized and
listened to our hurt. That was just really
a watershed moment of new relationships. So that really began a process
that was over many years. A key part of that
was my brother Dave. About two years after
my own experience, he went on a retreat
weekend himself. He went to confession
for the first time and just laid it
all out, first time after 20 some years,
25 years probably. He came back after
his confession, this is what he
told me afterwards, after his confession
he was so euphoric, God's forgiven me, I
can't believe this. But as he goes to bed he starts
to remember all the events. The way he had stolen
from the family, the crimes he'd committed,
the times he was in jail. All the stuff that had happened,
abandoning his daughter. He just began to hate
himself, that self-hatred. He really wanted to get
up and leave the weekend and this is the
middle of the night. What he did instead is he
walked out into the sanctuary kneeling, still the same
church I go to right now, Good Shepherd,
kneeling at the alter, looking up at the image
of the Resurrected Jesus. He says, how can you forgive me? After everything I've done,
how can you forgive me? He just heard still small voice, has your family forgiven you? And he said, yeah. Where do you think they
received that from? And at that he broke
and he said he just had torrents of tears,
all this self-hatred, was all this pain that had
been bound up inside him just torrents of tears, he's
at the foot of the altar, just weeping, repenting,
just really sorry for everything
that had happened. And yet, in the middle
of that, this joy. The joy that started
in the confession and it just came and took hold. When I saw him, again,
I had lost my brother for all those years, when I
saw him come out of that church on that weekend, and
his face was radiant and he looked so
youthful and so alive and I went up and hugged
him and it was just like, I've got my brother
back, just incredible. So you want me to go
into the part later? - Yeah that's just part
of the story with him, it's just so
amazing, our friends have to hear this, it's so good. - We ended up, my Mom and my
wife Margie and my brother Dave went to New Zealand kind
of as a celebration trip. My Mom had these four Frequent
Flyers anywhere in the world so we went to New Zealand
and had a great time. Just like reliving childhood,
jumping on the trampolines and laughing, just playing
again just to restore life. But it wasn't maybe two
years after that we began to find out that Dave
was suffering from HIV and had contracted AIDS
from a heroin needle before the last time he was
in jail, before this weekend. Actually, he was let out of jail and came into our house and
then he went onto the weekend. And so, it was a
couple of weeks later you know, all this joy turned
into this mourning again. We really thought
he was gonna run, that he was just
gonna go back on drugs and not deal with it. But I remember sitting out
in front of his new house, he had just gotten a house, he
had just invited his daughter to live with him for the
first time in his life. Things were lookin' great
and I remember sitting out on the front porch of
his house, just like this and he says, I'm gonna be
going to the doctor's tomorrow and I think I might have AIDS and I just, ya know,
what do you say? He says, but I've
been praying a lot and God's asking me to be
a person with AIDS for him. And I finally have
a purpose in my life and even if it's a positive
diagnosis, I'm not afraid. I was just stunned, I was
just absolutely stunned sitting there listening to him. And sure enough,
that's what happened. He went and lived with my
brother Wayne when he got sick. My brother played quarterback
at the University of Virginia, a big athlete who kind of
walked away from his faith. In caring for Dave,
even seeing Dave's joy, seeing Dave surrender,
seeing Christ in Dave while Dave's dying, Wayne went
through a conversion process. We went to visit another
guy with AIDS, Dave and I. This guy was in total
despair, was close to death and Dave was able to
share the Gospel with him, share his faith with him,
share his joy with him. And I believe this
man will be in Heaven. But the biggest one
was as Dave was dying. My Dad was living in West
Virginia, still does, still did until this
last year when he died, but my Dad was living
in West Virginia and a friend of his just came and gave him an airplane ticket. He says, I want you to go
down and visit your son. So it was Easter,
around Easter time, it was two weeks before Easter. So he tried to
come at Easter time and he couldn't get a
flight, and so ten days back before Easter, on the Thursday
before, Passion Sunday, he ended up getting a flight
and so because of that, all of our family members decide we're gonna descend
on Jacksonville which was where Dave was staying and have a family
reunion together. Have the last Easter with Dave. So we come over into the
house, knock on the door in the morning,
nobody else was there and my Dad yells from the
back bedroom, come on in. And I walk into the
room and see my Dad on the bed straddled
behind my brother and my brother is here
and my Dad's got his arms around him and my brother
is in a half-comatose state. So my Dad's holding him,
it's the Prodigal Son story but the Prodigal Father and
the Prodigal Son both together. And I walk in there
and I couldn't believe God's graciousness to
have an experience like that where I could see that
kind of faithfulness of God's provenance to
bring things back together at the last moment
of my brother's life and to bring healing. - Wow, that is so
powerful, thank you so much for sharing that and
friends, that's the Lord. A loving Father and he brought
a family that was so wounded so broken and so separated
together and just the idea of your father being
in the center of it who had been the source
of a lot of that pain for everybody and this
is what God can do. If we give our hearts to him,
if we open our hearts to him and acknowledge the
wounds that we carry or the pain that we have,
we begin to seek him. He's a loving Father
and he loves you. I hope you can receive
that word today, that word of encouragement
for you because it's real. Friends, I want to also
remind you of this new book that Ralph Martin wrote called
Mary's Mission, Our Response. You can get it at our website
at renewalministries.net. Just click on the icon on
there and we'll send it to you free for the asking. But until next week,
just want to remember Bob's gonna be with
us again next week and he's gonna talk
about the content of this book about
how we can all learn to open our hearts to the
Lord, receive the healing that the Lord wants to give us
and he does want to heal you. He loves you, he knows
you, he's named you and in this show he's
coming after you, so tune in again next
week, God bless you. - [Ralph] At times of
great crisis for the church and for humanity, God has
sent a very special messenger. When the new world is not
responding to the Gospel, he sent Mary at Guadeloupe. When atheism was aggressively
growing in Europe, he sent Mary at Lourdes
and the Living Waters began to flow. When perhaps when the greatest
crisis began to unfold, the domination of the world
by an atheistic materialism which is still growing,
he sent Mary at Fatima. The world is again in danger,
the Church is again confused and she is here
again to help us. I've written a booklet about her and her role and
her mission today and we'd like to give it to you at no cost, just for the asking. Go to our website
renewalministries.net and we'll send it
right off to you. ♪ He is great to the Heavens ♪ ♪ And thy faithfulness,
thy faithfulness ♪ ♪ To the clouds ♪ ♪ Be exalted, be exalted ♪ ♪ Oh God, oh God ♪ (Hymn music)
