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There's some abnormalities on your ultrasound and I just said, what? What do you mean there's abnormalities? We had no clue anything about trisomy diagnosis. Trisomy 13 and trisomy 18 are genetic mutations that are lethal diagnoses. Either one of those diagnoses will end the pregnancy not making it to term. We're young, married, we're a young business owner, young dad, young couple, no clue what we're going to do. And it sent us into the season of hey, we're grieving the diagnosis of our son while he's also here, and then trying to prepare our hearts for what is to come while also navigating life in general. Welcome to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast with Rob Harder. I'm Lena Larew, based currently in Mexico,
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and I'm a listener just like you
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who cares about the nonprofit world and
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the people leading it. If you're looking to learn and grow
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as a nonprofit leader, you're in the right place.
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Thanks for listening. Now here's Rob. Well, welcome back to the Nonprofit Leadership Podcast. I'm Rob Harder, your host, and I want to say a couple of things of some exciting things coming up you can look forward to if you've been following the podcast for a while. You know, I've had these Friday FOCUS on Leadership special vignettes that are typically about five minutes a piece. And I've taken a break for the summer, but we're going to restart those in the fall. And the thing I want to do is what I'm going to talk about are the trends in the nonprofit world. I definitely have seen, even this year, some things that are really popping up and becoming a theme with a lot of the guests that I have on my show, a lot of the colleagues I talk to that are in this nonprofit world, you know, rolling their sleeves up every day, trying to do their best to fulfilled their mission. So I really am excited to be able to share some of those. And so each week it'll be a very quick same thing, about five minutes, talking about one specific trend. And I encourage you to check it out. It'll just be on Fridays. Again, a five minute little clip on. Here are some of the key trends that are shaping the nonprofit sector right now. So look forward to that coming up very soon. Okay, so for today, you know, this particular interview is a really, really challenging one, only in that it's such a personal one. My guest today is Matthew Efford. And Matthew had this tragic diagnosis of his son, Noah, and he's going to share the story about the grief that he went through, he and his wife Hannah both. And through that grief, though, they used all of their experiences and he wrote down in his journal, even all that he was going through about this tremendous loss that they experienced by losing their son. And now he's helping thousands of people with his experience, what he went through, and then just to come alongside these families in a very practical way. So it' a bit of a somber interview, but it's powerful in that when you listen to Matthew and how he shares a story, he has such a heart to help others who go through a similar grief or a similar loss, particularly when it comes to child loss. And in the process, he learned, by the way, that there weren't at the time many books, particularly for fathers who've lost their children. So he decided to write a book. It's called Even Though We Will. In fact, that's the name of his foundation. And he'll talk a bit about the book and how much he's really tried to utilize that to help so many other people. So it's really a powerful interview. As always, so glad you've tuned in today. Now on to my interview with Matthew. This podcast is sponsored by DonorBox Donor Box, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business. Welcome back, everybody, to the show. I've got Matthew Effort here. Matthew, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule. I know you get a lot of speaking engagements partly because your book has really spread widely and a lot of people have benefited and been impacted by your book. So I'm really excited to dive in today to your story and again, just want to say thank you for being on the show today.
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It's truly my honor. Thank you for having me.
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Absolutely. Well, you know, typically I always ask, you know, tell us a little bit about your story to kind of get us a bit of context for my listeners of where you've come from. But I thought for your particular interview, let's go back to September 2019. Take us back to that moment, because as I've learned, you and your wife Hannah went into a routine prenatal appointment expecting one kind of news that anybody who's expecting a baby soon, but you left with something very different. What happened in the room and what did the doctors advise?
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Yeah, Rob, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to share. I'm Matthew Effort, unapologetically follower of Jesus Christ, married my high school sweetheart. Best decision I ever made outside of that relationship with the Lord. And we have four amazing boys. Eight would be six, five and three at the time in September 2019, we had 18 month olds. Our oldest, we had gotten pregnant with our second. We had gone to our six week appointment. Normal ultrasound, See the heartbeat, super excited. Go into our 12 week ultrasound appointment. And the ultrasound technician's measuring some thickness on the back of the neck. We have no clue what that means. Go into the waiting room, which some of your audience may have been in a waiting room waiting to get results that they don't know that they should be expecting. And our doctor walks in and she says, matthew and Hannah, there's some abnormalities on your ultrasound. And I just said, what? What do you mean? We saw a heartbeat. Like there's a strong heartbeat. What do you mean there's abnormalities? What does that mean? And you know, there's a lot of confusion, a lot of tears, but we had no clue anything about trisomy diagnosis. So trisomy 21 is the most popular in terms of the one that's most well known, that's down syndrome. But trisomy 13 and trisomy 18 are genetic mutations that are lethal diagnosis. And so they do not support life outside the womb for any length of time. Normally, either one of those diagnoses and the pregnancy not making it to term, the child will pass away as a miscarriage or as a late term miscarriage. That's normally what happens. Or if they make it to delivery, it's a stillborn. So immediately. My wife and I, we're young, married, we've been married for about five years at the time. We've been together for about 10 years. And a young business owner, young dad, young couple. No clue what we're going to do. It's in the center of the season of hey, we're grieving the diagnosis of our son while he's also here, and then trying to prepare our hearts for what is to come while also navigating life in general, like our relationship, us as parents of our oldest son, the businesses that I operate, it was just very chaotic. And our goal on this side of our journey, where we are now six years removed from my son, he was born March 7th and he passed March 9th. So we got 57 and a half hours with him on this side, is to provide resources and help in connection to families that get that same diagnosis. So trostomy 13 is a diagnosis that other families receive as Patel syndrome. And we don't know everybody's story. That's their own unique story that they're walking through. But we have some understanding of part of the road that they're Walking. And so our goal as a family with our foundation in honor of our son is to help them walk that path. Yeah.
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Well, again, first of all, thank you so much for sharing so vulnerably about your own story. And I know you've used your story to really help so many other families. As we're going to get into today, I thought it would be interesting for my listeners to hear a bit more kind of the next steps after that. Because you were given this diagnosis, you decided to carry your child to term, talk about the what that was like the months after and maybe Even specifically that 57 and a half hours you had with your son. And yeah, just talk a little bit about what that was like and what the story was between you and Hannah during that time.
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So our Dr. Salvus, when they confirmed the diagnosis, they did ask us if we wanted to keep the pregnancy. Our personal conviction. This is just us personally as a couple. We believe life happens at conception. So we wanted to continue the pregnancy. We wanted to trust that God was going to do what he was going to do even when we didn't understand it. And so we chose to keep the pregnancy. We wanted to see that through. We wanted to honor our son in that way. I know not everybody makes that same decision. It's their decision to make. But this was the decision that we made. And that took us into about six and a half months of grieving this diagnosis. So we went into weekly, sometimes bi week, twice a week, doctor's appointments. So lots of ultrasounds, lots of specialists that we met with, lots of a lot of monitoring his growth to see if he was falling behind. They knew that he was going to be on a different growth pattern than other normal healthy babies, a normal pregnancy. So we had to meet with specialists that had additional equipment that could make sure they monitored him well while also monitoring Hannah well. Right. Because we wanted to make sure that we were maintaining her health as well. Too. Thankfully. Noah, out of all of our sons, we have four sons. Out of all of them, he was the one that moved the most. And so up until the time of delivery, Hannah said that she could always feel him. She always knew that he was okay because he moved a tremendous amount. But we went into that kind of season of learning how to communicate differently. I talk about in the book so I wrote our family phrase became even though we will, that comes out of a story in the book of Job, which is an Old Testament. If you read scripture and Job has this horrific account of suffering, he gets to this place in his life and he says, even though you slay me, yet will I praise you. And it just became our family's mantra to say, if we want to navigate this, if we have the ability to choose the way that we as a family navigate this journey, we want to choose to navigate it in this way. We want to choose to navigate it in a way that even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will feel no evil. Even though our son is dying, we will continue to honor him and serve the Lord. And so I write in the book, the book's titled Even Though We Will. I write in the book a way that Hannah and I learned to communicate. It's one that I teach across the country to faith communities or to private businesses. They're looking at the impact of empathetic leadership is the perspective of have I done something that upsets you? And would you like to talk about it? Right. Because Hannah and I had been together for a long time. We have a great relationship. She is my best friend. I had to learn how to recommunicate with her in this scenario, right? So asking her, is something bothering you? That became like a futile question, right? Of course something's bothering her. Of course something's bothering me. Our son is dying. But in life, in the midst of grief, what happens is that grief, that story touches everything in your life, but also everything else in your life continues to move forward. So me as a business leader, that story continues to move forward. Me as a friend, me as a husband, me as a dad to my oldest son, all of those stories continue to move forward. They're impacted by this other core story. But we had to learn. Rob, I don't know about you, I'm a doofus. I make a lot of mistakes. I like a lot of mistakes in my marriage. My wife is very gracious and compassionate to me, and so I have to ask for forgiveness a lot, right? But in this scenario, we had to learn me asking, hey, are you upset? Is something bothering you? If I saw something in her, really kind of futile to ask, but a better question was for me to say, hey, have I done something upset you? Because if I've done something, either in this story with our son Noah, or any of the other stories that cross pollinate with her, I need to be in a healthy relationship, apologize, ask for forgiveness, seek restitution, right? Like be in a healthy relationship. And if I've not done something, the follow up question is, would you like to talk about it? So I'm going to put my phone down. I'm Going to turn the TV off, I'm going to send the kids into the other room, I'm going to get face to face and I'm going to say, hey, I see you. I see you in the midst of your grief. Your grief is isolating. Grief wants you to turn inward and get completely removed from everybody. I believe we were designed in community for community, and we were not meant to do this life alone. So by doing this in our relationship, we learn to communicate. And it came from one of the meetings that we had in that six month period. So one of the things that you do is you meet with the hospital staff and you meet with their palliative care team. So if you're like me in 20, 19, 2020, I had no clue what that was. What that is, is a team of doctors and nurses and medical professionals at the hospital that their job is to help care for end of life care for infants, for children. That's their job. So we met with that team and in that meeting you make decisions on the end of life care. It's a very challenging meeting to be in. Very heavy, very hard. But we left that meeting and the neonatologist, the head of the department pulled me aside and he said, hey, Matthew, can I ask you a question? So he invited to give me feedback. So I had to, yeah, I would love some feedback. Yeah, please. Of course. He said, how was your marriage? And I said, well, Dr. Karan, I think it's pretty good. You know, we're hurting, but she's my best friend. All the things that I've said earlier about her. And he said, okay. He said, I just want you to know, in the 35 years of me doing this, this goes one of two ways every time. This either drives you together or this drives you apart. There is no in between. And it was kind of like that sage grandfather advice where he pulls you aside and he says, hey, buddy. For me, it was pulling my head above the fog of grief. And it was, I understand that in the midst of the circumstances you're walking in right now, all that you can see is right in front of you because that's part of the trauma response. You can't think 20 years down the road, your mind won't let you go there. There is a fog of grief that happens.
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Yep.
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But I'm going to help kind of bring you up for just a moment and let you see 30, 40, 50 years down the road. And Lord willing, if you want to get there married with your spouse, you need to be very intentional with the way that you make decisions here today and the way that you navigate this next season in your life because it will have resounding impact in your relationship for decades to come. And man, it was Rob. It was just an unbelievable gift. Unbelievable gift that he gave me. Wow.
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That's powerful. We'll be right back. Are you looking for an easy and effective way to boost your nonprofit's donations? Well, look no further than Donorbox, the online fundraising platform that streamlines your fundraising efforts, maximizes donations, and simplifies giving for your supporters. With Donorbox, you can create beautiful donation forms, accept digital wallet payments, track donations, and send auto receipts. And the best part, there are no setup or monthly fees and no long term contracts required. So what are you waiting for? Visit donorbox.org today to get started. That is www.donorbox.org. You mentioned already this foundation you've started Even though We Will, and the background behind that. And you also wrote a book with that same title. I found it fascinating that you said first, this was really your journal and tell us about the moment when you knew what you were writing down in a personal journal was going to form. Basically what needed to be shared publicly and turned into a book. Talk about the process and how you decided that.
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So I learned early on that, you know, of several things we came up with. The even though we will is the slogan in our family comes from the book of Job. He says, even though you slay me, yet will I praise you. That was the decision our family made. We said we're just going to follow in those footprints. Even when we don't fully believe it or understand it or feel it, we're just saying, like, this is the vision that we have for our family. This is the mantra. This is the truth that we're going to speak over ourselves. And so in that decision, we decided to remain married. We decided to work on ourselves as individuals and as couples. And one of the ways that I worked on myself is I journaled. So I had to get the thoughts out of my head. I don't know if any of your audience or you have ever been in this situation, but for me, I was feeling things I'd never felt before. And the longer they stayed in my head, the scarier they got, the more power it felt like they had over me. The more confusion it created in me when I would allow myself to write them out and to talk them out with professional and personal counselors and friends and my pastor. Like it allowed me to process what was going on inside of me instead of doing the manly Thing which is you press it down with a couple of beers and, like, just move forward, right? Like you don't have emotions. I didn't want to do that because I had seen that in distant friends that I knew that had gone through their families growing up. I saw that. I saw families have loss in their family. They didn't process it, and it blew up. I didn't want that to be our story. I wanted our story to be one that we honored our son, because I did not feel that that would be honoring to him. Everybody makes a different decision. So I had to move and I had to write. Those are two things I just found for me that worked for me. So I started writing as a way for me to cope, for me to process, for me to understand what was happening. We chose to share some of them publicly on social media because we had friends and family that were all around the country praying for us, wanted to know, wanted to follow along with the journey. At the end of the journey, we had thousands of people kind of following our story. And so some of that did get shared publicly, but a lot of that was just, hey, privately, like, I just, I need to work on me. And then as we progressed through Noah's journey, as we got closer to pregnancy, as we went through delivery, after he passed, after we had his memorial service, as we made it into late 2020, early 2021, I continued to write, continue to journal, continue to process, continue. And then I started getting invited to speak some. I was a bivocational pastor at the time. I was speaking at different events, had businesses that are run, they were doing well. I was speaking at events. But then I had my podcast. I had connections. I would get calls, Rob, where it was like, hey, Matthew, I've got this friend and he got this diagnosis, or she got this diagnosis. Their 2 year old just got this, or they're 12 weeks pregnant and they just got this news from the doctor. They just lost a sibling, they just lost an older child. Loss is universal. And I just was somebody they knew they could talk to. So they say, hey, would you be willing to talk to him? Absolutely. I'd be honored to. So we get on a phone call, I hear their story, I share our story, I ask them some questions, offer some advice that we found that were helpful. And then consistently that call would end with, do you have anything you can send me? I want my spouse to hear this, I want my kids to hear this. Where is this? Where I can find this? And I just got tired of saying, no, I don't have anything. I'm so sorry. Right. And so for several years, I had kind of dreamed, like, hey, it'd be so cool to honor my son with writing a book and telling his legacy. And at, like, year three, I got tired of trying to write the book. Most of it was written, but it was not edited, it was not formatted, it was not finished. And so I just put it on a shelf. And as a man of faith, I just prayed and I said, okay, God, when you want this to come off the shelf, it'll come off the shelf and I'll finish it. And it was the end of last year, so the end of 2025, working with my board of advisors, working with some wise counsel, I said, I think I'm ready. I think I'm at a place where I have matured enough along the road that I have received the healing that I needed in our journey. I've gotten to the place to where I can share this story that I have healed and accepted. I will never be better. I will always be a bereaved dad, But I'm at the place where I can be helpful to other people and it not be hurtful to me. And we went through the editing process, and it was okay. How do we tell this in a way that when we got the diagnosis In September of 2019, I'm an avid reader. I immediately started searching for, like, hey, where's the. I wanted a Christian perspective. Just me personally, I wanted a Christian perspective, and I wanted to hear about Child Boss. And there was very, very little things. Very, very little access to that kind of information at that time, and specifically from a dad's perspective. So Hannah, my wife, had a book that was recommended to her that was written from a mom. Great book. She read it. She had me read it because it helped me understand part of her journey better. Right? It helped me understand some of the feelings that she was having as the mom going through this. Couldn't find it from the dad perspective. And so I. I wanted to write we. So my wife's unbelievable. She's a much better writer than I am. She's a much better speaker than I am. She doesn't feel called to do either one of those. Baby. God, hopefully one day will call her to do that. But she did not want to write this book because she was very encouraging with me. The call that I felt was like, this needs to be from a dad's perspective because it needs to serve both audiences. It needs to serve the dads that are wrestling with the grief in their heart. Of a loved one, of a child, of a sibling, of a spouse, or of a parent, they need to process that. And it's not just packing it down with alcohol or stuff you can watch on the Internet or things that you can gamble on. Like, that's not actually going to be good just for what it is, but what it can be is we can actually process. So I don't speak for every man by any standpoint, but I just wanted to share. So a lot of the raw journals are in the book, and you can see the formatting is different, so you can tell it's really clear. So it's a journal entry. And you can see part of the language I was trying to put to the feelings that I was having along the way. Now, over the last six years, what are the groups? What are the resources? Who are the people we've been put in touch with that were really helpful that we wished we would have known in September of 2019? So that's what we're trying to put together. We're not trying to be all things, all people. We're just trying to say, hey, there's some amazing organizations out there that are doing some amazing things. You got connected to us because God's given me a platform, and now it's just, hey, how do we leverage that to get you connected to people that can help you along the way? Yeah.
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Well, your story is so personal, and the foundation, obviously, is based on your personal story and experience. And I'm assuming that that could really reopen deep wounds, because your why of what you do with your foundation is all about a great loss in your life. And so I'm curious, like, how do you, number one, how do you and Hannah kind of deal with that, perhaps reopening of those wounds as you go through this and help other families and then talk maybe about sustainability of when, again, the why of your whole foundation is about a really, really big loss.
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Yeah. So let me answer the first one first, and then we'll jump to the second one. I love the why question. So on the front end, the pain that you feel around child loss, I can speak to that specifically. Loss in general is universal. Everyone experiences is a universal truth. But child loss is not. And so we just learned to say, this is not how it was meant to be. This is not how it was meant to be. But in that, we've also learned. I'm not a neurologist, There's a lot in the brain chemistry that confuses me. But one of the things that we have learned is by allowing ourselves to go back to those moments, to write about them, to talk about them, to share about them. It allows the trauma loop to close because it allows our mind to process it instead of think. It's still in the fight or flight mode, right? When you're in the midst of grief, Part of the fog of grief is that trauma loop. It's the fight or flight. It's the safety mechanism of this is too painful. I cannot go there. But if you don't ever allow yourself to go there, you're going to end up numbing yourself in another way until it blows up. You're just going to. It happens 100% of the time. So what we have found, and Hannah and I both have found it. But let me just speak for myself. What I have found is one of the greatest gifts I gave myself was writing this book. Absolutely one of the greatest gifts I gave for my personal health was writing this book. Noah has impacted me forever. I have a Noah sauce hole in my heart, and I imagine it as if I've thrown baseballs through plain glass windows, unfortunately. And it's got all those jagged edges around it, right? I imagine that being kind of in my heart. And I go and I sit on the edge of that. And the first several times, it was like, I can't even get close to it. But then over time, you get closer, and maybe you dangle your feet kind of down in the hole, you get cut along the way. But then the more time you spend there, the edges smooth out. And there are times six years later where I still go to that place and find fresh, jagged edges that I'd not processed yet. So I will always have part of the story. As a bereaved parent, that will always be part of my life. I will always be grieving my child. The intensity of the grief and the duration of the grief, those two things shorten over time. There is a smoothing out of those edges over time. The why for me is I am deeply committed to helping people find hope in the midst of suffering. I just. I'm deeply committed to that, and I'm deeply committed to. I believe good business can change the world. I'm deeply committed to both of those things, and I think the first one helps fuel the second one. And so in that, the burnout can easily become, hey, I love to speak. Unfortunately, I've got a knack for speaking. I feel like I've got a call to speak. I feel like I've got gifting to speak. I enjoy doing that. I don't like telling people no. I'm a much better yes guy than a no guy. And just in leadership in general, every yes to something is a no to something else. And so what I have learned and what I'm continuing to learn is my yes has to matter and my no will be disappointing. And I just recently had to tell some people no that I do not like telling no. But I know I have to protect me and my time and the design of the way that I'm allocating my resources both monetarily and time wise. Time is the only thing we can't get back. We can make more money. We can't get time back. And so that's where my wife does an unbelievable job of just us working together to say hey, over the next we look at 90 day kind of rocks. If you look at the EOS system, if you're in the entrepreneurship world, we look at that in our marriage and we just say hey, like what's over the next 90 days? Like what's coming for us on our schedule? What are the non negotiables? Let's go ahead and put the big ones on the calendar. And I just know like I don't care what comes up, I'm not going to miss this. Other opportunities will come and I just trust that, that I'm going to be faithful to what I'm committing to. And then we look back over the past 90 days, we say, hey, where do we do well and where did we miss the mark? And that helps me a lot. That helps me stay within the confines of what I can physically do because if I don't show up well for my family, I don't show up well anywhere. And it sounds cliche, but it's just what I found that I have to be a lot better at saying no. And then my team within our organizations, they've got to lead and I've got to delegate better. I've got to continue to grow and mature as a leader and help empower them to be better. Better delegation. The beater Jerker says the bottlenecks are always at the top. I'm the rate limiting step for growth, for throughput through the organization. So I surround myself with some really wise people he walks with wise becomes wise and that that helps tremendously.
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Well, it's such a powerful story. Again, obviously it's very personal. You're obviously impacting lots and lots of people that are going specifically child loss as you mentioned. So for all my listeners who are hearing the story, how best can they connect with you? Learn a Little bit more about your book and even about your foundation. Where would you send them?
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Thank you, Rob. I appreciate that a lot. So you can go to my personal website, which is matthewefer.com that's E F I R D like bird, but e F. So matthewefer.com or you can go to our foundation website, which is eventhough we will com. The book is on there. The book is on Amazon. Would be honored to connect. There's. There's ways if you, you know, I speak to organizations all across the country. If you've got an organization that you're wanting to bring in, somebody that can share a deeply personal story, a moving story that can help awaken leaders to be more empathetic and lead better, I would truly be honored.
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What's really obvious, that you've turned a real tragic situation and turned it into something where you're helping so many families. And I really appreciate your, again, your vulnerability today and your resilience. You and Hannah both to be able to really keep moving forward, expand your foundation. And again, the end result being helping so many people. So thanks again for being on the show, sharing some of your personal story with us today. It was really powerful.
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Thank you, Ronald. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. And for my listeners, I encourage you to check out the show notes that'll be right there on my webpage as well as connected to where we post this podcast. There is some real interesting information and make sure that all the links that Matthew talked about will be there. Perhaps you have gone through some grief. Maybe you know somebody else who's lost a child specifically. It could be a great resource for you. I encourage you to check it out. And as always, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week. Hey, friends. Well, I wanted you to know that this podcast can be found on itunes, Spotify, Amazon, Google podcasts, and wherever you listen to other podcasts. I also want to encourage you to like, subscribe and share this podcast with others. This will actually help us get this great content out to more nonprofit leaders just like you. You can also join the the nonprofit leadership podcast community, find other resources and interviews of past guests, all on my website, nonprofit leadershippodcast.org. well, thanks again for listening and until next time, keep making your world better. This podcast is sponsored by Donorbox. Donorbox, helping you help others with the best donation forms in the business.