Tragic Events Lead Couple to Helping Others

“I would go and speak, and people would line up, and I thought initially they were just going to offer their condolences to me, but they begin to . . . start to share their own pain story with me. And that showed me that there's people all over churches who are hurting, but maybe they don't feel like they can disclose that they can be honest and vulnerable about that. It's not maybe a safe space for them,” said Davey Blackburn. A former pastor, his life was thrust into the national spotlight after an unimaginable tragedy struck his family.

“A pastor's pregnant wife died after being shot in the head at the couple's home. 28-year-old Amanda Blackburn was pronounced dead Wednesday after being shot during a robbery. She leaves behind her husband, Davey, and her 15-month-old son,” reported Efrem Graham. 

“Here I was overnight a single dad. Now, with a 15-month-old, I had just lost my best friend and ministry partner, and our unborn baby,” remembered Davey.  “And now I'm trying to sort through the grief myself, as well as trying to help our congregation figure out what just happened, and sort through their own grief."

"The primary emotions I was feeling was this deep sense of sadness and loss and shock. I didn't feel any kind of rage or anger or anything like that yet until I saw the men, once they made the arrests. And then there was this emotion that emerged inside of me that I never experienced, especially to that degree," Davey recalled.

"And that's when I had to begin to wrestle through, 'What does it look like as a believer, as a pastor who has preached about radical forgiveness? How do I actually do and be what I'm saying I believe and at the same time desire justice?'"

Davey then made a decision that would ultimately help him through the depths of his grief and pain. He recalled, “You know for me to come out within the first two weeks and say, 'I've chosen to forgive the man that killed Amanda,' that seems so upside down to the world who doesn't know Jesus. The thing that was so life giving to me at the time when all I could see in front of me was this cloud of grief and death was the fact that the church rallied around us.”

Davey eventually remarried and began sharing the spiritual keys to healing through grief and trauma with his wife, Kristi. 

“We had started a podcast called, The Nothing Is Wasted podcast, where we were just interviewing people who had gone through difficult things and they had testimony to how God had shown up in their story. And this podcast...it just exploded. So we began to see that people were being inspired by the podcast, but they needed more than inspiration, they needed transformation. They needed a pathway to be able to go down to for their healing,” said Davey.

“People are reaching out to us a lot. They were emailing us, trying to figure out like, you know, how do I get help? And so, for us, we're like, how do we create this for everybody? And when God called us out it was a huge leap of faith for me specifically. But again, we just know that when you follow God in His leading, that that's exactly where you're supposed to be,” said Kristi.

Her traumatic past has helped her minister alongside Davey. Together they are passionate about helping others through their dark times.

Kristi stated, “There were multiple times in different church settings or different ministries that I experienced a lot of church hurt. And I did so much work. And I went to all these counselors and I, you know, again, I finally was like, 'God, You're going to be having the one to bring the healing power to it. But I want to be healed. I don't want to be triggered again. I don't want PTSD for my situation. And my friend said, 'Christi, it's like you want to arrive, you want to be complete.' So, yeah, of course. She goes, 'Well, we're not going to until we go to heaven.' And so, to know that, before, when I would try to override a reaction, it would take me a lot longer. And now seeing how the healing process is working. The overwriting is super quick. And so, I would just like encourage people just to keep on leaning into it and keep on stepping into it because really it's a healing process. It's not going to be healed, period. And you're done.”
    
Davey echoed, “What's beautiful about our journey with the Lord is that we can in Him be healed, be healing, and one day we'll be healed. And all of those three things are a reality. And so that means that just like she said, there’s going to be certain components or aspects of our wounding that can be mended and we don't have to react out of that trauma brain or that trauma response the way that we used to."

Davey continued, "We can find that there is a progressive sanctification that is happening inside of us and at the same time, we're not we're not fully complete, and we won't be until the day that we stand in front of Jesus. And it...and it seems like that's really the culminating moment where the final restoration of all things takes place, not just for humanity and for this world, but for us individually as well.”

Today they enjoy raising their family and are encouraged that God is using the pain from their past to help others find healing from the Lord. 
    
“We have coaches all over the country who are able to help people in specific pain points because they've journeyed those specific stories, loss of a child, you know, sexual betrayal, abortion, regret and recovery, anything you can think of that that trauma ends up, you know, incurring in someone's life. We're able to coach them in that specific area and so that's what “Nothing is wasted,” our ministry has evolved into, it has evolved into a ministry that helps people in trauma, tragedy and major life transition and helps them discover purpose in their pain,” says Davey. He continued, “Scripture promises that He will be faithful to complete the good work that He began in you. And that means as we continue to walk with Him, we're going to find ourselves becoming an even fuller and more whole version of ourselves so that we can impact people in a way that sheds light on who Jesus is. More accurately, we become more like the image of Christ.”

Check out Davey and Kristi's podcast, Nothing is Wasted, and be inspired!