You Were Made for This John Certalic

In the past dew episodes I’ve been talking about how I tracked down my birth father and met him for the first… and last time in my life. You’ll find links to those episodes at the bottom of the show notes. Today’s show concludes this painful chapter in my life by focusing on a larger relational and spiritual principle that applies to all of us. Namely, sometimes in our difficulties God will surprise us in unusual ways to remind us he is still working for our good and for his glory.
But before we get into today’s episode, here’s what this podcast is all about. 
 Welcome to You Were Made for This If you find yourself wanting more from your relationships, you’ve come to the right place. Here you’ll discover practical principles you can use to experience the life-giving relationships you were made for.
I’m your host, John Certalic, award-winning author and relationship coach, here to help you find more joy in the relationships God designed for you.
To access all past and future episodes, go to the bottom of this page to the yellow "Subscribe" button, then enter your name and email address in the fields above it. The episodes are organized chronologically and are also searchable by topics, categories, and keywords.
Where we left off in the last episode In our last episode, #216, I told how I got the phone number of my birth father through one of his other sons. After about a month of sitting on the phone number and rehearsing what I would say to him when we talked, I finally summoned up the nerve to make the call. Part of my delay in calling, I realized later, was that the search for him was what energized me, not any actual contact with my birth father. The adrenaline rush was over. 
I had no illusions that he would respond well when I called. I don’t even know what responding well would have looked like. The fact the man was married seven times lowered my expectations. There was no thinking in my mind that he would rejoice at my call, sobbing, and once he composed himself would say something like,
No fantasy expectation “Oh, I’ve wondered about you and thought about you almost every day since I first heard you were going to be born. Your mother would not return my phone calls. I even stopped at her apartment on one of my trips, but no one was home. I wrote to her a number of times, but she never wrote back. Then I lost track of her. I am SO glad you called, and I do hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me for not being able to support you when you were a child. If you have it in your heart to forgive me, I really would like to see you face to face.”
A more realistic response, I thought, would be his denial that he was my birth father. He might even hang up on me. I’d be fine with either. The court records told me all I needed to know about his character.
Surprise ending to my search “Hello, is this Jack Byrd?
“Yes, it is.”
“My name is John Certalic, and I’m doing some family history work and I think you and I might be related.”
“Really?”
“Yes, does the name Renee Morris ring a bell with you?”
“No, can’t say as it does.”
“You would have met her in the late 1940s when you were a truck driver and used to make runs to Milwaukee where she lived. She was from northern Minnesota and worked for the telephone company.”
“Hmmm. This does sound familiar, now that you say it.”
“Well, I am her son, and she tells me you are my father.”
Long silence. Dead air. Nothing. What is he going to say now? What came out of his mouth surprised me.
“Well, well,” with a jovial laugh as would come from a gentle grandfather, “I guess I have children all over the country I didn’t even know about.”
We talked for a bit more, exchanged addresses, and agreed to send pictures of each other.
Neither of us ever did.
A different surprise phone call After tracking him down, and then my telephone conversation with Jack Edward Byrd, I was able to put things to

Hello everyone. If you haven’t listened to episode 215, “Searching for my Birth Father,” I suggest listening to that episode before continuing with this one. Just go to johncertalic.com/215. Today’s episode, #216, continues with the theme of how understanding our past helps us understand our present when we see how God began shaping us early on to find joy in being the person he created us to be.
Before we get into this I need to tell you that Carol, our announcer and executive director on vacation this week. Filling in for her is the latest addition to our staff, our chaplain and family cat, Father Patrick O’Malley. You’ll see his picture at the top of our show notes for today’s episode.
Picking  up where we left off in the previous episode
We left off episode 215 with the end of a conversation I had with my mother in the early 1990s about wanting to track down my birth father. The only information she had on him was that Jack Byrd, a truck driver, lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1948.
I’ll continue now reading from edited excerpts from my book, THEM  that describe what I did next. 
*   *   *
At the time of this talk with my mother, our son and daughter were attending Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana, about forty miles from Fort Wayne. I learned through my genealogy class that Fort Wayne has one of the best genealogy libraries in the country.
Planning a trip to discover more about my past I thought I would extend one of our weekend trips to visit our kids by driving to Fort Wayne to try locating this Jack Byrd. But without the Internet, and certainly without Google, I didn’t have a lot to go on. Just his name, and a seemingly common one at that, his occupation, and where he lived 43 years ago.
Before going to Fort Wayne, I started some research from home using directory assistance. (My apologies here to the thirty and younger crowd. Ask your parents or grandparents about “directory assistance.”) I called the Fort Wayne area code, asking for the phone number of any Jack Byrd, of which there were three. Each with different middle names or initials. So I called my mother and asked her if she remembered his middle name, and she did —it was Edward. Jack Edward Byrd.
Then I called the only Jack E. Byrd listed with directory assistance and found out he wasn’t the Byrd I was looking for. This Jack Byrd told me the following, “Back in the 1950s, I used to get mistaken for him all the time. Bill collectors and other people kept calling me, thinking I was the other Jack E. Byrd. It was quite annoying. Sorry I can’t help you out, but good luck in finding him.” 
A second dead-end in search for my birth father Starting this search process surprised me; something I had ignored for thirty years had developed into a sense of urgency to locate my birth father. It created an adrenaline rush in me that lasted for about six months. In the genealogy class I learned of services that track down birth parents for adopted children. So I contacted one and paid twenty- five dollars for them to try locating Jack Edward Byrd. They came up with nothing. They’re not trying hard enough, I thought. 
Undeterred by this dead end, Janet and I decided to visit our college kids over their homecoming weekend in October of 1991. We drove down on a Thursday evening.  Then on Friday, while Janet spent time with our daughter Jennifer and our son Michael in Winona Lake, I drove over to Fort Wayne. I wanted to use what I had been learning in my genealogy class to try locating this mystery man in my life. 
My first stop was the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, where I camped out in the Genealogical Department. Looking through every source I could think of, I documented my research as I used to do when I wrote term papers in college. Using one bit of information to lead to another energized me. I started looking through obituary notices from the Fort Wayne newspaper. I found nothing there. I had t

One of the more popular topics from past episodes has been the story of Gail Rohde who was adopted as an infant, and her search as an adult for her birth mother. Then several years after finding her, she searched for her birth father - and found him, too. I’ll have links to those episodes at the bottom of the show notes. 
It can be a relational minefield in dealing with the dynamics of adoptees wanting to know where they’ve come from, especially when it’s been hidden from them.
I have a similar story about searching for my birth father that I wrote about in my book, THEM.  Today’s episode is about that search. 

Welcome to You Were Made for This If you find yourself wanting more from your relationships, you’ve come to the right place. Here you’ll discover practical principles you can use to experience the life-giving relationships you were made for.
I’m your host, John Certalic, award-winning author and relationship coach. I'm here to help you find more joy in the relationships God designed for you.
To access all past and future episodes, go to the bottom of this page to the yellow "Subscribe" button, then enter your name and email address in the fields above it. The episodes are organized chronologically and are also searchable by topics, categories, and keywords.
An invitation from a friend One day my retired friend Bill told me he was starting to get interested in his family history. He wanted to learn more about where he came from and then pass this information down to his children and grandchildren. To help with this, Bill decided to attend a meeting of the Milwaukee Genealogical Society at the main library downtown. And he wanted to know if I would like to come with him. 
I wanted to know where I came from, too, particularly as it related to my birth father, the man who brought me into this world in a one-night stand with my mother. The man who abandoned us and who made life very difficult for my farm-girl mother from Staples, Minnesota. The man who was having a greater and greater unwelcome influence in my life, though we had never met. Discovering who he was might help me discover who I was.
So with all this in mind, I decided to go with Bill. We went to the first meeting and both of us became hooked on discovering our roots. This was in the early 1990s, before the Internet was widely available. So playing family detective and historian was a bit more challenging than it is today. 
Wondering about my birth father From the time my mother first told me I was born out of wedlock and later adopted by my father, I wondered a lot about who my biological father was. And a lot about who I was. I always felt different as a kid. I was taller than my siblings, and as a teenager, was much taller than my parents. Maybe the circumstances surrounding my birth explained why I was depressed much of the time growing up. 
“How you came into the world is not how it’s done. You never should have been born” was a feeling that kept repeating itself over and over again in my soul, like a song on a damaged CD that skips because of a scratched track. Maybe if I knew more about my birth father and where I came from, I would be less depressed.
Long before attending the Milwaukee Genealogical Society meetings with Bill, I began the search for the mystery man from my past. One morning, when I was twenty years old and home from college, I sat at the kitchen table of our small house, just with my mother and father, as my brother and sisters were in school. Fighting back my fear of not knowing what would happen next, I summoned all the courage I could muster to continue the conversation my mother started with me ten years earlier.
Picking up a conversation from ten years ago “Mom, do you remember when I was about ten and you told me Dad was not my natural father? I was wondering whatever happened to my…”
With that, my father quickly jumped up from the table, forcefully cutting me off and pounding his fi

A listener once suggested that for a podcast episode I should read from the book I wrote in 2016, THEM- The Richer Life Found in Caring for Others. It’s about relationships, which of course, is what this podcast is about. But I don’t know if reading from it would interest many of you. Maybe the first chapter might, I don’t know. It’s about how people are like houses when it comes to deepening our relationships with others.
But before we get into today’s episode, here’s what this podcast is all about. 
Welcome to You Were Made for This If you find yourself wanting more from your relationships, you’ve come to the right place. Here you’ll discover practical principles you can use to experience the life-giving relationships you were made for.
I’m your host, John Certalic, award-winning author and relationship coach, here to help you find more joy in the relationships God designed for you.
To access all past and future episodes, go to the bottom of this page to the yellow "Subscribe" button, then enter your name and email address in the fields above it.
The episodes are organized chronologically and are also searchable by topics, categories, and keywords.
THEM - The Richer Life Found in Caring for Others My book THEM has never sold well. Many of them sit on a shelf in our basement to prove it. Two of my relatives I know bought the book, and I offered it to the rest of the extended family as Christmas gifts after it came out. But no one wanted a free and signed copy. I was going to pay the postage, too. Yeah, that was my Charley Brown Christmas alright.
But I did get an award and a cash prize for the book. Writers Digest named it the “Best Inspirational Book of 2016.” However, there wasn’t much competition for inspiration in 2016. It was a lean year in the inspiration department, as you may recall.
Nevertheless, I’m going to take a chance and read from selected portions of chapter one of the book that I think you’ll enjoy hearing, and maybe even find inspiring. It’s about a useful principle that could help you in deepening the relationships in your life. It’s called, “People Are Like Houses.”
People are like houses I’ll begin with this. Every house has multiple openings. All kinds of openings— windows, doors, chimneys, even clothes-dryer vents. Openings to bring the outside in, or openings to let the inside out. 
When you walk past some houses, the resident of the house will see you from inside through a window, open the door and come bounding out to greet you. 
“Why don’t you come in and I’ll get you something to drink. Please stay a while so we can chat and get caught up with each other’s lives. I’ve been thinking about you. I have so much to tell you since we last met. It is so good to see you.” 
This is how some people respond when we walk past their houses. Such people are wide-open houses with openings that invite you in. They are easy people to engage with—the low-hanging fruit of relationships. It doesn’t take a lot of work to relate with people like this. Me, I get along great with children and older ladies because they are houses with relational openings I can easily pick out. Younger than eight and older than eighty is my sweet spot. With everyone in between, not so much. 
Other people are houses with fewer openings. Walk past someone’s house like this and when she sees you from her front window, she closes the drapes, pulls the blinds, and turns off the lights. If you go to her front door and ring the doorbell, she’ll pretend she’s not home and leave you standing there like a rebuffed Jehovah’s Witness. 
Closed openings to this house A number of years ago, the elders from a church in our area called me into a meeting to ask me how they could better care for their pastor, who was going through a rough time. Their question showed me they didn’t know him very well. The better we know someone, the easier it is to care for them. 
I res

One thing on my mind lately is a question about the meaningful conversations we sometimes have with friends, and what makes them different from other conversations. I started thinking about this while reading news articles about the Super Bowl played earlier this month.
Meaningful conversations and the Super Bowl don’t quite seem to fit together, but they do in my mind.  Keep listening and I’ll explain the connection in today’s episode, number 213.
Welcome to today’s episode Maybe they’ve always done this, I don’t know, but it seems that sports journalists lately are using a new format to write about upcoming sporting events. It’s a pattern where the headline states a specific number of things to look for when one team plays another.
Take the recent Super Bowl from a few weeks ago, for example. “Five things to Watch for When the 49ers take on the Kansas City Chiefs” would be a common headline in news stories. Articles like this help the reader focus on specifics of the game coming up.
This makes me think what if we took the same news approach to analyze the conversations we have with the people close to us. I wonder what that would do to enhance our relationships.  Would it make for more meaningful conversations with the people close to us?
I’m going to try this out in today’s episode I’m calling  Five Things to Watch for in Your Next Conversation with a Friend
Here goes. First off, 
Notice if the topic of conversation with your friend is new or is it one that’s been repeated many times before?  Assuming neither of you are suffering from Alzheimer’s, do you or your friend frequently cover the same ground you’ve gone over many times before? For example, does the topic of conversation drift once again to discussing your body’s aches and pains? My friend Robert calls these “organ recitals.” Or does it go to concern about wayward children? The state of our country or culture? Should I buy brown carpeting or grey carpeting? Things you’ve talked about many, many times before.
Why are some conversations with our friends like this? Is there nothing else on our minds? Are we that shallow?
I don’t think so.
My guess is that people who bring up the same topics over and over again are bound up by the unspoken emotions about those topics. No. 1 on the list would be fear, or one of its cousins, like anxiety. Sadness or regret would not be far behind. They are all close relatives.
We sometimes ruminate over things because we haven’t put words to what we’re feeling about those concerns.  Instead, what if we talked about the emotions riding on the backs of the topics we repeatedly bring up and see where the conversation goes? It will be a lot better than going in a never-ending circle we often go around in.
A second thing to look for that’s important to having meaningful conversations is to notice who does most of the talking.
Notice who does most of the talking  There are certainly times where a conversation with a friend needs to be all about them. One person should have the floor for the entire time when they are dealing with a recent loss or some unexpected circumstance. But it shouldn’t be a pattern every time you talk.  
I have an extended family relative who is quite a charming extrovert that I only see at extended family gatherings like weddings and funerals. Everyone likes the guy. He holds court with all the relatives and goes on for what seems like hours talking about what’s going on in his life. We know all about him. He knows virtually nothing about the rest of us.
There’s no air time for a meaningful conversation with him. It’s always an interesting monologue from his lips, but there’s no back and forth dialog.
 You see the same thing in restaurants sometimes with small groups of people. One person dominates the conversation. And it’s usually someone who talks loudly so you can’t help but overhear what he or she is talking about. 
Many tim

The older I get the more I’ve come to appreciate how it’s the little things we do for people that matter most to them. Little things that come naturally for us because of how God uniquely made us,
I’ve got a few stories for you today to illustrate this point. Stories that I hope will inspire you to bless others in ways that are easy and natural for you. But before we get into today’s episode, here’s what this podcast is all about. 

 Welcome to You Were Made for This If you find yourself wanting more from your relationships, you’ve come to the right place. Here you’ll discover practical principles you can use to experience the life-giving relationships you were made for.
I’m your host, John Certalic, award-winning author and relationship coach, here to help you find more joy in the relationships God designed for you.
To access all past and future episodes, go to the bottom of this page to the yellow "Subscribe" button, then enter your name and email address in the fields above it. 
The episodes are organized chronologically and are also searchable by topics, categories, and keywords.
Today’s episode  If you’re a regular around here you may recall that our most recent podcast episode, no. 211, was my “Men With Waffles” story. Click here if you missed 
A Men’s Breakfast Like No Other. It’s the story of how 5 men who each received a waffle maker for Christmas got together one Saturday morning to make waffles for the guys in our adult Sunday School class.
As part of the breakfast they each wrote down on a large sheet of newsprint one thing they appreciated about their wife. I took photos of the whole event, including individual shots of each guy holding the paper describing what they wrote about their wife. Then I made a slide presentation of the photos and showed it to our Sunday school class the next morning. The ladies loved it.
The photo that evoked the most oohs and ahs was of Allen. It’s the one you see at the top of the show notes for today’s episode.
Little things we say can mean a lot Allen simply wrote, “I appreciate Carol.”  As I described in the episode, he was the quietest man in our church. While he was a man of few of words, each one of them counted. I don’t know about you, but I’m drawn to people like this.
While our men with waffles breakfast is so vivid in my mind that it seems like a recent event, it actually took place in March of 2011. So much has happened in the lives of the men at that breakfast since then. 
Scott and his wife adopted a child. Randy took a new job that moved him to Pittsburgh. Bill completed his Ph.D. and moved first to California, then to Washington State. Brad finished his Ph.D. and took a job in Kansas, and then later moved to South Dakota for a different job.  Gregg retired. Mike also retired and is now caring for his wife who recently suffered a debilitating stroke.
But the biggest change of all happened to Allen. Ten years later.
The day that changed everything On Sunday, March 7th, 2021 Allen went downstairs to the basement of the home where he and his wife Carol lived, together with their 16-year-old quadriplegic granddaughter Haily who is confined to a wheelchair.
It seemed to Carol that Allen had been in the basement doing some little thing for an unusually long time, so she called to him, “Allen?” There was no answer. She called again. Still no answer. So she went downstairs, and there discovered Allen lying on the floor, having suffered a massive fatal heart attack.
The funeral was held at our church, and I remember going up to Carol in the lobby. But before I could say anything, she began recounting to the people standing around here what happened to Allen on that fateful day a week or so before.
Carol was clearly in a state of shock. What is this going to mean to her and Haily, I thought. Will she be able to care for Haily by herself, given all that Allen did so lovingly to care for and raise their grandd