April 24, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Caleb Bailey's father wanted nothing more than to be a firefighter. But just 10 days after Caleb was born, his father died in the line of duty while responding to a structure fire at a pet food factory in Los Angeles in 1998, leaving behind a young wife and two sons. It was the first line-of-duty fatality the L.A. Fire Department had seen in decades. Here's Caleb with his family’s story of hope and redemption after such a devastating loss.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, we have a story from a young man
named Caleb Bailey. Caleb is from California and recently moved
to Asheville, North Carolina for work. Here he is sharing
his family's story, beginning with his dad, who, from a
(00:33):
very young age, wanted to be a firefighter.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
My dad wanted to be a firefighter so bad when
he was a kid that he set his backyard on
fire just so the fire department would show up. He
was so excited to see them. And you know, my
poor grandma was just like, I don't know how to
explain this to you. And then it's funny. You fast
forward or some years later and he is a firefighter,
(01:00):
had a heart for serving others in that capacity. But
when I was born, ten days after I was born,
my dad, Joseph Dupe, was killed in the line of
duty as a Los Angeles City firefighter. He was a
(01:20):
captain and had been on the job for a while
at that point. He was responding to a structure fire
early in the morning. It was a pet food factory
and as him and his crew were fighting it. They
decided to exit the building because the structure was kind
of collapsing, and so he got a signal from one
(01:41):
of the emergency devices there that they use if any
of them are lost or trapped or anything, and they'll
set off that signal and the rest of the crew
will go and find them and help them out. And
one of his crew members dropped his and that's what
set it off. So actually no one was really in danger,
but they didn't know. So he went back in to
(02:02):
find that member, and so while he was in, he
walked into a room where the roof collapsed and knocked
his face mask off, so he was, you know, inhaling
all the smoke and toxins and stuff, and then an
oven in the building actually exploded and blew out and
knocked him out at that point. So his crew members
were close behind and came and found him and you know,
(02:24):
dragged him out, but by the time they tried to
do CPR and rushed him to the hospital, he was
already gone at that point. So my mom received the
news that morning. Mike Killiger, who is the chaplain, was
the one who told my mom about my dad. She's
told me a few times about what was going through
her mind when she got that news. Obviously a billion things.
(02:45):
You've lost your breadwinner of the family, you don't have
any finances, you've lost the father of your two sons,
and possibly most important of all, she lost her soulmate.
This is her husband and she married for years and
was just gone. And now they had to figure out life.
And that's a dark place to be. It's a place
(03:05):
where most people would give up, especially realizing that these
two little boys of yours have a lifetime of hurt
and hardship ahead of them because of this. So they
went to the hospital and many people from her church
were there. Many people from the fire department and surrounding
stations as well were nearby and supporting her. It was
(03:29):
the first fatality on duty that the La City Fire
Department had seen in a long time, years, maybe decades,
I'm not sure the actual number. So it not only
shook those of us who were close to my dad,
but just everyone in the department. It was a really
dark time for La City. And so yeah, that's where
(03:50):
we stood in February or March of nineteen ninety eight,
a family barely getting started as a family and now
they're just ripped apart. It's a pretty hopeless situation when
you look at it anyway that you cut it. It's
just tragic. It's sad. You hear stories like this all
the time about people, and different people deal with those
(04:10):
things differently. My mom could have given up and felt
no hope, which I'm sure she did at many points,
but she didn't give up. She resolved to raise her
two sons to love on them, regardless of what the
next ten twenty thirty years brought and whether or not
her husband was there alongside her. So yeah, all of that, Like,
(04:33):
like I've said, you can read about all of that online.
All those reports are on La City firefighter websites and
the incident reports, and you know the background on my dad.
But a lot happened after that, and you won't read
about those online, but they're the biggest parts of the story.
So the first one is my uncle Robert Dupe, who
(04:55):
was Joe's brother. He was similar to Joe in a
lot of ways. They're both just always up to no
good and pulling pranks and doing rowdy things, but in
terms of his faith and his morals, you couldn't have
been more different. He hated everything about the Church and
the Bible and Christianity. No matter how much his brother
(05:17):
presented it to him and pleaded with him about it,
he wanted nothing to do with it. And my dad
would pray at night. My mom told me, Lord, please say, Robert, like,
whatever it takes, even if it means taking my own life,
would you save him. And we kind of laugh a
little bit at that, sometimes say careful what you pray for.
(05:39):
But they got the news of my dad dying, and
my uncle was driving to the hospital and he remembers
just parking his car, turning the car off and looking
up and just saying, all right, you have my attention.
(06:00):
And as soon as he walked in that building, he
saw something that you don't see in these situations very often,
and it was the love of the church, the love
of family, the love of the fire department, all surrounding
my mom and overwhelmed him, you know. And it was
something that stood out and was different than what he'd
(06:20):
experienced in his life. And so he spent the next
few months asking questions and wanting to know what it
was that Joe believed. You know, what was this faith?
He asked one of Joe's friends from church. Will I
ever see my brother again? Like I want to see
him again, you know? A few months later, he accepted
Christ and started attending church regularly and wanted to not
(06:45):
only live on his brother's legacy, but more importantly, to
know this savior that his brother did.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
And you're listening to Caleb Bailey tell the story of
his father, his mother, and his father's brother and how
he and his family dealt with a great loss, of
great tragedy. When we come back, more of this remarkable
story about faith, love, and so much more here on
Our American Stories. Lee Hibibe here the host of our
(07:32):
American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring
stories from across this great country, stories from our big
cities and small towns. But we truly can't do the
show without you. Our stories are free to listen to,
but they're not free to make. If you love what
you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click
the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go
(07:54):
to Auramerican Stories dot com and give. And we returned
to our American Stories and we've been listening to Caleb
Bailey share his family story. Caleb's birth dad died when
(08:19):
he was just ten days old in the line of
duty as an LA firefighter. Through this tragedy, Caleb's uncle,
Robert came to Christ but Caleb's mother was left a
young widow and Caleb and his older brother Luke were
left fatherless. Back to Caleb for the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
So then life goes on for our family, just two
boys and a mom trying to make it by. And
one of my mom's friends had a mutual friend named
Kevin Bailey, who was also a firefighter. The fact that
she thought my mom would want to marry another firefighter
is crazy, but it worked, and introduced the two of
(09:06):
them at a Super Bowl party and they hit it off.
And that was Kevin Bailey. And I could talk your
ear off about Kevin Bailey. He had been working for
a while and was single, living in southern California, and
he was looking to get married and was blown away
by my mom's story. In fact, before he had met
(09:28):
my mom at that Super Bowl party, he had heard
her speak at a firefighter event regarding my dad's death,
and he was blown away. He was just like because
she spent that whole time just giving the gospel you know.
Here she was in front of hundreds of people in
La City and she was just given the Gospel and
he was like, WHOA, that's different. Apparently the two little
(09:51):
rascals she was dragging along her side didn't scare him off,
so he went on some dates with her. It speaks
a lot to his character that during that time, before
they were even married, he would be coming over for dinner,
He would be watching us, if my mom had some
events she needed to go to, he would babysit us.
When I had pneumonia and I was in the hospital
(10:12):
at a year old, he was there supporting my mom,
taking care of me, and hanging out with my older
brother Luke. Obviously, my dad was interested by based on
the fact that he stuck around my mom and me
and Luke, and so as he was dating her, he
kind of went to our pastor at our church and said, hey, look,
(10:33):
I don't know what the next step would be or
how soon that step would be, but I think I
want to marry this woman. And my pastor just looked
at him and said, hey, you either fish or cut bait.
She's got two sons, and those sons need a dad,
and she needs a husband at this point, so you
better make a decision. And so I guess my dad
(10:55):
went with the fish instead of cutting bait and married
my mom in nineteen ninety nine in July and adopted
me and Luke, so he was now my mom's husband
and our dad. And people ask me sometimes, you know,
was there ever any weird points in her upbringing, just
(11:16):
kind of like dealing with your stepdad and trying to
navigate that and kind of the power dynamics or the
parenting models and all those things, and I just tell
them he wasn't my stepdad, Like legally, he was my
legal dad, and it wasn't just a legal obligation either.
The way he raised us made it really easy to
(11:37):
be his son because he was a great father. They
had two more sons, my younger brother's Brock and Rylan,
so we had four boys in our house and it
was chaos all the time. But nothing really surprised my
mom at that point, after all she'd been through. So
my dad retired from the fire department in twenty ten
or twenty twelve, I can't remember. I'm pretty sure it's ten.
(12:00):
A man on his crew, Glenn Allen, actually died that
year responding to a fire as a roof collapsed on
a building, and my mom just said, Hey, that's enough.
You know, I can't be going to bed every night
with you at the station and knowing that that could
be you, you know, and go through all this all
over again. So he retired after thirty years on the department.
(12:24):
They've been present and very active in our lives. So
six months back, I moved from California to Asheville, North Carolina.
So Uncle Robert, he's one of the few family members
of Joe that we've been in close contact with. He
made quite an effort after everything happened to still be
(12:45):
around to support my mom, to love on me and
my older brother, to spend time with us. And I
actually visited him this past summer on my way down
to North Carolina. They live in nash Tennessee, and so
I spent time about five hours that first night there
just kind of hearing stories about my dad, hearing kind
(13:08):
of what went down on site of the incident, which
was kind of a huge moment because I hadn't heard
those things for a long time, and not for bad reason.
I mean, I just had never asked my mom, you
don't really want to bring up those things unnecessarily. If
I were her, I wouldn't really want to revisit that
situation a ton, So I wanted to be consider in
(13:28):
that sense. And it wasn't of the utmost importance that
I knew about some of those things. But my uncle
didn't mind talking about it, so we talked through some
of those things, and then he told me he had
the actual original tape of the funeral. There were a
couple funerals, actually, the La City Fire Department did one,
and then Grace's Community Church held another. One of the
most impactful things about that video was watching my mom. Naturally,
(13:51):
my eyes were just kind of directed towards her and
just kind of seeing how she dealt with it. My
mom is so sweet and so emotional too, in both
the highs and the lie, so she gets the most excited
about our achievements and our accomplishments, but she cries very
easily too, So I was just expecting her to be
in a pool of tears during this video, and I
kid you not, the whole time I watched it, she
(14:13):
wasn't crying once. She had her two sons with her
and she had to be strong for them. Obviously she
wasn't pretending like nothing happened. Deep down, her heart was
being ripped out. There's a whole range of emotions from
overwhelming support of all these people being here for the service,
and then the reality of her husband being dead, and
yet she stood there and welcomed all the hugs, welcomed
(14:37):
all the love and the condolences from people around. There's
one little clip where they cut in and it's close
and she's holding my older brother Luke, who's two at
that time, and she's pointing out things on the fire truck, like, hey,
that's kind of cool. You see that all you see
the big fire truck, And it's just like here she
is facing the biggest moment of her life, the biggest
(14:57):
tragedy of her life, right in the face, and she's
raising her son at the same time and knows that
that's going to be the next you know, rest of
her life is doing that regardless of what happens. And
she was strong in that, and she's continued to be
strong even if she's emotional. She doesn't crack. You know,
(15:18):
she has been joyful all throughout our upbringing, even when
a lot of it wasn't joyful. So yeah, even talking
to her. I talked to her today because yesterday was
the anniversary, twenty four year anniversary, so I was talking
to her today and I told her people always ask
(15:39):
me how I process through that situation, like how can
I pray for you? What's difficult about it? And that's understandable.
But the reality is there's not much grief in it.
You know, obviously in that time and at the moment
there was, I was too young to really experience that.
The only emotion that I feel is just being overwhelmed
seeing the Lord's kindness and providing through all of that.
(16:01):
And she said that's exactly how she feels, which says
a lot because she was the one that, you know,
bore the brunt of what happened, and yet today, you know,
twenty four years later, she's saying, yeah, it's not sad,
it's only like incredible what's happened. There's so much redemption
(16:21):
in the midst of all of it. Like, if I
were to plan that out from a third person perspective,
I'd be like, they have a happy life as a family,
nothing bad happens to them. Okay, that's cool, that's great.
That would be a good situation. And then the Lord says, no,
I'm going to take the husband out of the picture.
And you're going, what in the world, that's not only
a bad idea, that's the worst possible idea, Like that's
(16:42):
complete opposite. What are you thinking? And then he goes,
but through that, I'm going to save his brother. And
then through that, I'm going to provide another dad for
this family. They're going to get more people to their family,
and those that whole family will know me as a
result and pray, and then they're going to tell this
story to hundreds of thousands of people in the future,
(17:05):
and those people will know the story. Now, Yeah, your
whole thing with the family being happy and complete and
everything that's special, but this is something different. He can
redeem those things that are broken way better than we
could ever picture it.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
And a terrific job, a beautiful job on the production
by Faith and a special thanks to Caleb Bailey for
sharing his story. And my goodness, his mother comes off
as one heck of a star. He lost a breadwinner,
lost the father of two sons, lost her soulmate, and
had to figure out life. He said he could have
(17:44):
given up, but she didn't. Caleb Bailey's story, his family's story.
Here on our American Story.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Up next, we have a story from a young man
named Caleb Bailey. Caleb is from California and recently moved
to Asheville, North Carolina for work. Here he is sharing
his family's story, beginning with his dad, who, from a
(00:33):
very young age, wanted to be a firefighter.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
My dad wanted to be a firefighter so bad when
he was a kid that he set his backyard on
fire just so the fire department would show up. He
was so excited to see them. And you know, my
poor grandma was just like, I don't know how to
explain this to you. And then it's funny. You fast
forward or some years later and he is a firefighter,
(01:00):
had a heart for serving others in that capacity. But
when I was born, ten days after I was born,
my dad, Joseph Dupe, was killed in the line of
duty as a Los Angeles City firefighter. He was a
(01:20):
captain and had been on the job for a while
at that point. He was responding to a structure fire
early in the morning. It was a pet food factory
and as him and his crew were fighting it. They
decided to exit the building because the structure was kind
of collapsing, and so he got a signal from one
(01:41):
of the emergency devices there that they use if any
of them are lost or trapped or anything, and they'll
set off that signal and the rest of the crew
will go and find them and help them out. And
one of his crew members dropped his and that's what
set it off. So actually no one was really in danger,
but they didn't know. So he went back in to
(02:02):
find that member, and so while he was in, he
walked into a room where the roof collapsed and knocked
his face mask off, so he was, you know, inhaling
all the smoke and toxins and stuff, and then an
oven in the building actually exploded and blew out and
knocked him out at that point. So his crew members
were close behind and came and found him and you know,
(02:24):
dragged him out, but by the time they tried to
do CPR and rushed him to the hospital, he was
already gone at that point. So my mom received the
news that morning. Mike Killiger, who is the chaplain, was
the one who told my mom about my dad. She's
told me a few times about what was going through
her mind when she got that news. Obviously a billion things.
(02:45):
You've lost your breadwinner of the family, you don't have
any finances, you've lost the father of your two sons,
and possibly most important of all, she lost her soulmate.
This is her husband and she married for years and
was just gone. And now they had to figure out life.
And that's a dark place to be. It's a place
(03:05):
where most people would give up, especially realizing that these
two little boys of yours have a lifetime of hurt
and hardship ahead of them because of this. So they
went to the hospital and many people from her church
were there. Many people from the fire department and surrounding
stations as well were nearby and supporting her. It was
(03:29):
the first fatality on duty that the La City Fire
Department had seen in a long time, years, maybe decades,
I'm not sure the actual number. So it not only
shook those of us who were close to my dad,
but just everyone in the department. It was a really
dark time for La City. And so yeah, that's where
(03:50):
we stood in February or March of nineteen ninety eight,
a family barely getting started as a family and now
they're just ripped apart. It's a pretty hopeless situation when
you look at it anyway that you cut it. It's
just tragic. It's sad. You hear stories like this all
the time about people, and different people deal with those
(04:10):
things differently. My mom could have given up and felt
no hope, which I'm sure she did at many points,
but she didn't give up. She resolved to raise her
two sons to love on them, regardless of what the
next ten twenty thirty years brought and whether or not
her husband was there alongside her. So yeah, all of that, Like,
(04:33):
like I've said, you can read about all of that online.
All those reports are on La City firefighter websites and
the incident reports, and you know the background on my dad.
But a lot happened after that, and you won't read
about those online, but they're the biggest parts of the story.
So the first one is my uncle Robert Dupe, who
(04:55):
was Joe's brother. He was similar to Joe in a
lot of ways. They're both just always up to no
good and pulling pranks and doing rowdy things, but in
terms of his faith and his morals, you couldn't have
been more different. He hated everything about the Church and
the Bible and Christianity. No matter how much his brother
(05:17):
presented it to him and pleaded with him about it,
he wanted nothing to do with it. And my dad
would pray at night. My mom told me, Lord, please say, Robert, like,
whatever it takes, even if it means taking my own life,
would you save him. And we kind of laugh a
little bit at that, sometimes say careful what you pray for.
(05:39):
But they got the news of my dad dying, and
my uncle was driving to the hospital and he remembers
just parking his car, turning the car off and looking
up and just saying, all right, you have my attention.
(06:00):
And as soon as he walked in that building, he
saw something that you don't see in these situations very often,
and it was the love of the church, the love
of family, the love of the fire department, all surrounding
my mom and overwhelmed him, you know. And it was
something that stood out and was different than what he'd
(06:20):
experienced in his life. And so he spent the next
few months asking questions and wanting to know what it
was that Joe believed. You know, what was this faith?
He asked one of Joe's friends from church. Will I
ever see my brother again? Like I want to see
him again, you know? A few months later, he accepted
Christ and started attending church regularly and wanted to not
(06:45):
only live on his brother's legacy, but more importantly, to
know this savior that his brother did.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
And you're listening to Caleb Bailey tell the story of
his father, his mother, and his father's brother and how
he and his family dealt with a great loss, of
great tragedy. When we come back, more of this remarkable
story about faith, love, and so much more here on
Our American Stories. Lee Hibibe here the host of our
(07:32):
American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring
stories from across this great country, stories from our big
cities and small towns. But we truly can't do the
show without you. Our stories are free to listen to,
but they're not free to make. If you love what
you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click
the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go
(07:54):
to Auramerican Stories dot com and give. And we returned
to our American Stories and we've been listening to Caleb
Bailey share his family story. Caleb's birth dad died when
(08:19):
he was just ten days old in the line of
duty as an LA firefighter. Through this tragedy, Caleb's uncle,
Robert came to Christ but Caleb's mother was left a
young widow and Caleb and his older brother Luke were
left fatherless. Back to Caleb for the rest of the story.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
So then life goes on for our family, just two
boys and a mom trying to make it by. And
one of my mom's friends had a mutual friend named
Kevin Bailey, who was also a firefighter. The fact that
she thought my mom would want to marry another firefighter
is crazy, but it worked, and introduced the two of
(09:06):
them at a Super Bowl party and they hit it off.
And that was Kevin Bailey. And I could talk your
ear off about Kevin Bailey. He had been working for
a while and was single, living in southern California, and
he was looking to get married and was blown away
by my mom's story. In fact, before he had met
(09:28):
my mom at that Super Bowl party, he had heard
her speak at a firefighter event regarding my dad's death,
and he was blown away. He was just like because
she spent that whole time just giving the gospel you know.
Here she was in front of hundreds of people in
La City and she was just given the Gospel and
he was like, WHOA, that's different. Apparently the two little
(09:51):
rascals she was dragging along her side didn't scare him off,
so he went on some dates with her. It speaks
a lot to his character that during that time, before
they were even married, he would be coming over for dinner,
He would be watching us, if my mom had some
events she needed to go to, he would babysit us.
When I had pneumonia and I was in the hospital
(10:12):
at a year old, he was there supporting my mom,
taking care of me, and hanging out with my older
brother Luke. Obviously, my dad was interested by based on
the fact that he stuck around my mom and me
and Luke, and so as he was dating her, he
kind of went to our pastor at our church and said, hey, look,
(10:33):
I don't know what the next step would be or
how soon that step would be, but I think I
want to marry this woman. And my pastor just looked
at him and said, hey, you either fish or cut bait.
She's got two sons, and those sons need a dad,
and she needs a husband at this point, so you
better make a decision. And so I guess my dad
(10:55):
went with the fish instead of cutting bait and married
my mom in nineteen ninety nine in July and adopted
me and Luke, so he was now my mom's husband
and our dad. And people ask me sometimes, you know,
was there ever any weird points in her upbringing, just
(11:16):
kind of like dealing with your stepdad and trying to
navigate that and kind of the power dynamics or the
parenting models and all those things, and I just tell
them he wasn't my stepdad, Like legally, he was my
legal dad, and it wasn't just a legal obligation either.
The way he raised us made it really easy to
(11:37):
be his son because he was a great father. They
had two more sons, my younger brother's Brock and Rylan,
so we had four boys in our house and it
was chaos all the time. But nothing really surprised my
mom at that point, after all she'd been through. So
my dad retired from the fire department in twenty ten
or twenty twelve, I can't remember. I'm pretty sure it's ten.
(12:00):
A man on his crew, Glenn Allen, actually died that
year responding to a fire as a roof collapsed on
a building, and my mom just said, Hey, that's enough.
You know, I can't be going to bed every night
with you at the station and knowing that that could
be you, you know, and go through all this all
over again. So he retired after thirty years on the department.
(12:24):
They've been present and very active in our lives. So
six months back, I moved from California to Asheville, North Carolina.
So Uncle Robert, he's one of the few family members
of Joe that we've been in close contact with. He
made quite an effort after everything happened to still be
(12:45):
around to support my mom, to love on me and
my older brother, to spend time with us. And I
actually visited him this past summer on my way down
to North Carolina. They live in nash Tennessee, and so
I spent time about five hours that first night there
just kind of hearing stories about my dad, hearing kind
(13:08):
of what went down on site of the incident, which
was kind of a huge moment because I hadn't heard
those things for a long time, and not for bad reason.
I mean, I just had never asked my mom, you
don't really want to bring up those things unnecessarily. If
I were her, I wouldn't really want to revisit that
situation a ton, So I wanted to be consider in
(13:28):
that sense. And it wasn't of the utmost importance that
I knew about some of those things. But my uncle
didn't mind talking about it, so we talked through some
of those things, and then he told me he had
the actual original tape of the funeral. There were a
couple funerals, actually, the La City Fire Department did one,
and then Grace's Community Church held another. One of the
most impactful things about that video was watching my mom. Naturally,
(13:51):
my eyes were just kind of directed towards her and
just kind of seeing how she dealt with it. My
mom is so sweet and so emotional too, in both
the highs and the lie, so she gets the most excited
about our achievements and our accomplishments, but she cries very
easily too, So I was just expecting her to be
in a pool of tears during this video, and I
kid you not, the whole time I watched it, she
(14:13):
wasn't crying once. She had her two sons with her
and she had to be strong for them. Obviously she
wasn't pretending like nothing happened. Deep down, her heart was
being ripped out. There's a whole range of emotions from
overwhelming support of all these people being here for the service,
and then the reality of her husband being dead, and
yet she stood there and welcomed all the hugs, welcomed
(14:37):
all the love and the condolences from people around. There's
one little clip where they cut in and it's close
and she's holding my older brother Luke, who's two at
that time, and she's pointing out things on the fire truck, like, hey,
that's kind of cool. You see that all you see
the big fire truck, And it's just like here she
is facing the biggest moment of her life, the biggest
(14:57):
tragedy of her life, right in the face, and she's
raising her son at the same time and knows that
that's going to be the next you know, rest of
her life is doing that regardless of what happens. And
she was strong in that, and she's continued to be
strong even if she's emotional. She doesn't crack. You know,
(15:18):
she has been joyful all throughout our upbringing, even when
a lot of it wasn't joyful. So yeah, even talking
to her. I talked to her today because yesterday was
the anniversary, twenty four year anniversary, so I was talking
to her today and I told her people always ask
(15:39):
me how I process through that situation, like how can
I pray for you? What's difficult about it? And that's understandable.
But the reality is there's not much grief in it.
You know, obviously in that time and at the moment
there was, I was too young to really experience that.
The only emotion that I feel is just being overwhelmed
seeing the Lord's kindness and providing through all of that.
(16:01):
And she said that's exactly how she feels, which says
a lot because she was the one that, you know,
bore the brunt of what happened, and yet today, you know,
twenty four years later, she's saying, yeah, it's not sad,
it's only like incredible what's happened. There's so much redemption
(16:21):
in the midst of all of it. Like, if I
were to plan that out from a third person perspective,
I'd be like, they have a happy life as a family,
nothing bad happens to them. Okay, that's cool, that's great.
That would be a good situation. And then the Lord says, no,
I'm going to take the husband out of the picture.
And you're going, what in the world, that's not only
a bad idea, that's the worst possible idea, Like that's
(16:42):
complete opposite. What are you thinking? And then he goes,
but through that, I'm going to save his brother. And
then through that, I'm going to provide another dad for
this family. They're going to get more people to their family,
and those that whole family will know me as a
result and pray, and then they're going to tell this
story to hundreds of thousands of people in the future,
(17:05):
and those people will know the story. Now, Yeah, your
whole thing with the family being happy and complete and
everything that's special, but this is something different. He can
redeem those things that are broken way better than we
could ever picture it.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
And a terrific job, a beautiful job on the production
by Faith and a special thanks to Caleb Bailey for
sharing his story. And my goodness, his mother comes off
as one heck of a star. He lost a breadwinner,
lost the father of two sons, lost her soulmate, and
had to figure out life. He said he could have
(17:44):
given up, but she didn't. Caleb Bailey's story, his family's story.
Here on our American Story.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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