Help & Hope

Help & Hope

The Help & Hope Podcast guests address life's darkest circumstances that are often difficult to discuss, yet need to be faced as we help one another walk by faith. These are the real-life testimonies of people who have walked through these experiences and have found their strength in Christ.

Episodes

October 8, 2025 72 mins

Elyse Fitzpatrick, author of over twenty books, a frequent conference speaker, and counselor, joins hosts Sharon Betters and Heidi Nequist to discuss aging and the second half of life. Rather than a question-and-answer format, listeners will feel like they are sitting around a table with three friends who are sharing their thoughts, concerns, and questions about what it means to age in this culture. For example, why is aging so har...

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There are many blessings that come with age: retirement, grandchildren, travel, and life experience. Today’s culture, however, marginalizes old age, often portraying it as burdensome and hopeless. Many older women can feel like an encumbrance rather than a blessing to their friends and family members. In this conversation with Chuck L. Betters, while acknowledging aging can be hard and challenging, Sharon Betters and Susan Hunt enc...

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Many people have experienced betrayal, someone violating your trust perhaps by lying, cheating, some kind of abuse, putting their own interests ahead of yours when they promised otherwise. Betrayal affects every part of our hearts, often in ways we don’t understand at first. Some hurts we carry with us to the day we die because they are so deep and seem impossible to resolve. In this conversation with Sharon Betters, Wendy Alsup sh...

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This conversation is for pastors and ministry wives and those who love them. While there are occupational hazards in all lines of work, ministry families experience conflicts that sometimes not only result in broken relationships but the loss of their beloved church family. In most jobs, wives are not expected to be unpaid laborers, stand by their husband’s side every Sunday, remembering every name and something about the families,...

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From the time you’re little, your experience with friendships can make or break your day – whether it’s a five-year-old who is left out of the game on the playground, or a thirty-year-old who sees pictures on social media of her friend group having fun without her, or facing the most hurtful season of your life completely alone –  friends or the lack of friends have power to help or hurt.  Sharon Betters and co-host Heidi Nequist t...

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1 in 8 couples have trouble getting pregnant. That's about 6.7 million people each year who have trouble conceiving.

10—15% of women who know they are pregnant will experience a miscarriage. Some studies say it’s higher.

About 1 pregnancy in 100 at 20 weeks of pregnancy and later is affected by stillbirth, and each year about 24,000 babies are stillborn in the United States.

This doesn’t take into account the number of babies dia...

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From age 12 through the age of 18, Doug began to experiment with any and all drugs, from ecstasy to crystal meth, that he could get his hands on. Over the course of the next few years, oxycodone became the dominant Idol that consumed him and eventually transitioned into a full-blown heroin addiction. Doug shares his journey into drug addiction including how being raised “in the church” left him so empty that he searched and found a...

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With the explosion of the technology age we are currently in, easily-accessed porn invades younger and younger hearts, often unbeknownst to parents. When encouraged to protect their children from tech invasions, many parents vehemently declare that their child is so innocent and so protected, they are not concerned for their welfare. Their relationship to their child is so secure, that their child would not secretly travel into suc...

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Depression affects more than 15 million American adults – 6.7% of the population 18 or older. Twenty percent of teens experience depression before adulthood and 70% will have more than one episode of depression before adulthood. 8.3% of these teens suffer depression for at least a year.

Women are twice as likely to suffer from depression.

Untreated suicide is the leading cause of suicide, and suicide is the leadin...

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Thin. Fat. Thin again. Dieting. Binging. Starvation diets. Grapefruit Diets. Low Carb. Thin. Fat. Thin again. Constance Rhodes understands the obsession with body image. In this conversation, she shares her own roller coaster struggle with weight. Young people and adults alike will find a friend in Constance as she transparently tells her story of weight loss, weight gain, and the thin cage in which she found herself trapped.

The He...

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Stephanie Hubach is no stranger to the challenges of raising a child with special needs as a researcher in disability ministry and the mother of a son with Down Syndrome. Stephanie has spoken to thousands of parents about the struggles and the blessings of children who might be seen by our culture as dispensable but in God’s world are indispensable. We lose many gifts and blessings when we do not recognize that what appears weak to...

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In this interview, two sets of parents speak honestly about how their children with an autistic spectrum disorder impacted their dreams, challenged their marriages, and created chaos in their homes. They also describe their special joys in parenting their children. If you are parenting a child with special needs, you will relate to their transparent descriptions of parenting children with a form of autism. These interviews will als...

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Bryan and his wife Sharon say the diagnosis of severe autism for his son Matthew confronted them with the reality that the future they had planned would never come. In this transparent conversation Bryan touches on how he and his wife went into survival mode, how he initially thought he could “fix” his son, the spiritual struggles they experienced, and the impact of Matthew on their other children and their marriage. Though their j...

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Nearly aborted, graciously adopted, and later abandoned, Lori Sealy has traveled the road of atheism and lived a life of autism. Lori was diagnosed with Autism as an adult, and not long after that diagnosis, learned her son had autism as well. Lori is a classical pianist and songwriter whose music gives a transparent view into the intimate struggles of faith and life that she experiences.

In this interview, parents of a yo...

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Paul and Jill Miller welcomed their sixth child, daughter Kim, into their home in 1982. It became apparent at a young age that Kim was behind in her developmental milestones. She was also nonverbal. Kim was diagnosed as having autism, a diagnosis that was just beginning to be recognized by doctors. Kim’s diagnosis not only created enormous stress on their family, but also isolated Jill as she learned how to parent their precious ch...

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Pornography – do you know someone who is struggling with this particular sin? Unfortunately, it’s likely that you do, but you may not know how to help. In these two conversations, host Dr. Chuck Betters, along with Rebekah Hannah (Director of Anchored Virtual.co, an online biblical counseling service), talk with counselors Deepak Reju and Jonathan Holmes, who provide biblical strategies for guiding a fellow believer toward recovery...

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What happens when a four-year-old gets an unwanted education in the darker side of humanity and experiences sexual abuse at the hand of her father? In this powerful, sometimes difficult to hear interview, Dr. Terry Eccles takes the listener into the abyss of the sexual abuse she experienced beginning at the age of four. This interview gives hope to the abused but also gives a window into the soul of the abused in a way that will be...

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Some stats state that 50% of married couples in churches have experienced sexual betrayal in their marriage. When a wife learns about her husband’s sexual betrayal, in the blink of an eye, a bomb detonates and blows up her marriage. The very foundations on which she built her home shatter, and she can barely breathe, let alone find her way out from under the rubble. Ellen Dykas has walked with hundreds, maybe even thousands of wome...

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"In August 1999 I sat by myself on my living room couch. Alone. Scared. I tried to piece together what 13 years of sexual addiction had just torn apart. My life was unraveling and I couldn’t harness my out of control behaviors. I remember thinking I might be better off dead than alive. As I sat there I had a lot to consider. I was a sex addict." (From 2.bebroken.com) Exposure to pornography at the age of 12 was Jonathan’s...

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When a son, sister, or grandchild begins to behave in unexpected and disturbing ways, family members hope it is simply a phase. For some, it is instead a life-time illness – schizophrenia. The diagnosis of schizophrenia can bring shock, fear, and worry to everyone involved. But in the midst of the numerous challenges, hope doesn’t have to die. In this conversation with Sharon Betters, Simonetta Carr shares the story of her beloved ...

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