March 8, 2022 • 38 mins
Impactful author, Mitch Albom, comes alongside today with some powerful messages of hope and healing. His last two books, "Finding Chika", and, "The Stranger In The Lifeboat", are inexorably tied, the first about the grief of losing his daughter, and the second, about healing. The drifting lifeboat a metaphor for desperation, of crying out to God for help, (and demanding the cry be answered with the swiftness and accuracy of a fast food order).
Mitch and his wife, Janine, have dedicated their lives to caring for the forgotten children of Haiti, where they met Chika. He had only one request today, that I introduce my listeners to Have Faith Haiti Mission (www.havefaithhaiti.org) on the chance that your hearts too may be touched. ~ Delilah
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Are you still buried in snow or ice? Or has
your little corner of the world begin to thodd just
a bit? And one of the blessings of living in
the Pacific Northwest is that our weather isn't as harsh
as it is in other areas. But whoa boy, can't
it be unpredictable? You know that old saying march comes
in like a lion and marches out like a lamb. Well,
(00:26):
where I live it applies to hourly weather changes in
the late winter early spring. One minute there's rain or
sleet that's coming in sideways. The next minute the sun
so bright it nearly blinds you. But you know what else?
Through it all, the asparagus in my garden manages to
poke itself up out of the soggy soil. The crocus
(00:48):
and the tulip follow sweet, and before long there are
oceans of daffodils lapping at the shores of my meadows.
The weather as crazy as life can be too. But
it's these little mere miracles that happened not in spite of,
but because of the mixture of rain and sleet and
sun that so reassuringly delights my senses while calming my soul.
(01:12):
No one else helps to get me through the rest
of this Chili season. Reading immersing myself in a book
transports me out of my own reality, places me in
the middle of the characters that I'm reading about. That
is why I have a book club on Delilah dot
com to recommend some good reads I hope will do
the same for you. It's also the reason that I
(01:34):
so revere book authors. Their gift is a gift to
us all. Like today's guest here on Love Someone, he
is the much celebrated author seven number one New York
Times bestsellers, including true stories like Tuesdays with Marie and
Have a Little Faith, as well as the novel that
(01:55):
really blew My mind, The Five People You Meet in Heaven.
All of his writing, as novels as memoirs have the
same central theme of faith, of kindness, the power of community.
He has honed the gift of finding the miraculous in
the mundane and then shining a spotlights was to share
(02:15):
the goodness with us all. Let's welcome Mitch album too.
The conversation today, right after I say a few words
about one of our podcast sponsors, I love Mercyship's spirit
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(03:02):
ships dot org to learn the many ways you can
be a part of the great work that they're doing
Mercy ships dot org. Today we are welcoming Mitch Album.
It's good to have you here. You started writing. You
started your writing career as a sports writer for the
Detroit Free Press, and now you are an accomplished songwriter,
(03:24):
accomplished pianist, accomplished lyricists. You've written best sellers, and we're
going to talk about not one, but two of your
books today, Finding Chica and The Stranger in the Lifeboat
the I always say that I wrote Finding Chica, which
(03:45):
was a story of our losing our little girl that
we had we adopted from Haiti when she died when
she was seven. I always say I wrote that book
in pain, and I wrote The Stranger in the lifeboat
in healing, and so they are kind of connected to
one other very much. So let's let's talk about you
for just a minute, um Mitch, because you've had quite
(04:08):
a prolific, productive, busy, busy, busy life. I think I'm busy.
And then I was reading about all the wonderful projects
that you have embraced and opened your arms too and
taken on. And one of the sweet things and finding
Chico was the way that you described your daughter and
how she was a natural born leader and that she
(04:31):
loved having kids to boss around and and to follow her.
And you said, you know, I don't know where that
came from, if that was something that she got in
the early years of her life or having raised as
many kids as I've raised, some that I gave birth to,
most that I adopted, I can tell you because you
did not get her at birth, but I did raise
(04:52):
several from birth. They're born with that, They're born with that,
And I think God put YouTube together because it sounds
like you were born with that. Well, she certainly had
me beat if I was born with it. She just
basically led me around by the nose. But you know,
for people who don't know the background on it. I
(05:14):
went to Haiti twelve years ago after the earthquake of
two thousand ten, a couple of weeks after it, on
a factfinding trip with a pastor who said that his
orphanage had been destroyed, and before long I ended up
taking over that orphanage. And I've been there ever since.
I'm there every month of my life for the last
(05:35):
twelve years. I'll be there every month of my life
if I don't move there for the rest of my life.
And uh, I have fifty four children now that we
raised there at the orphanage, and Chica was one of them.
She came to us when she she was born three
days before the earthquake, so she actually survived the earthquake
as a three day old. Uh. The house that she
(05:56):
was in collapsed around her, but she and her mother
were spared because the roof fell backwards and they were
just kind of left on the bed out in the open,
you know, naked to the sky. So that night she
slept in a bed of sugarcane leaves in the dirt,
and that that was her bed for the next six weeks.
So you'd have to say she was born pretty tough,
(06:17):
and she remained that way even when she came to
us a couple of years later after her mother died
during childbirth of a baby brother, and she lived with
us at the orphanage for several years, and she was,
as you say, the Lila, the bossiest, pushiest kid that
we had and uh loud. I mean she was like
ethel merman and size two shoes. You could hear her
(06:38):
from across the way. It didn't matter if she opened
up and bellowed out. You could be across the street
and you know it was her, and and you know,
she was just delightful. She was you know, that kid Chica.
Everybody said, oh, that's just chica, that's just cheek. And
then when she was five, she developed a brain tumor,
and we brought her to America thinking that well, American died,
(07:00):
or will take it out and we'll bring it right
back to Haiti and she'll resume her life. And instead
she never went home, and she became our daughter, and
we traveled around the world trying to find a cure
for this incurable disease that she had. And she lived
two years, which is about a year and a half
longer than she was supposed to live and during that time,
(07:23):
we ultimately didn't find a cure, but we did find
something else. We found a family, my wife and Chica
and me, And we've never had children of our own,
even though I have fifty four orphans. Uh. And Chica
suddenly was a five year old who was sleeping at
the foot of our bed and waking us up for
breakfast and giving us this chance at all these amazing,
(07:46):
incredible things that you get when a child comes into
your life. And you know, when she died, I was
very angry at the world and at God in particular,
because I didn't think that there could be a benevolent
God who would not be benevolent to a seven year old,
especially one who had suffered as much as she had.
(08:07):
And I wrote the book Finding Chica because I wanted
to tell her story about the two of us and
and and her life. You know, while it was all
in my heart, in my head, because it was all
I could think about, and as I say, it was
kind of written in pain. Even though I think it's
a pretty hopeful and good spirited book, you know, it's
not a horrific book. You know from the page one
of Finding Cheeka that she dies it's not a mystery,
(08:30):
and she actually comes back and is talking to me
as as kind of her ghosts and visiting with me
all that time when we tell her story. And then
a few years later, when it you know, enough time
had passed, I began to sit down to write a
book that was about healing and about what happens when
we cry out for help, as I had cried out
(08:51):
for help with Chica, and we don't get it in
the form that we wanted, and how do we react
to that? And that's what A Stranger in the Lifeboat
is about. You're amazing. You're amazing. Thank you for going
to Haiti. Thank you for saying yes, I don't know
many people that would have done that. Well, I think
(09:13):
I think once you, once you see the kids, an
awful lot of people would have done it. I just
happened to have the means to be able to, you know,
go down monthly and then you're gett ensnared by those children.
And of the fifty four that we have their forty
nine of them were kids that I had to admit,
(09:35):
you know, there were five that were there when I
first got there, But the other forty nine are children
who were brought to us by whomever, you know, a relative,
a grandparents, sister. They were found out in the street.
You know that one of our children was left to
die in the woods and someone found them there crying,
(09:56):
no name, no birth certificate or anything, and and and
brought him to us. Another kid was left at a
malnutrition center, uh and in the hallways for two years.
No one ever picked him up. You know, he dwindled
down to fourteen pounds, and then he was brought to
us again, no names of birth certificates or knowledge or anything.
(10:16):
And when you are the you're the thing standing between
a child like that, you know, maybe living or dying.
There's no options, there's no patting yourself on the back,
there's no aren't we great for doing this? You're just
desperate to save the child when you see the conditions
that they're in. And so of course we'll take bring
(10:36):
that child here. We have to. We have to get
them food and water and medicine and all those things.
So I'm pretty sure you, Delila, or anybody who's listening
to this, if they happen to be in that situation,
would do the same thing. Well, I do the same thing.
In Ghana, there you go. But it's hard. You know.
We take people over every year, every every chance we
(10:59):
get hope that they'll see what you just said and
jump in and say, yeah, yeah, I'll do this, I'll
partner with you, I'll come alongside you. And I don't know,
I don't know how you can see a child who's
starving and not say yes, I will feed this child.
I will commit to feeding this child every day for
(11:20):
the rest of their life. Right. I made little notes
in the book about some of the profound wisdom that
you included that was so sweet that unless you are
looking for that help or that hope, maybe you might
(11:40):
miss it. But one of the things that you said
in Finding Chica is there are many kinds of selfishness
in this world, but the most selfish is hoarding time,
because none of us knows how much we have, and
it is an affront to God to assume there will
be more. Yeah, that is probably the most profound thing
(12:03):
I have read in several months, because it's so true.
It is true, and uh, you know, I wrote it
out of having learned it the hard way, you know,
to assume that, oh, there's always going to be time.
I think when I was writing about I was talking
about my younger years and when I was just working, working, working, working,
(12:23):
and figuring we would get around to starting a family
and we get around all the things that we never
got around too. And to presume that there's going to
be time is you know, an affront to God, because
every day is a gift, and you say, well, good,
I'm getting a gift today. I'm sure I'll get the
gift tomorrow, and I'm sure I'll get the gift next
week and given next year. And that's that's being ungrateful.
(12:47):
And of course, Chica, when you lose a child, you
realize how precious every day is. You know, when the
child only gets to live seven years, you recount every
day of it. But you know, I've I've learned a
lot of lessons on the way, and I try to uh.
Almost everything that you'll read in one of my books
is pretty much me having done something stupid and then
(13:08):
having had to figure out the sentence that I ultimately
end up writing in the book, which is the case
of what you just brought up. I love your honesty
about that. Um the Stranger in the Boat. I haven't
received my copy yet. I ordered it so hopefully it'll
be here today. But it didn't get here in time
to have this conversation, so I didn't. I did research
(13:30):
the last week and I'm I'm reading everything I can,
all your comments from readers who read it and loved it,
and I'm thinking, just from what I've read this this
might end up like Tuesday where it needs to be
you know, maybe put on the screen. Oh, that's actually
already in motion, believe it or not. The Stranger in
(13:50):
the Lifeboat from a reception point of view, you know,
Sales or something has been the biggest book I've written
in ten years. I'm not quite sure why. Um let's
look around us and say, who needs a lifeboat now
more than ever? Oh yeah, the world maybe COVID and
has something to do with it. But the you know,
(14:13):
the premise of it, you know. I always set out
in my books, you know, And I'm not like some
other writers who start with the plot, which is a
great way to do it. I just for me, it
always seems that I have an idea that I wanted
to explore, and once I said, okay, I want to
write about that idea, then I decide, okay, let me
come up with a plot that kind of fits that idea.
(14:34):
So in this case, as I said, I wanted to
write about asking for help, not just because over the
last couple of years, we've all asked for helping one way,
shape or form. You know, Please help me not get COVID,
Please help my relatives in the hospital, you know, not
die from COVID. Please let me keep my job. You know,
there's so much kind of crying out to the universe
for help. But also because, as I say, I kind
(14:56):
of went through this experience of my wife and out
losing the wild and that's the ultimate sort of crying
out for help. And and so I thought, well, where's
the most desperate situation that I can create to try
to explain this kind of theory of crying out for
help and maybe not knowing that help is coming even
if we, you know, don't recognize it. And so I thought, well,
(15:20):
how about a lifeboat? And the first couple of pages
of the book are basically set up the whole thing
that there's this luxury yacht that owned by one of
the richest people in the world. He invites all his rich,
famous friends on and they're all out there, uh, you know,
having a grand time, and all of a sudden the
boat explodes and everybody is killed except ten people, five
(15:43):
of whom are the rich guests, and five of whom
are the staff who were serving them on the boat.
And they find their way to this life raft and
they're floating out there for three days and nobody's coming
for them, and they see sharks in the water, they're
running out of food that you know, that it's hot,
and they realized this could be the end, and in
(16:03):
all their own particular ways, they're crying out for help.
And suddenly they see this body floating in the water
and they pull it into the raft and it's this
young guy, very nondescript, average looking guy, nothing special about him,
and they pepper him with questions he did He doesn't speak,
and finally one of the women says, well, thank the Lord,
(16:24):
we found you, and he says, I am the Lord.
And that's the setup for the book, and it becomes
this question of what do you believe and and you know,
where do you accept your help. Everybody on the boat
doesn't believe he is who he claims because he doesn't
look the part. And he gets thirsty and he gets
(16:46):
hungry and he sleeps a lot, and so they just
think he's some cook who banged his head, you know.
And when he keeps saying I'm the Lord, and they said,
what are you doing here? And he said, well, haven't
you been calling me? I came because you called me.
And they said, are you going to save us? And
he says, well, I can only save you if everybody
in this boat believes I am who I say I
am at the same time. And the simple a thing
(17:08):
is that would be to do, especially if you're out
in the middle of the ocean with sharks around you
and no food, no water. I think, well, how hard
is it to just believe in something? But they don't.
And so as the days go by, you know, more
mysterious things keep happening, and you're left as a reader
to sort of try to figure out, well, is this
(17:28):
guy really he says he is? Or is he not?
And and the point of it is that sometimes the
help that we asked for when we're really down, uh,
it doesn't come the way we wanted to. And I
think especially Americans, when we ask for help, we pray,
we kind of want to help like that, you know,
like we're ordering a sandwich, like we rubbed the magic lamp,
(17:52):
and the genie appears and grants our wish right, and
when it doesn't come, we get like a little ticked off, like, well,
that's not sandwich I ordered, you know, or this isn't it.
And and yet I have observed Delilah that And I'm
old enough now to say this, like I say, I've
not having made many mistakes. The opposite way, Um, God,
(18:13):
the universe, whatever you choose to believe in, it doesn't
operate on our timetable. But if you think about how
many times in your life you look back on something
that was bad, that happened, and then you end up saying, well,
you know, when it happened at the time, I was
really upset. It was terrible. But if that hadn't happened,
then this won't happened. I wouldn't have to move here,
(18:34):
I wouldn't have met this, but we wouldn't have got
married whenever, And you said, well, I guess that's kind
of been its own way. Was the best thing that
could have happened to me? Well, if it's the best
thing that could have happened to you ten years from now,
it is the best thing that could happen to you
right now. It's just we don't see it that way
because we only see what's right in front of us.
And I kind of take this full circle. I realized that,
(18:57):
you know, losing Chica, when I kept looking at it
from the point of view of losing her, I wasn't
looking at it from the point of view of getting her.
I wasn't looking at at the point of view that
she was a gift that my wife and I in
our mid fifties suddenly had the chance to have a
family and have a child, and and and have all
(19:19):
the joy that you get from having a child in
your life after never having had it. That's a gift.
That's an answer to a prayer that we made fifteen
years earlier that we thought was an answer, but it
was answered. It just was answered later. And you know,
the stranger in the light boat kind of tries to
explore all that kind of stuff. I knew when I
was reading the comments from listeners and just from the
(19:41):
descriptions that I had read, I knew that just from that,
just from the comments from from your readers, that it
was going to have a profound impact on people. I
heard a man speaking one time whose daughter had developed
bone cancer. She was training to be a professional ballet
and she fell and broke her femur, and they're like,
(20:03):
nobody breaks their femur. And it was because she had
a tumor in her leg and she had to have
the leg amputated, which ended her hopes of being a
professional dancer. Actually it didn't because she went on to
become a teacher, Um, a dance teacher. But it ended
his life. For seven years, he was unable to to
(20:25):
move past it, and just kept saying why why, why? Why? Why? God?
Why why would you punish a child that had never
done anything wrong? Why? Why? Why? And he said, when
I stopped asking why and started asking what now? What
would you have me do now? Um, he was able
to put his life back together. And the same year
(20:46):
you lost your daughter, I lost a son and I
trying to remember that message, what would you have me
to do now? Yeah? Well, there's a moment in this
book that has become kind of It's been so cited
by the people who have read it that I know
(21:07):
the page number to forty one. Uh, and people keep
writing to me about page to forty one. Why did
you write page to forty one? How did you come
up with page to forty one? And it's a moment
where one of the passengers on the boat in kind
of a desperation. It's not the end of the book,
but it's three quarter mark and kind of desperation for
(21:29):
everything that has happened. And he's mourning his wife who died,
and he turns to the God character and says, you know,
why did you take my wife? Why did you have
to die? And the answer that comes is why is
it that when a human being dies, his loved ones
always say why did God take them? Maybe a better
(21:52):
question would be why did God give them to us?
What did we do to deserve or merit their attention,
their love? The memories? Didn't you have that with your wife?
And the guy says every day? And the answer is, well,
those memories are a gift, but their absence is not
(22:12):
a punishment. I'm not cruel. I don't take things away
from you to punish you. This world is just part
of the story. I know that you cry when your
loved ones leave this planet, but I can assure you
they're not crying. And when people have asked me, you know,
(22:34):
while where did you write that well, obviously I wrote
that for myself. I wrote that so that I could
deal with Chicken not crying here, even though we're crying
for here, And to look at it as what did
I do to get a chance to be a father
at years old? Uh? Why? You know nobody gets that,
(22:58):
and yet I did. And yet my response is how
could you take that away? The response should be thank
you for giving me that even for a day, let
alone for two years. And when now that's not an
easy thing to do, it was easy to write, you know,
something like that down after four ruling years of tutting
(23:21):
yourself through the through the ring, or I wouldn't have
been able to write that sentence or page to forty
one a year or a month or a week after
Chick had died. But that's what I mean about time.
You know, time is its own medicine, and time is
is in some thing else's hands than ours. If you
(23:43):
believe in God, that it's in God's hands, if you
just believe in the universe, and it's in the universe's hands,
but it is not in ours. And it's the one
thing that that frustrates us and we leave, you know,
leaves us so maddened because we want to control everything,
you know, and yet we still can't control the time
that we get, the little amount of it or the
(24:05):
long amount of it. And and you know, all these
different characters in the Stranger in the Lifeboat, they sort
of end up posing the questions to God that I
would ask God, or I imagine Delilah, you would ask
if instead of having me as a average guest, you've
got a special guest like God. And God was your said,
(24:26):
We're gonna we're gonna do a podcast with God today,
and I've got a few questions for God. Here they are,
And I tried to sort of put those questions in
the mouths of the of the passengers on the boat.
Wouldn't that be amazing if we could do that? I
said to my pastor one time. I said, I just
wish he would write me a letter and explain this
to me, because I can't. I can't figure anything out.
(24:48):
He said, he did. It's called the Bible. You don't
read that. You wouldn't read a letter either, And I
was like, WHOA, Okay, thank you for that. Uh So,
how how is your wife holding up? You mentioned in
your book about Chica that you two had kind of
made it come to a decision not to argue in
(25:09):
front of her, not to talk about her condition in
front of her, because she was there to make you happy.
How is she holding up? An? Has she found her
God in the lifeboat? Um? Well, my wife has always
been more faithful and and had a purer faith than
I have, and it helped carry her through the whole
(25:32):
time that Chica was sick, and even after Chica was gone. Um,
I was the one who questioned thing she never did.
But you mentioned that moment where I remember that where
we were in the hospital and something happened at my
job that I took a phone call and I found
it was really frustrating. It is a really stupid thing
(25:53):
that was becoming a big thing and it shouldn't happen.
And I said something, and Jenny said something, and we
were going back and worth and and and just I
was frustrated. She was frustrated, and Chica was in I
was in the bed and she said, hey guys, Hey guys,
that's how she call Hey guys, what are you fighting about?
(26:14):
You know? And I felt so bad at that moment,
Hey guys, And uh, I said, what are we doing?
You know, like we're in a hospital, because we spent
a lot of time in hospital, so it wasn't it
wasn't a new experience. But I walked over to cheek
and I said, it's all right, sweet, I'm sorry, you know, um,
it's nothing. And and she she said that she was
(26:37):
sad or you know, and I said, well, why why
why does it bother? She's because I can't make you happy,
you know. And I realized that she was when we
were arguing. She was taking it on herself, like I
need to do something to make them happy. And when
the child is afflicted with a brain tumor and she's
in a hospital bed and and she's thinking about what
(26:59):
am I supposed to do to make them happy? The
least you can do is not make that child unhappy.
And and you know what, in its own way to Elilah,
that moment and others like it, kept Janina and I
from going down a path that a lot of people
who lose children go down. A lot of couples break
(27:21):
up after a child died. More than is that what
it is? I know it was high and I understand
that because every time you look at your partner, you're
seeing the ghost of of of your child as well.
And then there's you know, there's these subtle well maybe
you should have done something more, Why didn't you help
do more? But we never had that because chicab made
(27:45):
sure that she helped us together. You know, throughout the process,
we knew like it would it would be such a
dishonor to Chica for us to break up. That would
be the worst thing we could do to her memory. Chica.
When we were in um, when we were in Germany,
we lived in Germany for a little while for these
immunology treatments that you can't get here in the States,
(28:06):
and uh, we had to live in this tiny little flat.
You know, we have a nice comfortable house to here
in Michigan. It's plenty. Everybody has the room and everything.
But there we had to live in this one room apartment,
had one bathroom, the single bedroom one bed, so we
all had to sleep in the same bed, which of course,
at our age we weren't crazy about. But Chica loved
it because like she had us all to herself and
(28:29):
there was no one else there, and we were around
her all the time. And so I would sleep on
one side and he would sleep in the other and
she could sleep in the middle. And this one time
and even were about to go to bed, and she
could go Mr Mitch, Mr Need, Mr Mitch, miss Need.
He said, well, she goes kiss kids, kis, kis kiss
kiss because she's love to watch, you know, princess and
princesses kiss and stuff. So we were in like a
(28:50):
little tent, you know, tep over her in the bed.
So we kissed and she was underneath us since she
started to clap, and she said, now you can live
happily ever after, and you can't dishonor that wish by
breaking up or getting mad at each other. And I
(29:11):
think we just tell those kinds of stories to one
another and they bring us closer together. So our our
love for Chica is a unifying thing. In our case.
We're very fortunate because you know, the couples who do
split up, they've done nothing wrong. It's just grief is
taking a different hold on them. You know, it's coming
at him from a different angle, like a wrestling move.
Um that one takes them down. And we've got and
(29:33):
we managed to escape, and we're very lucky. You were
very blessed. You were very blessed. And you have been
a blessing to so many. You know, it would be
fun as if I could go with you two Haiti
and interview some of those kids. Come on, it's no problem.
Meet me there and we'll pick you up the airport.
(29:53):
I probably met you there. I was probably there because
I was there three days after the earthquake when you
were well. Come on back. Our kids are good interviews.
I know they are. I know they are. Most of
the work I do is in Ghana, and in Ghana
the buses are called tros, and in Haiti their tap taps.
But if anybody wants to smile, look up online the
(30:18):
tap tap busses in Haiti. The artwork is mind boggling.
So the most creative artwork I have ever seen in
my life are on the tap taps in Haiti. When
you're stuffed inside with forty other people, you know, cheek
to cheek and sweaty elbow to sweaty elbow and no
air conditioning and no anything. The artwork doesn't doesn't really
(30:41):
comfort you very much on the outside, but it's fun
to look at when you're behind it. It's really quite
something for a country that has so little, you know, Second,
force country on the planet. And you know, the average
salary is two dollars a day, and unemployment and illiteracy
and all these ridicul listening high numbers, and there's such faith.
(31:03):
They're such faith, And you know, it's easy for me
to write books like I do being there, and I
wrote a lot of The Stranger in the Lifeboat down there,
and I would write it and uh, in fact, the
kids read it before it came out, because you know,
I have to sit outside because it's too hot sometimes inside,
(31:24):
especially if you don't have a fan or whatever. So
I sit outside. And if I have a computer like
I bring down, well that's a big deal because we
don't have computers. So the kids start buzzing around me immediately,
and what are you doing, Mr Mitch. I'm working on
a book. What's the book called, Mr Mitch? A Stranger
in the lifeboat? Who is a stranger in the life boat?
(31:44):
Mr Mitch? Okay, this is too many questions. How about
if you read it, I'll let you go read it
and then you know, and and so they said, yeah,
can we read it? So I printed it out a
bunch of copies and I gave it to them and
they went off and read it, because they'll read everything
and anything with you. When you don't have TV, and
you don't have internet, you don't have cell phones or whatever.
You'd be amazed at how much kids love to read.
And they did and are like fifteen year old, fourteen
(32:07):
year old, sixteen year old. They had some pretty good
ideas on it. You know, they had some pretty good
questions and I made some edits as a result of
the stuff that they did. So um, their faith, you
know what was was a big kind of what what
an amazing focus group. You're writing a book about finding
(32:28):
God in tough circumstances and you've got kids who have
known nothing but tough circumstances and who have the biggest faith.
Like you said, the kids we work with in Ghane
and the kids that we have interacted with and helped
in Haiti have the biggest faith of anybody I've ever
met in my life. What a great focus group for you. Yeah,
(32:50):
it's a pretty cool place to to work and to
write books, at least hopeful books, which is what I
try to write. All your books that I have read,
and I've read some are very hopeful, very inspiring, and
not sugarcoated. A lot of books of faith or books
that inspire faith are so sugarcoated or so pretend you
(33:13):
know that they make my skin crawl. They set my
teeth on edge, like I just date a cupcake from Costco,
you know. But yours are very beautiful and do inspire.
So thank you, thank you, and thank you for being
here with us today. I enjoy it. Is there anything
(33:34):
I can do to bless you, to make life better,
or anything I can shared that would bless you in
any way? Well, if you want to share with your
listeners that they can go to our website for Haiti,
which is called have Faith Haiti dot org and read
about our kids and if they want to get involved
(33:55):
in some way from helping out to coming down the
volunteering or anything like that. A pretty comprehensive website. Over
the course to twelve years, we've got a lot of
videos of our kids and pictures and updates and everything.
So I love to spread the word about that more
so than about my you know, books or things like that.
So if you can tell people that let's have faith
(34:16):
Haiti dot org, awesome, we will do that. Mitchell Baum,
thank you for being with us. Thanks for having me on.
Let me know if I can ever be any help,
or if you want to come down to eighty, I
will thank you. Mitch has given us so many gifts
already and so much to think about. In today's conversation,
let's recap a bit, but first a shout out to
(34:38):
another one of my amazing podcast sponsors. If you have
been listening to my voice on the radio four years,
then you know that I have been around on the
radio four years. Off the radio, I'm taking care of
my kids, taking care of my dogs, riding my horses,
growing plants in my gardens. And you know what it hurts.
(35:02):
It does. My hands hurt, my back hurts, my knees hurt.
But when I started taking Omega x L, I noticed
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Omega x L dot com forward slash love to place
your order and to discover all the wonderful goodness of
(36:10):
Omega x L. Mitch Albom became a household name after
the release of Tuesdays with Morey, a memoir of his
visits with his old college professor during the last day
of Maury's life. It was a book full of lessons
on living, on dying, on loving. Since then, he has
continuously put forth works just as insightful, compelling, inspiring, like
(36:35):
his latest finding Chica and The Stranger in the Lifeboat,
both available wherever books are sold. And while his books
have sold over forty million copies, he might also be
interested to know he's an accomplished songwriter, pianist, lyricist. He
and his wife Janine worked tirelessly to better the lives
of kids at the orphanage they started in Haiti and
(36:57):
the many other charitable organization that they established and support.
They embody the lessons we first learned in Tuesdays with
Marie love Winds. I asked Mitch what I could do
to help. He said, please spread the word about have
Faith Haiti dot org. Have Faith Haiti dot org. Go
(37:18):
there see how you can help, how you can become
a part of this amazing mission. I'll be here in
the meantime, keeping you company on the air here n
Loves Someone, where we have truly the greatest, most inspiring conversations,
and on my new daily podcast, Hey It's Delilah, where
(37:39):
I share best on air moments with you in potent
daily doses. Spring is on the way and we will
get there together. Thank you for joining me on Love
Someone with the LIMA. Don I know
Are you still buried in snow or ice? Or has
your little corner of the world begin to thodd just
a bit? And one of the blessings of living in
the Pacific Northwest is that our weather isn't as harsh
as it is in other areas. But whoa boy, can't
it be unpredictable? You know that old saying march comes
in like a lion and marches out like a lamb. Well,
(00:26):
where I live it applies to hourly weather changes in
the late winter early spring. One minute there's rain or
sleet that's coming in sideways. The next minute the sun
so bright it nearly blinds you. But you know what else?
Through it all, the asparagus in my garden manages to
poke itself up out of the soggy soil. The crocus
(00:48):
and the tulip follow sweet, and before long there are
oceans of daffodils lapping at the shores of my meadows.
The weather as crazy as life can be too. But
it's these little mere miracles that happened not in spite of,
but because of the mixture of rain and sleet and
sun that so reassuringly delights my senses while calming my soul.
(01:12):
No one else helps to get me through the rest
of this Chili season. Reading immersing myself in a book
transports me out of my own reality, places me in
the middle of the characters that I'm reading about. That
is why I have a book club on Delilah dot
com to recommend some good reads I hope will do
the same for you. It's also the reason that I
(01:34):
so revere book authors. Their gift is a gift to
us all. Like today's guest here on Love Someone, he
is the much celebrated author seven number one New York
Times bestsellers, including true stories like Tuesdays with Marie and
Have a Little Faith, as well as the novel that
(01:55):
really blew My mind, The Five People You Meet in Heaven.
All of his writing, as novels as memoirs have the
same central theme of faith, of kindness, the power of community.
He has honed the gift of finding the miraculous in
the mundane and then shining a spotlights was to share
(02:15):
the goodness with us all. Let's welcome Mitch album too.
The conversation today, right after I say a few words
about one of our podcast sponsors, I love Mercyship's spirit
and I'm so happy to share all the good they
do in the world, providing free surgeries to suffering people
(02:36):
who lack access to medical care. Today, I ask you
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ships dot org to learn the many ways you can
be a part of the great work that they're doing
Mercy ships dot org. Today we are welcoming Mitch Album.
It's good to have you here. You started writing. You
started your writing career as a sports writer for the
Detroit Free Press, and now you are an accomplished songwriter,
(03:24):
accomplished pianist, accomplished lyricists. You've written best sellers, and we're
going to talk about not one, but two of your
books today, Finding Chica and The Stranger in the Lifeboat
the I always say that I wrote Finding Chica, which
(03:45):
was a story of our losing our little girl that
we had we adopted from Haiti when she died when
she was seven. I always say I wrote that book
in pain, and I wrote The Stranger in the lifeboat
in healing, and so they are kind of connected to
one other very much. So let's let's talk about you
for just a minute, um Mitch, because you've had quite
(04:08):
a prolific, productive, busy, busy, busy life. I think I'm busy.
And then I was reading about all the wonderful projects
that you have embraced and opened your arms too and
taken on. And one of the sweet things and finding
Chico was the way that you described your daughter and
how she was a natural born leader and that she
(04:31):
loved having kids to boss around and and to follow her.
And you said, you know, I don't know where that
came from, if that was something that she got in
the early years of her life or having raised as
many kids as I've raised, some that I gave birth to,
most that I adopted, I can tell you because you
did not get her at birth, but I did raise
(04:52):
several from birth. They're born with that, They're born with that,
And I think God put YouTube together because it sounds
like you were born with that. Well, she certainly had
me beat if I was born with it. She just
basically led me around by the nose. But you know,
for people who don't know the background on it. I
(05:14):
went to Haiti twelve years ago after the earthquake of
two thousand ten, a couple of weeks after it, on
a factfinding trip with a pastor who said that his
orphanage had been destroyed, and before long I ended up
taking over that orphanage. And I've been there ever since.
I'm there every month of my life for the last
(05:35):
twelve years. I'll be there every month of my life
if I don't move there for the rest of my life.
And uh, I have fifty four children now that we
raised there at the orphanage, and Chica was one of them.
She came to us when she she was born three
days before the earthquake, so she actually survived the earthquake
as a three day old. Uh. The house that she
(05:56):
was in collapsed around her, but she and her mother
were spared because the roof fell backwards and they were
just kind of left on the bed out in the open,
you know, naked to the sky. So that night she
slept in a bed of sugarcane leaves in the dirt,
and that that was her bed for the next six weeks.
So you'd have to say she was born pretty tough,
(06:17):
and she remained that way even when she came to
us a couple of years later after her mother died
during childbirth of a baby brother, and she lived with
us at the orphanage for several years, and she was,
as you say, the Lila, the bossiest, pushiest kid that
we had and uh loud. I mean she was like
ethel merman and size two shoes. You could hear her
(06:38):
from across the way. It didn't matter if she opened
up and bellowed out. You could be across the street
and you know it was her, and and you know,
she was just delightful. She was you know, that kid Chica.
Everybody said, oh, that's just chica, that's just cheek. And
then when she was five, she developed a brain tumor,
and we brought her to America thinking that well, American died,
(07:00):
or will take it out and we'll bring it right
back to Haiti and she'll resume her life. And instead
she never went home, and she became our daughter, and
we traveled around the world trying to find a cure
for this incurable disease that she had. And she lived
two years, which is about a year and a half
longer than she was supposed to live and during that time,
(07:23):
we ultimately didn't find a cure, but we did find
something else. We found a family, my wife and Chica
and me, And we've never had children of our own,
even though I have fifty four orphans. Uh. And Chica
suddenly was a five year old who was sleeping at
the foot of our bed and waking us up for
breakfast and giving us this chance at all these amazing,
(07:46):
incredible things that you get when a child comes into
your life. And you know, when she died, I was
very angry at the world and at God in particular,
because I didn't think that there could be a benevolent
God who would not be benevolent to a seven year old,
especially one who had suffered as much as she had.
(08:07):
And I wrote the book Finding Chica because I wanted
to tell her story about the two of us and
and and her life. You know, while it was all
in my heart, in my head, because it was all
I could think about, and as I say, it was
kind of written in pain. Even though I think it's
a pretty hopeful and good spirited book, you know, it's
not a horrific book. You know from the page one
of Finding Cheeka that she dies it's not a mystery,
(08:30):
and she actually comes back and is talking to me
as as kind of her ghosts and visiting with me
all that time when we tell her story. And then
a few years later, when it you know, enough time
had passed, I began to sit down to write a
book that was about healing and about what happens when
we cry out for help, as I had cried out
(08:51):
for help with Chica, and we don't get it in
the form that we wanted, and how do we react
to that? And that's what A Stranger in the Lifeboat
is about. You're amazing. You're amazing. Thank you for going
to Haiti. Thank you for saying yes, I don't know
many people that would have done that. Well, I think
(09:13):
I think once you, once you see the kids, an
awful lot of people would have done it. I just
happened to have the means to be able to, you know,
go down monthly and then you're gett ensnared by those children.
And of the fifty four that we have their forty
nine of them were kids that I had to admit,
(09:35):
you know, there were five that were there when I
first got there, But the other forty nine are children
who were brought to us by whomever, you know, a relative,
a grandparents, sister. They were found out in the street.
You know that one of our children was left to
die in the woods and someone found them there crying,
(09:56):
no name, no birth certificate or anything, and and and
brought him to us. Another kid was left at a
malnutrition center, uh and in the hallways for two years.
No one ever picked him up. You know, he dwindled
down to fourteen pounds, and then he was brought to
us again, no names of birth certificates or knowledge or anything.
(10:16):
And when you are the you're the thing standing between
a child like that, you know, maybe living or dying.
There's no options, there's no patting yourself on the back,
there's no aren't we great for doing this? You're just
desperate to save the child when you see the conditions
that they're in. And so of course we'll take bring
(10:36):
that child here. We have to. We have to get
them food and water and medicine and all those things.
So I'm pretty sure you, Delila, or anybody who's listening
to this, if they happen to be in that situation,
would do the same thing. Well, I do the same thing.
In Ghana, there you go. But it's hard. You know.
We take people over every year, every every chance we
(10:59):
get hope that they'll see what you just said and
jump in and say, yeah, yeah, I'll do this, I'll
partner with you, I'll come alongside you. And I don't know,
I don't know how you can see a child who's
starving and not say yes, I will feed this child.
I will commit to feeding this child every day for
(11:20):
the rest of their life. Right. I made little notes
in the book about some of the profound wisdom that
you included that was so sweet that unless you are
looking for that help or that hope, maybe you might
(11:40):
miss it. But one of the things that you said
in Finding Chica is there are many kinds of selfishness
in this world, but the most selfish is hoarding time,
because none of us knows how much we have, and
it is an affront to God to assume there will
be more. Yeah, that is probably the most profound thing
(12:03):
I have read in several months, because it's so true.
It is true, and uh, you know, I wrote it
out of having learned it the hard way, you know,
to assume that, oh, there's always going to be time.
I think when I was writing about I was talking
about my younger years and when I was just working, working, working, working,
(12:23):
and figuring we would get around to starting a family
and we get around all the things that we never
got around too. And to presume that there's going to
be time is you know, an affront to God, because
every day is a gift, and you say, well, good,
I'm getting a gift today. I'm sure I'll get the
gift tomorrow, and I'm sure I'll get the gift next
week and given next year. And that's that's being ungrateful.
(12:47):
And of course, Chica, when you lose a child, you
realize how precious every day is. You know, when the
child only gets to live seven years, you recount every
day of it. But you know, I've I've learned a
lot of lessons on the way, and I try to uh.
Almost everything that you'll read in one of my books
is pretty much me having done something stupid and then
(13:08):
having had to figure out the sentence that I ultimately
end up writing in the book, which is the case
of what you just brought up. I love your honesty
about that. Um the Stranger in the Boat. I haven't
received my copy yet. I ordered it so hopefully it'll
be here today. But it didn't get here in time
to have this conversation, so I didn't. I did research
(13:30):
the last week and I'm I'm reading everything I can,
all your comments from readers who read it and loved it,
and I'm thinking, just from what I've read this this
might end up like Tuesday where it needs to be
you know, maybe put on the screen. Oh, that's actually
already in motion, believe it or not. The Stranger in
(13:50):
the Lifeboat from a reception point of view, you know,
Sales or something has been the biggest book I've written
in ten years. I'm not quite sure why. Um let's
look around us and say, who needs a lifeboat now
more than ever? Oh yeah, the world maybe COVID and
has something to do with it. But the you know,
(14:13):
the premise of it, you know. I always set out
in my books, you know, And I'm not like some
other writers who start with the plot, which is a
great way to do it. I just for me, it
always seems that I have an idea that I wanted
to explore, and once I said, okay, I want to
write about that idea, then I decide, okay, let me
come up with a plot that kind of fits that idea.
(14:34):
So in this case, as I said, I wanted to
write about asking for help, not just because over the
last couple of years, we've all asked for helping one way,
shape or form. You know, Please help me not get COVID,
Please help my relatives in the hospital, you know, not
die from COVID. Please let me keep my job. You know,
there's so much kind of crying out to the universe
for help. But also because, as I say, I kind
(14:56):
of went through this experience of my wife and out
losing the wild and that's the ultimate sort of crying
out for help. And and so I thought, well, where's
the most desperate situation that I can create to try
to explain this kind of theory of crying out for
help and maybe not knowing that help is coming even
if we, you know, don't recognize it. And so I thought, well,
(15:20):
how about a lifeboat? And the first couple of pages
of the book are basically set up the whole thing
that there's this luxury yacht that owned by one of
the richest people in the world. He invites all his rich,
famous friends on and they're all out there, uh, you know,
having a grand time, and all of a sudden the
boat explodes and everybody is killed except ten people, five
(15:43):
of whom are the rich guests, and five of whom
are the staff who were serving them on the boat.
And they find their way to this life raft and
they're floating out there for three days and nobody's coming
for them, and they see sharks in the water, they're
running out of food that you know, that it's hot,
and they realized this could be the end, and in
(16:03):
all their own particular ways, they're crying out for help.
And suddenly they see this body floating in the water
and they pull it into the raft and it's this
young guy, very nondescript, average looking guy, nothing special about him,
and they pepper him with questions he did He doesn't speak,
and finally one of the women says, well, thank the Lord,
(16:24):
we found you, and he says, I am the Lord.
And that's the setup for the book, and it becomes
this question of what do you believe and and you know,
where do you accept your help. Everybody on the boat
doesn't believe he is who he claims because he doesn't
look the part. And he gets thirsty and he gets
(16:46):
hungry and he sleeps a lot, and so they just
think he's some cook who banged his head, you know.
And when he keeps saying I'm the Lord, and they said,
what are you doing here? And he said, well, haven't
you been calling me? I came because you called me.
And they said, are you going to save us? And
he says, well, I can only save you if everybody
in this boat believes I am who I say I
am at the same time. And the simple a thing
(17:08):
is that would be to do, especially if you're out
in the middle of the ocean with sharks around you
and no food, no water. I think, well, how hard
is it to just believe in something? But they don't.
And so as the days go by, you know, more
mysterious things keep happening, and you're left as a reader
to sort of try to figure out, well, is this
(17:28):
guy really he says he is? Or is he not?
And and the point of it is that sometimes the
help that we asked for when we're really down, uh,
it doesn't come the way we wanted to. And I
think especially Americans, when we ask for help, we pray,
we kind of want to help like that, you know,
like we're ordering a sandwich, like we rubbed the magic lamp,
(17:52):
and the genie appears and grants our wish right, and
when it doesn't come, we get like a little ticked off, like, well,
that's not sandwich I ordered, you know, or this isn't it.
And and yet I have observed Delilah that And I'm
old enough now to say this, like I say, I've
not having made many mistakes. The opposite way, Um, God,
(18:13):
the universe, whatever you choose to believe in, it doesn't
operate on our timetable. But if you think about how
many times in your life you look back on something
that was bad, that happened, and then you end up saying, well,
you know, when it happened at the time, I was
really upset. It was terrible. But if that hadn't happened,
then this won't happened. I wouldn't have to move here,
(18:34):
I wouldn't have met this, but we wouldn't have got
married whenever, And you said, well, I guess that's kind
of been its own way. Was the best thing that
could have happened to me? Well, if it's the best
thing that could have happened to you ten years from now,
it is the best thing that could happen to you
right now. It's just we don't see it that way
because we only see what's right in front of us.
And I kind of take this full circle. I realized that,
(18:57):
you know, losing Chica, when I kept looking at it
from the point of view of losing her, I wasn't
looking at it from the point of view of getting her.
I wasn't looking at at the point of view that
she was a gift that my wife and I in
our mid fifties suddenly had the chance to have a
family and have a child, and and and have all
(19:19):
the joy that you get from having a child in
your life after never having had it. That's a gift.
That's an answer to a prayer that we made fifteen
years earlier that we thought was an answer, but it
was answered. It just was answered later. And you know,
the stranger in the light boat kind of tries to
explore all that kind of stuff. I knew when I
was reading the comments from listeners and just from the
(19:41):
descriptions that I had read, I knew that just from that,
just from the comments from from your readers, that it
was going to have a profound impact on people. I
heard a man speaking one time whose daughter had developed
bone cancer. She was training to be a professional ballet
and she fell and broke her femur, and they're like,
(20:03):
nobody breaks their femur. And it was because she had
a tumor in her leg and she had to have
the leg amputated, which ended her hopes of being a
professional dancer. Actually it didn't because she went on to
become a teacher, Um, a dance teacher. But it ended
his life. For seven years, he was unable to to
(20:25):
move past it, and just kept saying why why, why? Why? Why? God?
Why why would you punish a child that had never
done anything wrong? Why? Why? Why? And he said, when
I stopped asking why and started asking what now? What
would you have me do now? Um, he was able
to put his life back together. And the same year
(20:46):
you lost your daughter, I lost a son and I
trying to remember that message, what would you have me
to do now? Yeah? Well, there's a moment in this
book that has become kind of It's been so cited
by the people who have read it that I know
(21:07):
the page number to forty one. Uh, and people keep
writing to me about page to forty one. Why did
you write page to forty one? How did you come
up with page to forty one? And it's a moment
where one of the passengers on the boat in kind
of a desperation. It's not the end of the book,
but it's three quarter mark and kind of desperation for
(21:29):
everything that has happened. And he's mourning his wife who died,
and he turns to the God character and says, you know,
why did you take my wife? Why did you have
to die? And the answer that comes is why is
it that when a human being dies, his loved ones
always say why did God take them? Maybe a better
(21:52):
question would be why did God give them to us?
What did we do to deserve or merit their attention,
their love? The memories? Didn't you have that with your wife?
And the guy says every day? And the answer is, well,
those memories are a gift, but their absence is not
(22:12):
a punishment. I'm not cruel. I don't take things away
from you to punish you. This world is just part
of the story. I know that you cry when your
loved ones leave this planet, but I can assure you
they're not crying. And when people have asked me, you know,
(22:34):
while where did you write that well, obviously I wrote
that for myself. I wrote that so that I could
deal with Chicken not crying here, even though we're crying
for here, And to look at it as what did
I do to get a chance to be a father
at years old? Uh? Why? You know nobody gets that,
(22:58):
and yet I did. And yet my response is how
could you take that away? The response should be thank
you for giving me that even for a day, let
alone for two years. And when now that's not an
easy thing to do, it was easy to write, you know,
something like that down after four ruling years of tutting
(23:21):
yourself through the through the ring, or I wouldn't have
been able to write that sentence or page to forty
one a year or a month or a week after
Chick had died. But that's what I mean about time.
You know, time is its own medicine, and time is
is in some thing else's hands than ours. If you
(23:43):
believe in God, that it's in God's hands, if you
just believe in the universe, and it's in the universe's hands,
but it is not in ours. And it's the one
thing that that frustrates us and we leave, you know,
leaves us so maddened because we want to control everything,
you know, and yet we still can't control the time
that we get, the little amount of it or the
(24:05):
long amount of it. And and you know, all these
different characters in the Stranger in the Lifeboat, they sort
of end up posing the questions to God that I
would ask God, or I imagine Delilah, you would ask
if instead of having me as a average guest, you've
got a special guest like God. And God was your said,
(24:26):
We're gonna we're gonna do a podcast with God today,
and I've got a few questions for God. Here they are,
And I tried to sort of put those questions in
the mouths of the of the passengers on the boat.
Wouldn't that be amazing if we could do that? I
said to my pastor one time. I said, I just
wish he would write me a letter and explain this
to me, because I can't. I can't figure anything out.
(24:48):
He said, he did. It's called the Bible. You don't
read that. You wouldn't read a letter either, And I
was like, WHOA, Okay, thank you for that. Uh So,
how how is your wife holding up? You mentioned in
your book about Chica that you two had kind of
made it come to a decision not to argue in
(25:09):
front of her, not to talk about her condition in
front of her, because she was there to make you happy.
How is she holding up? An? Has she found her
God in the lifeboat? Um? Well, my wife has always
been more faithful and and had a purer faith than
I have, and it helped carry her through the whole
(25:32):
time that Chica was sick, and even after Chica was gone. Um,
I was the one who questioned thing she never did.
But you mentioned that moment where I remember that where
we were in the hospital and something happened at my
job that I took a phone call and I found
it was really frustrating. It is a really stupid thing
(25:53):
that was becoming a big thing and it shouldn't happen.
And I said something, and Jenny said something, and we
were going back and worth and and and just I
was frustrated. She was frustrated, and Chica was in I
was in the bed and she said, hey guys, Hey guys,
that's how she call Hey guys, what are you fighting about?
(26:14):
You know? And I felt so bad at that moment,
Hey guys, And uh, I said, what are we doing?
You know, like we're in a hospital, because we spent
a lot of time in hospital, so it wasn't it
wasn't a new experience. But I walked over to cheek
and I said, it's all right, sweet, I'm sorry, you know, um,
it's nothing. And and she she said that she was
(26:37):
sad or you know, and I said, well, why why
why does it bother? She's because I can't make you happy,
you know. And I realized that she was when we
were arguing. She was taking it on herself, like I
need to do something to make them happy. And when
the child is afflicted with a brain tumor and she's
in a hospital bed and and she's thinking about what
(26:59):
am I supposed to do to make them happy? The
least you can do is not make that child unhappy.
And and you know what, in its own way to Elilah,
that moment and others like it, kept Janina and I
from going down a path that a lot of people
who lose children go down. A lot of couples break
(27:21):
up after a child died. More than is that what
it is? I know it was high and I understand
that because every time you look at your partner, you're
seeing the ghost of of of your child as well.
And then there's you know, there's these subtle well maybe
you should have done something more, Why didn't you help
do more? But we never had that because chicab made
(27:45):
sure that she helped us together. You know, throughout the process,
we knew like it would it would be such a
dishonor to Chica for us to break up. That would
be the worst thing we could do to her memory. Chica.
When we were in um, when we were in Germany,
we lived in Germany for a little while for these
immunology treatments that you can't get here in the States,
(28:06):
and uh, we had to live in this tiny little flat.
You know, we have a nice comfortable house to here
in Michigan. It's plenty. Everybody has the room and everything.
But there we had to live in this one room apartment,
had one bathroom, the single bedroom one bed, so we
all had to sleep in the same bed, which of course,
at our age we weren't crazy about. But Chica loved
it because like she had us all to herself and
(28:29):
there was no one else there, and we were around
her all the time. And so I would sleep on
one side and he would sleep in the other and
she could sleep in the middle. And this one time
and even were about to go to bed, and she
could go Mr Mitch, Mr Need, Mr Mitch, miss Need.
He said, well, she goes kiss kids, kis, kis kiss
kiss because she's love to watch, you know, princess and
princesses kiss and stuff. So we were in like a
(28:50):
little tent, you know, tep over her in the bed.
So we kissed and she was underneath us since she
started to clap, and she said, now you can live
happily ever after, and you can't dishonor that wish by
breaking up or getting mad at each other. And I
(29:11):
think we just tell those kinds of stories to one
another and they bring us closer together. So our our
love for Chica is a unifying thing. In our case.
We're very fortunate because you know, the couples who do
split up, they've done nothing wrong. It's just grief is
taking a different hold on them. You know, it's coming
at him from a different angle, like a wrestling move.
Um that one takes them down. And we've got and
(29:33):
we managed to escape, and we're very lucky. You were
very blessed. You were very blessed. And you have been
a blessing to so many. You know, it would be
fun as if I could go with you two Haiti
and interview some of those kids. Come on, it's no problem.
Meet me there and we'll pick you up the airport.
(29:53):
I probably met you there. I was probably there because
I was there three days after the earthquake when you
were well. Come on back. Our kids are good interviews.
I know they are. I know they are. Most of
the work I do is in Ghana, and in Ghana
the buses are called tros, and in Haiti their tap taps.
But if anybody wants to smile, look up online the
(30:18):
tap tap busses in Haiti. The artwork is mind boggling.
So the most creative artwork I have ever seen in
my life are on the tap taps in Haiti. When
you're stuffed inside with forty other people, you know, cheek
to cheek and sweaty elbow to sweaty elbow and no
air conditioning and no anything. The artwork doesn't doesn't really
(30:41):
comfort you very much on the outside, but it's fun
to look at when you're behind it. It's really quite
something for a country that has so little, you know, Second,
force country on the planet. And you know, the average
salary is two dollars a day, and unemployment and illiteracy
and all these ridicul listening high numbers, and there's such faith.
(31:03):
They're such faith, And you know, it's easy for me
to write books like I do being there, and I
wrote a lot of The Stranger in the Lifeboat down there,
and I would write it and uh, in fact, the
kids read it before it came out, because you know,
I have to sit outside because it's too hot sometimes inside,
(31:24):
especially if you don't have a fan or whatever. So
I sit outside. And if I have a computer like
I bring down, well that's a big deal because we
don't have computers. So the kids start buzzing around me immediately,
and what are you doing, Mr Mitch. I'm working on
a book. What's the book called, Mr Mitch? A Stranger
in the lifeboat? Who is a stranger in the life boat?
(31:44):
Mr Mitch? Okay, this is too many questions. How about
if you read it, I'll let you go read it
and then you know, and and so they said, yeah,
can we read it? So I printed it out a
bunch of copies and I gave it to them and
they went off and read it, because they'll read everything
and anything with you. When you don't have TV, and
you don't have internet, you don't have cell phones or whatever.
You'd be amazed at how much kids love to read.
And they did and are like fifteen year old, fourteen
(32:07):
year old, sixteen year old. They had some pretty good
ideas on it. You know, they had some pretty good
questions and I made some edits as a result of
the stuff that they did. So um, their faith, you
know what was was a big kind of what what
an amazing focus group. You're writing a book about finding
(32:28):
God in tough circumstances and you've got kids who have
known nothing but tough circumstances and who have the biggest faith.
Like you said, the kids we work with in Ghane
and the kids that we have interacted with and helped
in Haiti have the biggest faith of anybody I've ever
met in my life. What a great focus group for you. Yeah,
(32:50):
it's a pretty cool place to to work and to
write books, at least hopeful books, which is what I
try to write. All your books that I have read,
and I've read some are very hopeful, very inspiring, and
not sugarcoated. A lot of books of faith or books
that inspire faith are so sugarcoated or so pretend you
(33:13):
know that they make my skin crawl. They set my
teeth on edge, like I just date a cupcake from Costco,
you know. But yours are very beautiful and do inspire.
So thank you, thank you, and thank you for being
here with us today. I enjoy it. Is there anything
(33:34):
I can do to bless you, to make life better,
or anything I can shared that would bless you in
any way? Well, if you want to share with your
listeners that they can go to our website for Haiti,
which is called have Faith Haiti dot org and read
about our kids and if they want to get involved
(33:55):
in some way from helping out to coming down the
volunteering or anything like that. A pretty comprehensive website. Over
the course to twelve years, we've got a lot of
videos of our kids and pictures and updates and everything.
So I love to spread the word about that more
so than about my you know, books or things like that.
So if you can tell people that let's have faith
(34:16):
Haiti dot org, awesome, we will do that. Mitchell Baum,
thank you for being with us. Thanks for having me on.
Let me know if I can ever be any help,
or if you want to come down to eighty, I
will thank you. Mitch has given us so many gifts
already and so much to think about. In today's conversation,
let's recap a bit, but first a shout out to
(34:38):
another one of my amazing podcast sponsors. If you have
been listening to my voice on the radio four years,
then you know that I have been around on the
radio four years. Off the radio, I'm taking care of
my kids, taking care of my dogs, riding my horses,
growing plants in my gardens. And you know what it hurts.
(35:02):
It does. My hands hurt, my back hurts, my knees hurt.
But when I started taking Omega x L, I noticed
a difference within the first month. Omega x L, when
taken every day, gives me relief in my hands and
my joints like nothing else. If you suffer from pain
(35:26):
associated with inflammation, I urge you to try Omega x L.
When you try Omega x L, you will see a
difference in the quality of your life. You'll see a
difference in your joints. I even see a difference in
the way my skin feels and the way my hair grows.
(35:46):
I killed you not. My hair grows more rapidly when
I take my Omega Excel every day. In fact, if
I forget to take my Omega x L for a
few weeks, oh boy, do I notice a different prints
Omega x L dot com forward slash love to place
your order and to discover all the wonderful goodness of
(36:10):
Omega x L. Mitch Albom became a household name after
the release of Tuesdays with Morey, a memoir of his
visits with his old college professor during the last day
of Maury's life. It was a book full of lessons
on living, on dying, on loving. Since then, he has
continuously put forth works just as insightful, compelling, inspiring, like
(36:35):
his latest finding Chica and The Stranger in the Lifeboat,
both available wherever books are sold. And while his books
have sold over forty million copies, he might also be
interested to know he's an accomplished songwriter, pianist, lyricist. He
and his wife Janine worked tirelessly to better the lives
of kids at the orphanage they started in Haiti and
(36:57):
the many other charitable organization that they established and support.
They embody the lessons we first learned in Tuesdays with
Marie love Winds. I asked Mitch what I could do
to help. He said, please spread the word about have
Faith Haiti dot org. Have Faith Haiti dot org. Go
(37:18):
there see how you can help, how you can become
a part of this amazing mission. I'll be here in
the meantime, keeping you company on the air here n
Loves Someone, where we have truly the greatest, most inspiring conversations,
and on my new daily podcast, Hey It's Delilah, where
(37:39):
I share best on air moments with you in potent
daily doses. Spring is on the way and we will
get there together. Thank you for joining me on Love
Someone with the LIMA. Don I know
Host
Delilah
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