Mike McCarty Testimony
As a teenager, I was always drawn to dramatic testimonies like Nicky Cruz and his book The Cross and the Switchblade. I was a young Christian and found the conversions by men and women who had led lives of violence, rebellion, drugs or total disbelief in God powerful.
I have always been drawn to help victims and the men and women who commit acts of violence. I can attribute this to parents who worked in law enforcement and victim assistance and the open door to our home for people in crisis. For me, my faith and violence prevention have always been equally yoked.
The powerful testimonies had a huge impact on me. They were the evidence that God could change the heart of any man willing to confess.
They say everybody has a testimony and I am sure that is true to some degree. I have spent the past 12 years resisting telling my story. First, because it is personal. And second, because I don’t like to focus on myself. God has been whispering that a testimony is personal but the story is about Him not me.
The one commonality in all testimonies is the need to be vulnerable. And for me, and I’m sure for many men, that is tough. I have always been highly independent, driven, and competitive, even exposing weaknesses in opponents both in sports and business. I don’t cheat. I play fair, but I play to win.
The seed of justice was fertilized as a nine-year-old boy when I witnessed what People Magazine later called “one of the 20 most shocking crimes in American history.” And this horrific crime took place right in my own community -- to people I knew.
On Valentine’s Day 1977, four young men, out for a joy ride and night of terror, walked into a home three miles from my rural house and lined a mother and her four sons up on the floor and began to execute them with shotguns. The motive? Thrill killing.
The mother miraculously survived, wrapped her head in a towel to stop the bleeding and ran through sub-zero temperatures to a neighbor’s house to call the police. Unbeknown to anyone at the time, her brave action to go get help saved another family from horror. The killers had planned to stop and kill another family -- like the Charles Manson Tate-Labianca murders -- but they heard the police being dispatched on the scanner in their car and fled.
My dad, a young Indiana State Police Officer, was assigned to the case and left me, my mom and baby brother at home each night to go to an undisclosed location to guard the surviving mom until they could identify and capture the killers. It took three weeks and 800 leads to identify the killers and then another two months to capture all four of them.
Starting on the day of the murders, I began cutting out the newspaper articles that chronicled the investigation and tucked them inside a manilla folder that I would carry with me, not only through school, but to college and then on to Nashville, TN where I became a police officer and later a violent crime detective.
I would periodically pull the yellowed clippings out and read through them, looking for answers, trying to understand how such a horrific crime could happen, and what, if anything, could have prevented it.
One afternoon before I left for my evening shift as a detective, I sat down and wrote a letter to the surviving mother, and the four killers, each serving multiple life sentences in prison. I needed answers to the questions that had nagged me for nearly 20 years.
One of the killers responded and agreed to meet and answer my questions. I learned many things talking to this man who had grown up and aged in prison. He even shared the chilling detail that they had driven past my home the night of the murders and joked of stopping and “killing a pig and his family.”
This first visit started a ten-year journey of letters and more visits to the Indiana Reformatory Prison, as well as trips to meet with the surviving mother. During one of my many visits at the prison, I learned that the killer had become a Christian shortly after he was incarcerated in 1977. My search for answers resulted in a book, Choking in Fear.
This is where I would like to stop and say that is the totality of my testimony. A tough former detective on a mission to prevent violence.
I have been pushed and prodded by God for more than 12 years to share the rest of my story. I love sharing the good versus evil, but I have always been reluctant to peel back the layers and reveal my deeply personal journey.
However, I have always known I would have to. My great Christian friends have encouraged me to share my full story because it could help others. And it has been that very thought -- the ability to help and encourage others -- that causes me to finally be vulnerable and share the heartache and tragedy I’ve experienced in my life.
I was 40, in my fourth year of getting Safe Hiring Solutions launched, and my wife was pregnant with our third child. The pregnancy was nothing like the first two. It was filled with extreme exhaustion and a nagging cough that specialists said was most likely a fungal infection or viral pneumonia that could not clear because of the pressure from the baby against the bottom of her lungs.
One morning, like I did every morning, I sat down at my desk in my office to read my Bible and daily devotion before my employees arrived and the chaos of the day started.
I opened my Os Hillman devotional, my mind unfocused and wandering to the day’s events, but I plowed through the reading so I could check it off my list. Then the last line jumped off the page and smacked me in the face: “Whatever happens today stay vertical with God.”
My heart sputtered. What does that mean? What is coming?
Like I said earlier, I have a strong sense of justice and a nuclear intolerance for injustice. Though these are great attributes for fighting evil and protecting kids, it can be an albatross for dealing with real or perceived injustices in one’s own life.
God knew this about me. He created me. After-all, God loves us dearly and knows us more intimately than we know ourselves.
I was on eggshells most of the day, bracing for a sucker punch. Would we lose a big client? The business was in its fourth year but still vulnerable.
Then the workday ended and the Os Hillman devotional floated away. I pulled up to the house and my wife Lori met me at the door. “I feel awful. The cough won’t go away. My doctor wants me to come to the hospital and spend the night so they can do IV antibiotics.”
That seemed like a great plan. Nothing had worked up to this point. She was 8 months pregnant, so the options were limited.
I grabbed dinner with the boys, ran them to church for VBS and then hung out at the hospital while they started the IV antibiotics. We agreed I would bring the boys to the hospital to say goodnight then take them home and get them to bed.
My phone rang the following morning at 6:00AM. My wife said, “Listen to me, Mike.”
She knew me well -- I had a propensity to get angry or jump in and try to solve the problem immediately.
“The ER doctor did an x-ray last night and I have lymphoma.”
She said it matter-of-factly and moved right on in order to focus me on the solution and not the problem. My wife knew that was where I thrive.
“Call your mom. Get her prayer warriors praying.”
I could manage fear when clearing a dark house in search of a felon. I have the tools to manage and defeat a known threat. But when handed something outside of my control it would lead to fear and anger. After hearing my wife ask that I get the prayer chain going, I was immediately overwhelmed with a sense of having no control.
“Do it now,” she said. “And don’t say anything to the boys.”
The diagnosis over the next few weeks was like a ping pong ball, bouncing back and forth depending on which specialist we were speaking with. Ultimately, the doctors decided to induce labor because they felt relieving the pressure on her lungs would allow them to clear, heal and recover.
DeLaney was born healthy but a few weeks later the cough and exhaustion had not gone away. So, they scheduled a biopsy.
The biopsy revealed it was cancer. Further tests showed that it had spread throughout her body. Two months later my wife died. I was 41, with three young children aged 9, 6 and 3 months.
It would have been easy to turn to anger or a bottle --to give up on God.
However, the Lord’s hand was upon me during this whole period of my life. He used the Os Hillman devotion to prepare me. I felt He was telling me, “Hey son, I know you. And life is going to be very hard in the coming months, but I want you to never lose focus of Me. You can get mad at Me but don’t shut Me out. Don’t walk away. Stay vertical with Me.”
The Lord was telling me to leave the path to Him open. I was going to need Him in ways that I had not experienced in prior years of my life.
A year prior to the cancer diagnosis, I had reluctantly started meeting with a small group of Christian businessmen. I had never felt compelled to have close male friends because I felt more comfortable on my own, relying on my own strengths to navigate life.
We were all launching businesses and leaned on each for support, guidance and accountability. What I did not know at the time was that God had brought these men into my life a year before the wheels would come off my bus. These men would be my rock -- pointing me continually to the Lord.
My pastor, Don Keehner, was there for both my wife and I day in and day out. I remember walking out of our first oncologist appointment when we were told she had stage 4 lung cancer, having never smoked in her life. And there was Don in the lobby. How did he know where we were at? God had sent him.
After my wife went to be with the Lord, I had two young boys and an infant daughter that needed me. There were times when having three young kids was overwhelming. And times where I just didn’t think I could make it through another night without sleep. I honestly couldn’t understand why God had given me so much to bear on my own.
The pressure, grief, and exhaustion was very real. But I too often felt sorry for myself, which wasn’t helpful. I would sometimes think about the verse about God not giving more than we can handle, but I learned that the key was not so much about what I could handle on my own, but what I could handle with God’s spirit helping me. It is when we come to the end of ourselves -- our own strength and our own ability -- that God’s power works on our behalf. That was a big lesson for me to learn since I often relied on my own strength, rather than the Lord’s.
I vividly remember the last conversation I had with my wife. It was very direct, which was not her personality. But it caused me to sit up and listen.
She woke up in the hospital while I was pecking away at the laptop, keeping up with my business. She said, “Grab a pen and paper.”
I sat my laptop down and grabbed my journal.
“First, I want to be buried in my black dress.” She described the dress and where it was hanging in her closet.
I took a deep breath and wrote it down.
“I want Pastor Keehner to do my funeral. Make sure he tells some jokes. This should not be a downer.”
I nodded my head. What 39-year-old mother of 3 plans their own funeral?
“Take care of Logan. He is going to struggle.”
The tears started. Logan was our oldest at 9, still a young child. She knew he was wired like me -- that he would likely get angry and internalize his feelings. Logan would likely be mad at God too. She was clear that I had to keep him close to me.
In that hospital room, looking at my wife, I thought about the task ahead of me. How do I tell two young boys that their mom is going to die? I had delivered horrible news to family members as a violent crime detective, with great empathy and sorrow, but nothing compared to the day I sat our boys down and told them their mother was dying.
As I sat in the hospital room and continued to write down Lori’s last wishes in my journal, she caught me off-guard when she said, “And you have to remarry. You have to move on.” She paused for a second. All this time there had been no emotion in her voice, no self pity, no crying. This was a contract I had to agree to.
Then she said, “But she can’t be more than 4 years younger than you.” She laughed and I laughed.
She then leaned back on the bed and closed her eyes.
I sat back, exhaled and tried to absorb what had just happened. It was surreal. I had no idea how much this conversation would set the stage for healing and restoration.
That day in the hospital was the last conversation I would ever have with my wife, Lori. She went to be with the Lord where I know she is alive and well in heaven.
Through Lori’s short battle with cancer, her death, and being a widower with three young children, I learned that God is a God of restoration. He does not cause sickness and death. He will take the most awful events in life, which might be death, abuse, abandonment, violence, or sickness, and bring something good out of it.
As Christians, the bad things in life do not disappear but God’s goodness is magnified in ways that we cannot imagine.
I had no roadmap for what a widower should do; how I should manage my kids and keep them safe, or how I should keep my company growing for my employees and my family.
There certainly was no shortage of advice. I could sense my family watching me close, and waiting for me to implode. After all, no man can handle this alone, especially with 3 kids, one being an infant.
And I could see the same watchful eyes of people in my community when we bumped into each other in public. I knew they were uncertain of what to say. Regarding that, let me offer a piece of advice. Don’t avoid people who have experienced a loss. You don’t have to dance around it. Just say, “I am sorry.”
My family has danced around it with my kids for years. They have had good intentions -- and they have had their own grief to deal with, but sometimes they pushed too hard to keep the memory alive for my kids. Though my kids love them, they did not want to talk about their mom’s death with their grandparents. They wanted to talk to me. On the other side of the coin, there were family members who avoided discussing Lori for fear of hurting the kids. Even today, my kids wake up thinking of their mom.
How did my kids handle such a loss? Though there was grief, pain, and difficult times, the good news is that through healthy conversations and a relationship with Jesus, my kids have peace knowing this is only a temporary separation -- like going to summer camp and being homesick -- and one day they will be reunited with their mom.
There is no doubt that I had good days and bad days for quite some time after the death of my wife, Lori. Grief is necessary but not easy. The loss was deep and often overwhelming. Late at night I was still wrestling with God. This will likely make no sense, unless you have experienced something similar, but I felt like a failure. My number one mission in life was to protect my kids and I could not even do that.
One day I stumbled upon a recorded sermon from Pastor Greg Laurie of Harvest Christian Fellowship. I had never heard of him prior to listening to this message.
His sermon, spoken just 3 days after his son had died in a car accident, was called “I Still Believe.”
I listened to it over and over for many weeks. God spoke to me through Greg and taught me to take life “moment by moment” rather than “day by day.” A single day could be too overwhelming, and thinking about tomorrow could make a person come undone. All God wanted me to do was to focus on the present -- take each day moment by moment.
What dad doesn’t want to be Superman to his kids? No dad wants to feel like a failure in protecting his kids.
My feeling of failure was compounded by the fear my kids experienced. I would leave for a meeting and maybe have a two-hour drive. My youngest son Evan would call me multiple times, scared I would be killed in a car accident. Because of that I tried to limit my driving. I even refused to get on an airplane or leave them overnight. As young children who had lost their mom, they were afraid of losing their dad as well.
God forced me to trust Him. I was to stay vertical with Him and He would lift me up. I knew that the Lord was also committed to working a few things out in my life -- like my self-dependence. I cried uncle many times during this period of my life and the Lord faithfully would lift me up.
Late at night, when the kids were asleep, I would struggle with the injustice of everything. I could not take the fact that my kids were deeply hurting -- it gnawed at me constantly. My greatest fear was that this would destroy them.
As the months and years started to pass, I would lay in bed and wonder what my life would be like down the road. I felt guilty, but I did not want to find myself alone when my kids were raised. I loved being married. I wanted to love and be loved by a woman. And it felt inappropriate to have those thoughts, just as if I was lying in bed with my wife and thinking of another woman.
Then I remembered the words “you have to remarry.” These were words spoken from God through my late wife, just like the words of Os Hillman in the devotional.
I started to see more and more how God was pouring out his love for me and the kids. He brought a family friend back into our life who felt called to help take care of my kids.
It gave me room to breathe.
I could feel the restoration happening in our lives. Each day was better than the last. There was no way to erase the loss, nor was that a goal. The boys were happy, laughing, and goofing around. Delaney, who was only a three month old infant when my wife passed, was protected from much of the grief and turmoil. Yet, she was, and continues to be, a critical part of the healing for the boys and would in the future be the conduit that bridges two families.
I was focused on my kids, but God had plans to restore me and to bring me someone that would love me deeply, and be patient with me when my anger would surface or when I would push her away because I feared being hurt again.
There were matchmakers popping up inside the family and even among a few close friends. My brother actually told me that he had a name on a piece of paper that my late wife had handed him and said she would make a good wife for me. I laughed. And said “no.”
Looking back, God had someone selected for me years ago. This was not all about Mike, but bringing two people together to form a healthy, loving, Christ-centered marriage.
I would have settled if left to my own choosing. In fact, this would be true for all of the great things in my life. I tried desperately to go to law school, to get out of policing, and had I been successful I would have been miserable. Thankfully, my scores on the LSAT never put me in a position to get accepted!
The same can be said about a wife.
God brought someone to me who was a police officer who had experienced a divorce and had no intention of getting married again.
I had said over the years, many times in fact, that I could never be married to a police officer. God indeed has a sense of humor!
We agreed to meet for coffee. No strings attached.
She took my breath away. She was feminine, petite, and shy -- not at all what you would expect from a police officer. I’ve learned she can be very bold -- duh, she spent 20 years as an officer.
I couldn’t get her off my mind. We shared many common experiences, values, and thoughts.
We were married two years later after our first meeting.
Trish was able to retire from the police force and started working in my business. She loved what I had built and was eager to be a part of it and help grow it.
My company has been a huge part of my life and I loved having a wife that I could share it with. She was willing to jump in and do anything to make it better. And she had seen, and experienced, enough pain caused by violence in her life to fall in love with the mission of our company.
I would like to make you think this has been a fairytale romance and everything has been smooth sailing. And though we are blessed to have each other and God has certainly “restored the years the locust has eaten” and given “beauty for ashes”, we are no different than any other marriage. We both bring baggage into our union with one another. We had both been hurt by loss in relationships. And together we had 5 kids to blend into one family.
I had two boys that resisted a “mother” figure.
She had two kids that were used to having all of her attention and no competition.
And we had a toddler that bridged the gaps with the kids.
Marriage under the best of circumstances is work. Blending a family is a full-time job.
And Trish had to help me navigate my baggage. I was hesitant to be outwardly affectionate in front of my kids. I did not want to hurt them, but I also may have been avoiding navigating them through their healing and the role Trish could play with that.
Trish also had to be patient with me as I would have a tendency to push her away as we grew closer. The key, as with all things, was that we committed our marriage and family to God. We have been married over ten years now. I am deeply in love with my wife. She is my best friend. I cannot wait to get home each evening. And on the days we work in the same office, (we have two locations), I love seeing her all day long and eating lunch together.
We love our kids and love spending time with them, whether it’s just everyday life or having family vacations. And Trish and I absolutely cherish our time together when we have date nights.
It blows my mind how God works. His gifts, like Trish, are so much greater than a gift I would pick for myself. In the end, it’s all about loving and trusting God with our life. He is faithful and will lead you through the good times and the bad. I can affirm that even in the most difficult and tragic season of my life, the Lord was faithful to bring me through and even bless and restore me and my kids.
Now, Trish and I together, give back what we have received from the Lord by serving others. We started SafeMinistry as a mission to protect the church and children from harm.
Only God can give “beauty for ashes” . . .