Brooke Martin had never planned on writing a book. For more than a decade, she had built her career as an EMMY-winning anchor and reporter. But after walking through a great personal tragedy and witnessing God’s goodness in her own pain, she felt God calling her to something new.
But what?
She was driving down the highway, pondering this question in prayer, when she saw a very clear image in her head of a burned forest and heard the words, “Controlled burn.”
“I realized that I was being given an illustration to really help people understand that life’s fires can hold incredible promise and redemption and freedom,” she said in an interview with Indiana Right to Life.
Door after door opened, and eventually, she found herself at work on a book she had never planned to write.
Martin’s book—which she wrote in an incredible four months—came out at the end of August. The title? The very words she had been given during prayer: Controlled Burn.
Through a number of stories, including her own, Martin walks readers through a biblical understanding of hope in suffering. Writing the book was both healing and edifying for Martin.
“More than anything, it just solidified this message, in my own heart, that suffering is perhaps the most profound opportunity we have on this earth to know Jesus,” she said. “And as I was writing, it just became more and more clear that there’s nothing worth pursuing more, and that we can either waste our suffering by just trying to survive or numb it or jump out of it. Or if we stay in it and we walk through the fire with faith, we can come out on the other side just with incredible purpose and incredible freedom.”
Martin’s own personal tragedy began six years ago, when she received a fatal diagnosis for her unborn daughter while pregnant. Her daughter had been diagnosed with anencephaly, a rare, fatal condition in which a baby’s skull does not develop.
As they absorbed the shock of the diagnosis, Martin and her husband came together in a unified understanding of their path going forward. They named their daughter Emma Noelle, which together sounds like Emmanuel, meaning “God with us.”
And the couple’s mantra became, “God be glorified.”
This mantra carried Martin and her husband, Cole, through their grief. It gave them direction as they navigated life with Emma in the womb and prepared for her birth.
To any couple faced with a fatal prenatal diagnosis, Martin recommends finding a similar mantra.
“I would tell them to understand what their mission statement is in this,” Martin said. “And what I mean by that is, you can receive a terrible diagnosis and spend the rest of your life asking, ‘Why would God allow this? Why me?’ But if you can shift your perspective to, ‘God, what are you doing in this?’ What it does is it unleashes submission in our hearts. It unleashes surrender. And it’s in those moments where God’s like, ‘Okay, now I can lay incredible purpose upon your life and your baby’s life.’”
As she grappled with her grief and her desire to see God’s glory in it, she decided to share her baby’s diagnosis with the public, opting for total honesty and vulnerability over masking her suffering. The public met her and her husband with an outpouring of compassion.
“We just weren’t expecting the measure of the outpouring that we received in strength and peace and hope,” Martin said. “And yet we saw a really strong disconnect with a lot of stories that we had heard throughout my pregnancy, having it be a very public story. We heard from a lot of people, and a lot of people were really drowning in despair and in grief and really having a hard, hard time. And I realized that people were taking either one of two paths in suffering: Either they were being forged or they were being hardened.”
Over the years, these two responses created in Martin a resolve to help people through their suffering.
“We can choose to numb it by whatever means feels best to you, and try and just drown out the pain,” she said. “You can try and jump out of the fire by choosing termination and just getting out of there. You can go about pain and suffering in a number of different ways, but it’s in the surrender. It’s in the submission that God can work.”
Within her and her husband’s submission, the couple witnessed God’s work in their heartache. When asked if she had any particular memory of Emma that she wanted to share, Martin’s mind landed on a moment right after her daughter was born.
Newborn Emma had been handed to Martin’s husband first. In that moment, the anesthesiologist asked Martin a question. When she answered him, the nurse said that Emma turned her head to look at Martin, recognizing her voice. Then, Martin held her baby and said all the things she had been waiting so long to say. She passed Emma back to her husband, in whose arms she passed 21 minutes later.
“That memory speaks to so much,” she said. “It speaks to the connection that these babies have with us that we may not realize until heaven. But it’s there and they can feel our love. There is no doubt in my mind that they can feel our love. And the miraculous thing is I got 21 minutes with her, but I get the rest of my life knowing that she is in heaven and that she is now part of a great cloud of witnesses who is spurring me and my husband, my kids, on in this journey of life and faith. And so her precious life is just more powerful than if it was lived here. And that’s so hard to fathom, but it’s so true.”
Martin explained how this incredible bond with her daughter was at the heart of rejecting abortion and carrying her baby to term.
“I’m not choosing life to make a point; I’m not choosing life because it’s a political statement,” she said. “I’m choosing life because this is my daughter who knows me, who I know and whose impact will now be felt for generations.”
It’s that kind of biblical hope and reassurance that Martin aims to pass on to her readers in Controlled Burn.
“So often in our suffering, people point to eternity as an encouragement,” she said. “And it’s like, yeah, absolutely. That is the ultimate encouragement for a believer of what is to come. It is a beautiful picture. But let us not dismiss the fact that that means that this tiny short period of time on earth that we each get is our only chance to identify with and relate to Jesus as our suffering savior. We get to offer him this sacrifice of suffering and say, ‘It is in this that I get to know You in this way.’ And there’s a reason that God allowed Him to suffer as He did, because He knows every single ounce of our pain. He knows there is nothing that is beyond Him.”
Martin’s book Controlled Burn is available for purchase here.
For life-affirming information on perinatal hospice and palliative care, please consider the following resources:
– Indiana Perinatal Hospice Brochure
– PerinatalHospice.org
– He Knows Your Name
– CuddleCot
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