My brother Craig is a rocket scientist—a real rocket scientist! He’s worked on missions you may have heard about in the news: the James Webb Space Telescope, the LCROSS lunar mission to look for water on the moon, or the launch of the Milstar military communication satellites. Cool stuff!

But what’s NOT COOL is that he had to keep certain things “TOP SECRET.” While that’s essential for protecting our country and the people involved, if not done right, it can lead to isolation, loneliness and despair.

Craig’s not alone in this. Doctors, lawyers, pastors, teachers, counselors and sometimes just close friends or family have to keep secrets for good reasons. As Proverbs says:

“A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret” (Proverbs 11:13).

So it’s not wrong to keep secrets when needed. But it can be difficult… and sometimes even tragic. As Psalms says:

“When I kept silent, my bones wasted away” (Psalm 32:3a).

A few weeks ago, Craig shared with me about a time of despair he went through starting ten years ago… despair so deep he contemplated giving up on life itself.

I’m thankful to say he’s now 100% back to Craig, the brother I know. He’s laughing, playing games, talking, interacting. Life is good. I can’t imagine if he had given up.

But what got him through? And what can help you through when you feel like giving up?

That’s what we talk about in our conversation below. In it, Craig shares what he did wrong, what he did right, and what you can do to help you through, too. I hope you’ll watch or read the whole conversation!

If there’s one takeaway I want you to know today, know this:

There is hope! There is another side! Keep pressing on, even if you feel like giving up!

Love,

Here’s the link to watch our whole conversation, or read the transcript below the video.

https://youtu.be/yFVoJ6zODXw

TRANSCRIPT (not word-for-word, but cleaned up for clarity and flow)

Eric: This is Eric Elder and I’m with my brother, Craig Elder. This is a rare opportunity to get together in our yard here in Illinois. He’s normally from California—been there for a long time—and it’s nice that he’s here this weekend. We’re just talking about pressing on when you feel like giving up.

And I wonder if he could say a prayer to open us. We’re going to talk about dealing with secrets, and he’s in a unique role dealing with secrets in his life. We’ll start with a prayer. This is one of his favorite scriptures.

Craig: Dear Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, oh Lord, my rock and my redeemer. That’s Psalm 19. It starts out with “The heavens declare the glory of God,” and “the heavens display the work of his hands.” And in aerospace that means a lot to me. It always motivated me to follow my passion for space—everything space.

Eric: And Craig is a literal rocket scientist. So my brother is a rocket scientist and he’s been doing this for how many years?

Craig: I had 43 years of aerospace. I recently retired after 43 years. It’s good to have all my days be Saturdays from here on out—except for Sundays. Sundays are still Sundays. But all those weekdays, it’s kind of nice. I’ll come back to this point—that there is a reason to keep going on, because when you get to the point where all your days are Saturdays and Sundays, and then you look forward to an afterlife full of endless weekends and joy, you don’t want to miss out on that.

Eric: I know. And tell people what you did and what role secrets played in your life.

Craig: Over the course of my career I had various levels of government security clearances that required me not only to keep my mouth shut but also to actively protect secrets. I wasn’t alone in that. There are medical doctors who need confidentiality, or lawyers—attorney-client privilege—pastors, police officers, teachers. But my role as a government contractor meant that to do my job correctly, I had to absolutely not talk about certain things. Absolutely not leave a social media footprint. Don’t give the bad guys anything to go off of.

If not done correctly, that lifestyle can lead to loneliness and despair, and it can quickly spiral down.

About 10 years ago, I went through a real period of despair and fatigue. To give some context: in 2015 I had 30 years in building spacecraft—flying things like the James Webb Space Telescope, the LCROSS lunar impactor, and the Milstar nuclear-hardened, World-War-III-surviving communication satellites that kept all of our subs and bombers connected back to the United States. It had to survive a near nuclear burst of an anti-satellite weapon and come back with secure communication. My equipment had to come back within 10 seconds. We had to have the warfighters back in communication within a minute. All of this is unclassified now. But those satellites are still up there. They will far outlive me.

After many of those projects, I was asked to change companies to run a project that was six months behind schedule and had an insufficient budget. Some of my friends were retiring and would get 80% of their pension in cash at age 55. I was 54. I was approached by customers to run this program. After talking with my wife—and not talking with the financial advisors I should have—I said, “I’ll pass on the 80% pension at 55 and hold out for 100% at 65. I’ll work the 10 years.”

Four months before my 55th birthday, I switched companies. In the first two months, we recovered that six months of schedule and held a design review. Everyone was pleased. But there was a lot of churn and chaos at this company. In the 10 months I was there, I had five different bosses. One boss would be replaced, then we changed from one management structure to another. That construct lasted about a month.

Then one Monday morning, of the three contracts our company had, two were halted because of government funding restrictions. Keep in mind, I couldn’t talk to other employees about what we were doing. These were smart people asking good questions they needed for their jobs, but I couldn’t tell them. If I told one thing to one person, someone else might figure out what we were doing, and that would be very bad for America. People can be compromised.

Security clearances require not just no arrests—your finances are reviewed, your psychological profiles, your polygraphs every two years or more. They want to know if anyone in your circle could be blackmailed by anything. And I couldn’t divulge anything that people put on their security clearances that I had to approve.

Another issue was that I found myself working really long hours. There were only a handful of us who could open the secure vault. I lived near the factory, so I’d go in every morning at 5:30, fully dressed for the day. And in the evenings, people needed to work late, so I’d close up at midnight. They would’ve worked longer, but I said, “I can’t. I have to get up at 5:30 to open.”

In my isolation I became fatigued, and that spirals when you’re dealing with unsolvable problems. We were over-budget and understaffed. We didn’t have the right people cleared. I was getting fatigued. My wife is a teacher and had school-related problems. I got to a point where I absolutely felt I didn’t have time for friends. I barely had time for family. I was fatigued and started feeling despair. And I couldn’t talk to anyone, because if I talked to a counselor it would show up on my security records, and I didn’t want the hassle of explaining why I was talking to a psychiatrist.

I also knew I had given up that 80% pension bonus. I could have stepped away from it all and had enough to retire, had I stayed four months longer. And now I didn’t have that opportunity. I’d have to work 10 years in this unsustainable position. There was a lot of regret. A lot of regret about my decisions and my future. I didn’t see any value for life because I felt I had made bad decisions and couldn’t talk to anybody.

Sorry for so much context, but it gets to these points: What did I do wrong, and what did I do right? Because here I am on the other side. I’m wonderfully retired. I’ve got a wonderful family with a granddaughter and another on the way. They make life worth living. I’ve got great relationships with my kids, my wife, my friends who rallied around me in spite of myself. I thoroughly enjoy my life at this stage. I had no idea what I would have been throwing away when I was at my low.

Eric: We weren’t able to talk about this during the time. We saw the change in your personality and your silence. You were unable to talk.

Craig: We have a joke: with each program you’re briefed into, you become stupider at cocktail parties because people come up to you and say, “Hey, what’s the real story about aliens?” You can’t give any hint.

Eric: And so we’re watching you, not knowing how to help. It’s hard on the people around you. It’s hard on you. So I’m really curious—what you felt you did wrong and what you did right.

Craig: What I did wrong: first, I buried it. There’s a new Marvel movie out called Thunderbolts. A character has a dark side and says, “It’s hopeless. Why do we go on?” The young Russian girl says, “Shut up. Do what we do: bury it. Bury it deeper.” That was one thing I did wrong.

Another thing I did wrong was dwelling on past mistakes—thinking my career had been perfect until I changed companies. “I should have pushed back. I should have delayed. I should have…” That was wasted time. Dwelling on regret was a catalyst for the spiral down.

The third thing I did wrong was contemplating giving up. The biggest waste of time in my life was trying to figure out how to kill myself so my family could collect insurance money and be set. As an engineer I processed it, and there was no good way that wouldn’t impact my family. And if I searched online, that would trigger security flags and a polygraph: “Are you having suicidal thoughts?” And I’d bury it deeper.

What I did right was figuring out how to bury what needed to be buried without betraying the trust of the secrets I had to keep.

Eric: This weekend you shared some of these things I hadn’t heard before. You’re opening up here, and that’s why I asked if you’d share it—because people struggle with hope in very dark places. I didn’t realize the depth of what you went through. And I’m so sorry you were there. I’m so glad you’re here on the other side—100% back to Craig, the brother I know. You’re laughing, playing games, talking, interacting. Life is good. I can’t imagine if you had given that up. And I’m hopeful for people watching—including those who can’t see what’s on the other side. All they see is darkness.

Craig: Absolutely. Some people are dealing with the darkness of a terminal diagnosis. You see the darkness, but you need faith that something better is out there.

Eric: Let me affirm that keeping secrets is not wrong. Proverbs 11:13 says, “A gossip betrays a confidence, but a trustworthy person keeps a secret.” A teacher, pastor, spouse, police officer—there are times to keep a secret. But how you deal with what you also bury along with it matters. Psalm 32 says, “When I kept silent, my bones wasted away.” Silence can feel crushing. And Ecclesiastes says there’s a time to be silent and a time to speak. When I asked you this morning if you’d film this, I took a risk. Your trained muscle memory was, “I can neither confirm nor deny.” But you’re able to speak about hope, health, healing, and what helped you. So I think that’s huge. I’ll save the last verse for the end of the show. But yeah—how did you get out? What did you do?

Craig: Right. This sounds hokey, but I started going back to my company Bible study. Every Wednesday morning before work, a number of believers would meet for a Bible study. Just hearing God’s Word and seeing it in the faces and lives of my colleagues—many of whom worked in the closed area also, but on other projects—helped me. I couldn’t go in their vault, they couldn’t go in mine, but we could kind of knowingly wink. We had that shared experience of keeping secrets. I didn’t know what they were working on; I wanted plausible deniability. I didn’t want to know what they were working on because if I knew, I’d have to get breathed in, and then I’d become stupider at cocktail parties. I’d rather not know.

So just going back to God. Honestly, as I look back, I didn’t think of it much at the time as “God.” I just thought, “I’ve got to get away. I’m going to go meet with Howie and Lance and the guys at my old company for breakfast.” It was almost taboo showing up at another company. But it got me re-grounded and helped stop the spiral. It really did, those weeks.

I ended up, in talking with them, realizing that I could go back to work in my old job. I didn’t need the money. I didn’t want a salary increase. I didn’t want a new boss. I didn’t want a new title. Just get me into a safe space. But that wouldn’t have happened had God not called me—or had I not gone back to Bible study and kept those connections.

The second thing I did right was I just spent time with a friend. He was the dad of one of my son’s friends. We had a lot in common, but we weren’t super close. But he was willing to spend every Tuesday night with me. Usually Mondays were hell, Tuesdays were more hell, and by Tuesday night I was not looking forward to the rest of the week. But Serge knew I was going through some tough times. When a movie came out that our wives would never want to see—it was a blood-and-guts action movie—I wanted to see it, he wanted to see it. Tuesday nights were discount movie nights in our LA theater. So we established Tuesday as a dad date night.

Our wives would see a trailer and say, “Nope. Tuesday night—dad date. I’m not coming.” So Serge and I would go see it. We saw some stinkers over the years, but if there wasn’t a movie going on, Serge was willing to just get together and watch a hockey game, Disney Plus, or Hulu. We had some common science fiction background. Just spending time with him—not even talking about words or anything necessarily—helped. We’d go for a 20-minute hockey period not saying a word, and yet just being in the presence of someone else helped me through.

So I encourage you: it doesn’t have to be a good friend. It doesn’t have to be someone who knows your deepest, darkest secrets. Sometimes that’s better. I know some people in therapy or counseling have their therapist fill that role, but it doesn’t have to be a paid professional. Just somebody willing to sit with you. And to have a friend, you need to be a friend. Sometimes that person is going through something and they need you there, and you lean on each other.

How long have I done this with him? This has been five years now.

The last thing is: don’t bury your despair. Don’t bury the secrets. Don’t bury your badness. Bury your ego. That should be the first thing you bury. And take advantage of the resources. If someone is offering you a hand, take it. There are so many resources tailored for you. I was honestly blind to them. But now in hindsight, the company had a classified psychiatrist who was used to dealing with polygraphs. It was advertised on page three of the small print: “If you’re having problems, contact help.” But I was unaware of it—and maybe my pride kept me from seeking it. I thought, “I can do it. I’m going to buck up and do it. All the Cold Warriors before me, those rocket scientists in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s—they had to do it. They did it. I can do it.” But it was hard. Many of them didn’t survive. And there’s too much good to live for.

So there are resources out there. Bury your ego. That’s half the battle. If you can reach out for help, you don’t even have to reach that far—there are people reaching to you.

Eric: At church I went through Celebrate Recovery. You can bury the secrets you have to keep, but you don’t have to bury the feelings.

Craig: You don’t have to bury the “I’m feeling really stressed.” You can talk to someone about the stress you’re feeling. Moms and dads don’t have to provide the details of what they’re burying, but they need to deal with it. So definitely take advantage of the help that’s reaching out to you.

Eric: That leads into this verse that I want to close with. And if you have some other thoughts, great. But we’ll close and pray if you don’t. Galatians 6:2: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”

Just like Serge was there—you didn’t even have to say anything. He knew you needed help. He was local, he was right there, and he was willing to sit next to you. I see this all the time when someone dies and people say, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to bother them. I don’t know what to say.” Just go sit in their driveway. You don’t have to say a word. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. Don’t open your mouth. Just go there.

Craig: You’ve got two ears and one mouth for a reason.

Eric: Say, “I just want to sit with you.” You don’t have to solve their problem. You can’t solve their problem. But you can sit with them, and that’s huge.

So carry each other’s burdens and reach out for help. Share the burden, but not necessarily the details—share them with trusted people. And trust that God can walk you through. There are a lot of people who have gone before us—believers who trusted in God—and they came through. Jonah and the whale—pick a Bible hero. They went through a crucible and then they delivered Israel or did whatever they did. Paul was beaten numerous times, and he kept getting up and doing it again.

Somehow we have this faith in God, hope in God, and there is always hope. I am convinced of this: there is always hope. The best is yet to come. And it’s not necessarily in the form you want. I planted some trees in the yard. They were these little sticks, and the company sent me the wrong trees. I thought I planted hazelnuts. Five years later, the first fruit comes—and it’s a peach. I wasn’t expecting peaches. But this year we had so many peaches that we couldn’t eat them all. We were calling people to come eat peaches. It was fruitful, but not in the way I expected or planted.

So there’s hope. It may not show up in the way you expect or plant, but I can promise you—not because it’s my promise, but because the Word of God tells you—that there is hope. Keep pressing on for the prize set before you. That’s what Jesus did. He pressed on through all the trials for the prize set before Him, and now He is seated at the right hand of God. That is for each of us. Your story encourages me; I pray it encourages those watching.

Any final thoughts, Craig, before we pray?

Craig: Yeah. You are stronger than you think you are—but why push it? Many hands make light work. Don’t go it alone. Many hearts can turn a lonely trial into an incredible journey.

Eric: I love that. Would you close us in prayer? I’m so thankful. I’ll start: Thank you, God, for Craig, for bringing him through these trials and deep dark times, and for the things he shared this weekend and here on camera. Lord, I pray it would help others like it has helped me already this weekend. I pray, too, that You would continue to bless him from here on out and let him know the best is still yet to come. Amen.

Craig: And praying for everybody out there who has secrets that God needs them to keep—their friends, family, nation need them to keep those secrets—but they don’t need them to come at the price of despair. Amen.

Eric: Love that. Thanks, Craig, for being my friend, my brother, and for sharing this today.

Eric Elder writes for page, stage & screen to glorify God’s name so Christ may be seen! Use this link to subscribe or unsubscribe.