A Father, a Son, and a Sauna: Sacrificial Love as Psychological Medicine

In 2020, Becky Soltis of Cleveland, Ohio was given a 10% chance of survival. Diagnosed simultaneously with lupus, Lyme disease, a burst gallbladder, sepsis, and pancreatitis, she spent weeks hospitalized during COVID lockdowns her family could not enter. Her husband Joe, a father of six, gathered their children and told them their mother might not come home. Their son Jake was fourteen.

Joe did not withdraw. He kept running his marketing company, gathered his family around the uncertainty, and began reading about the social fractures erupting across the country that summer. He studied Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, concluded the division he was watching was being actively cultivated, and on July 4, 2020, began developing a response. That response became Prayer At The Heart, an ecumenical initiative uniting Catholics and Protestants around what its mission describes as a national movement of unified, humble prayer and evangelism. He now serves on its board. Meanwhile, his son Jake built his recovering mother a sauna and exercise room in the family basement, largely on his own, at fifteen years old. Becky still uses it.

This is not a story about suffering, though suffering is present throughout. It is a story about what human beings do when their interior life is ordered toward something beyond themselves, and why that ordering has measurable psychological consequences.

What the psychology says

Research on resilience consistently identifies perceived agency as a protective factor during crisis. When catastrophic loss of control occurs, the capacity to take meaningful action, even small action, functions as a buffer against prolonged grief disorder, depression, and post-traumatic stress. Pargament, Koenig, and colleagues have documented that individuals who use faith to find meaning, seek relational support, and reframe adversity within a larger narrative, what researchers classify as positive religious coping, show measurably better mental health outcomes across grief, chronic illness, caregiver stress, and traumatic disruption. Positive copers experience their suffering as meaningful, their agency as real, and their relationships as capable of bearing the weight of crisis.

There is also a growing body of evidence on the psychological benefits of prosocial behavior during personal hardship. When individuals redirect energy toward the needs of others while they themselves are suffering, they report reduced anxiety, stronger sense of purpose, and tighter relational bonds. Jake building that basement room was not a distraction from fear. It was fear channeled through love into something that would serve his mother's recovery. Sauna therapy and structured physical rehabilitation have documented benefits for autoimmune conditions including lupus. The gesture was both practically useful and psychologically potent.

Developmental psychology adds a third layer. Adolescent males do not primarily learn what it means to be a man from instruction. They learn it from witness. A father who structures his life around service, who subordinates personal comfort to the good of others, and who maintains faith under genuine uncertainty creates the conditions in which a son can do the same. Joe did not build the sauna. He formed the son who did.

A plan of action drawn from the model

The Soltis story is not a template for crisis management. It is an illustration of a prior formation that became visible under pressure. The practical question is how that formation is built before the crisis arrives.

First, name the orientation explicitly. Joe framed his response to his wife's illness not as heroic endurance but as the ordinary responsibility of a husband and father. Families that articulate a shared sense of purpose, that name service and sacrifice as the organizing logic of the household, give each member a framework for interpreting their own actions. That interpretive framework is what positive religious coping researchers measure when they assess meaning-making.

Second, assign real work to the young. Jake was not supervised into building that room. He was trusted with a genuine task that had genuine consequences for someone he loved. Adolescent identity formation, particularly in males, depends on tests of competence that carry actual stakes. Performative busyness does not produce the same psychological result as work that matters.

Third, maintain the outward orientation under pressure. Joe's response to private catastrophe was to expand his attention toward the social world, not contract it. The research on prosocial behavior during hardship supports this counterintuitive move. Families and individuals who find a way to serve others during their own suffering consistently report better outcomes than those who focus exclusively inward. This is not a denial of the suffering. It is a refusal to let the suffering define the entire horizon.

Fourth, integrate faith as an interpretive framework rather than a compartmentalized practice. Joe describing Becky, after everything, as incredibly holy and a blessing to all of us is the language of a man whose faith functions as a lens, not a coping supplement. That integration is the condition under which the other three moves become sustainable rather than merely effortful.

Becky Soltis still manages ongoing lupus symptoms. The room Jake built is still there, still used. Neither Joe's ecumenical initiative nor his son's carpentry project resolved the underlying illness. What they did was refuse to allow the illness to be the organizing fact of the family's life. That refusal, structured by faith and expressed in concrete action, is both a theological claim and a psychological one. The person is most fully themselves when oriented outward, in service, toward the genuine good of another.

References

[^1]: Kenneth Pargament, The Psychology of Religion and Coping (1997), on positive religious coping and mental health outcomes.