Quick Take
- Narration: Jeremy Freeman narrates his own story, and the rawness of a father reading about his son’s accident and his earlier child’s death gives this four-hour audio real emotional force.
- Themes: Faith under catastrophic loss, communal prayer and social media witness, grief compounded by multiple tragedies
- Mood: Urgent and devotional, built on genuine crisis rather than manufactured urgency
- Verdict: For listeners who share the Freeman family’s faith, this will feel like exactly the book they needed. For others, the sincerity of the experience is still difficult to dismiss.
I came to #butGod knowing it was a faith-based memoir about a medical crisis, and that it was narrated by the author himself. What I was not fully prepared for was the weight of the compounded grief that the book carries from its first pages. Jeremy Freeman is not only the father of a teenager who survived a catastrophic car accident with a ten percent chance of survival. He is also the father of a seven-year-old boy named Trey who died four years earlier from a genetic immunodeficiency. This is not a book about one family crisis. It is a book about what it means to trust God when you are already carrying the knowledge of what it feels like to lose a child.
That doubling changes everything about how you hear it. The accident involving Caleb lands differently when you know what the Freemans already know about the worst that can happen. And the faith they maintain through Caleb’s recovery, the but God of the title, the pivot from human desperation to divine intervention that structures the whole narrative, carries more weight than it would for a family encountering catastrophe for the first time.
The Social Media Witness and the #butGod Movement
Freeman was one of the early practitioners of real-time crisis sharing on social media, and the book describes how the #butGod hashtag spread through Christian communities and gathered prayers from around the world during Caleb’s recovery. This is a phenomenon worth understanding on its own terms. For the Freemans, and for the thousands of people who followed and prayed, the social connection was not performative. It was an extension of a theological conviction that God works through the prayers of his people, and the collective witness of a digital community was, in this framework, itself a form of miraculous intervention.
Emily’s Prayer Journal and the Dual Voice of the Book
One of the structural decisions that distinguishes #butGod from similar faith crisis memoirs is the inclusion of Emily Freeman’s prayer journal excerpts. Jeremy narrates the main text, and hearing the differences in how the same crisis registers in his voice versus what Emily wrote in those urgent, private pages adds texture and honesty that a single-narrator account would lack. The marriage’s interior life during the crisis, the tension and doubt and determined clinging, is more visible because of these excerpts.
The Honesty About Darkness Before the Resolution
I want to acknowledge one of the things the book does well that similar memoirs sometimes skip. Freeman does not rush to the miracle. He documents the darkness, the days in the ICU, the terror of watching monitors, the compound grief of parents who already know death personally, the moments of doubt and despair that the book describes as the darkness that nearly overtook their family. The resolution, when it comes, feels proportionate to the difficulty that preceded it precisely because he does not minimize that difficulty for the sake of an easier arc.
At four hours and six minutes, #butGod is compact, and the pacing reflects that. This is not a long meditation. It is a testimony delivered with urgency and intimacy. Freeman narrating his own story means the emotions in the room when those pages were written are still audible in the recording. The companion PDF includes a playlist and daily devotionals for those who want to extend the experience beyond the audio. With 253 reviews and a 4.9 rating, the book has clearly found its audience. Who should listen: Christian listeners dealing with medical crises or compound grief, anyone interested in how digital community forms around shared prayer, and readers who want a short, intense faith testimony rather than a long structural memoir. Who should skip: Listeners without a Christian faith context who find devotional framing in memoir distancing. The theology is not incidental; it is the book’s entire interpretive structure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Trey, and how does his earlier death affect the Caleb story in #butGod?
Trey was the Freemans’ seven-year-old son who died four years before the accident from a genetic immunodeficiency. His death is part of the book’s foundation: when Caleb is injured, the Freemans are already parents who have lost a child. That prior loss gives the faith they maintain during Caleb’s recovery a different quality than it would otherwise carry.
What is the #butGod movement, and is the social media element a significant part of the book?
The #butGod hashtag spread through Christian social media during Caleb’s recovery and gathered prayers from people around the world. Freeman treats this collective witness as both practically meaningful and theologically significant, understanding it as an expression of how God works through communal prayer. The social media element is woven into the narrative rather than being treated as a footnote.
Does Emily Freeman have a significant presence in the book, or is this primarily Jeremy’s account?
Emily’s prayer journal entries are included throughout the book and provide a meaningful second register. Jeremy narrates the main text, but Emily’s private writing during the crisis adds texture and emotional complexity, particularly about the interior experience of the marriage under that kind of pressure.
Is this book likely to resonate with listeners who are not Christian?
The theology is structural to the entire book, not decorative. The ‘but God’ framing, the conviction that Caleb’s survival is a divine miracle enabled by communal prayer, is the interpretive lens through which everything is understood. Listeners outside that framework can hear the family’s story but should know in advance that the faith dimension is not separable from the narrative.
