What does heroism look like when the people you love are hurting and the answers never come? Spirit Juice founder Rob Kaczmark joins Dominic on Heroic Stories to talk about losing his sister, enduring a miscarriage with his wife, and surrendering to God through grief and anger.
From Thor’s surrender to St. Joseph’s example, Danielle Rose’s prayer and his father’s lessons, Rob explores faith under pressure, raising sons who take responsibility, and getting through life one brick at a time. He also shares how fitness, fellowship and faith with F3 sharpen his own example, and how a heart-to-heart with another man turns shared pain into brotherhood.
Rob Kaczmark had prayed for another child.
When his wife told him she was pregnant the morning after a friend prayed with him, he saw a reason to celebrate.
The anticipated birth would fall around the anniversary of his sister’s death. After losing someone he loved, he thought the family would welcome new life.
Then came the first ultrasound. The technician left to get the doctor. The heartbeat he had expected to hear was absent.
“It felt like a cruel joke,” Kaczmark said.
Speaking with host Dominic on Heroic Stories, the Spirit Juice founder described grief, frustration with God and the work of continuing to trust while questions remain unanswered. The conversation moved from a Marvel movie to family loss, prayer, fatherhood and the example men can offer one another.
“I think surrender has been a theme I’ve had for a long time,” he said.
When strength means surrender
Asked for a story of heroism that inspires him, Kaczmark chose a scene from “Thor: Ragnarok.”
He described a powerful character being stripped of the things he had relied upon, then turning to his father for strength. For Kaczmark, the scene connected with his own experience of trying to push through hardship.
“I have to fully surrender to God and give it all to him,” he said.
He also pointed to Thor’s decision to save his people while allowing their physical home to be destroyed. Kaczmark connected that sacrifice to a man’s responsibility for his family, wherever the family lives.
The appeal, he said, was seeing a hero face losses and respond to them.
“Living for Christ, living that gospel message out, is really lived out in those hard times,” he said.
For men leading a family or a business, those decisions can arrive from several directions at once. Faith supplies a moral compass, he said, while the daily work still has to be done.
“You’re always putting God first in that,” he said. “But you’re realizing you have to also put the reps in to get through to the other side.”
Showing up for his sister
Kaczmark said he likes certainty. His calendar is scheduled, and he likes knowing what comes next.
His sister’s cancer diagnosis confronted him with circumstances he could neither organize nor fully understand. The family received information in pieces while trying to navigate her illness.
He began asking what having every answer would change about his responsibility to her.
“What I’m supposed to do is be there for her, show up, call her, talk to her, do whatever I can,” he said.
He said his sister died in May 2024. Looking back at her illness, he described the desire for information as connected to a desire for control.
“I think we find freedom in being obedient to serving those around us,” he said.
A prayer, a pregnancy and a loss
Kaczmark said he and his wife already had two boys and hoped for another child. While attending a conference at the University of Notre Dame, he met Catholic musician and speaker Danielle Rose after a holy hour near the grotto.
She asked what she could pray for. He told her about their hope for another baby.
“We’re going to pray right now,” he recalled her saying.
The next morning, his wife told him she was pregnant.
“Okay, God, thank you. This is amazing,” he recalled thinking.
The couple had experienced a miscarriage before their first child, and his wife was nervous about the ultrasound. Kaczmark had felt confident. They had already shared the pregnancy news with family.
When the appointment brought another loss, he struggled to reconcile what had happened with the prayer and the hope surrounding the pregnancy.
“It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense,” he said.
He described the experience as a source of frustration he was still working through. He also said anger can exist within a relationship, including a relationship with God.
“It’s okay to be mad at people that you have a relationship with,” he said. “It’s a matter of what you do with that anger.”
One brick at a time
For overwhelming days, Kaczmark returned to advice from his mother: take the next hour as it comes.
He illustrated it with a family story. His uncle, tired after a late night playing in a band, arrived at a manual labor job to find an enormous quantity of bricks that needed moving.
The work looked impossible when considered all at once. The way through it was to move one brick, then the next.
“The only way it’s going to get done is one brick at a time,” Kaczmark said.
He applies that approach when his own schedule feels overwhelming, bringing his attention back to the person or task immediately in front of him.
“Be fully present in where you’re at,” he said.
Discovering a faith he could turn to
Kaczmark said his mother made faith central to family life. His father became Catholic when Kaczmark was baptized.
As a child, he experienced Sunday Mass and religious education largely as obligations. In middle school, a prayer helped him understand his relationship with God differently.
“God’s here to help me?” he recalled thinking. “It was this epiphany.”
He began praying daily and added the Serenity Prayer. He said both prayers remained sources of strength.
A high school pilgrimage to Medjugorje deepened that experience. He recalled days of praying the rosary and walking up Apparition Hill, away from the technology that ordinarily occupied his attention.
“This God stuff is real,” he recalled thinking.
He compared remembering those experiences during difficult periods to remembering the early days of a relationship with a spouse. Earlier experiences of closeness can remain sources of strength when the relationship becomes harder.
Christ at the top, his children close
The conversation also turned to Kaczmark’s tattoos. He described religious images covering much of his body, including Jesus, Mary, saints and Old Testament imagery.
His favorite is an image of Christ on the top of his head.
“It’s a reminder to put Christ at the top,” he said.
Another carries his boys’ names in their own handwriting. They wrote the names, and the tattoo artist reproduced them.
The tattoos became a starting point for discussing a parent’s love and the way caring for children helped him understand God’s love.
Kaczmark recalled moving his son out of the path of a large cart. His son saw the push and questioned it; his father had seen the danger approaching.
“As much as we love our kids and our spouse, it’s still imperfect love,” he said. “But God loves us perfectly.”
Preparing sons to take responsibility
Asked about his heroes, Kaczmark named his father and St. Joseph.
He said becoming a father helped him understand aspects of his own upbringing that had been difficult to appreciate as a boy. He now thinks about preparing his sons for circumstances they will encounter years ahead.
One lesson concerns their response when something goes wrong.
He described children losing at sports and placing blame on a referee or another player. He tries to bring his boys’ attention back to what they can do themselves.
“The only thing you have control over is your reaction to what’s going on,” he said.
He connected that lesson to ownership and leadership, drawing on an idea he had heard from businessman Gary Vaynerchuk about treating everything as one’s responsibility. He acknowledged that an example involving a driver being hit by someone running a red light could take the idea too far.
The practice he valued was examining his own response rather than concentrating on blame.
“You have to take full ownership of all of this,” he said.
Learning from other men
Kaczmark said he also learns by watching other men live out their responsibilities.
He described attending F3 workouts at 5:15 a.m., built around fitness, fellowship and faith. The early start initially seemed beyond him, but he said the experience brought him into regular contact with men who served their families and communities.
“Seeing how they talk, seeing how they model their lives, and it’s constantly serving other people,” he said.
The value extended beyond exercise. Being around those men gave him examples he could carry into his own life.
“I learn a lot through osmosis, being around other people that are doing it better than I am,” he said. “I get better because of that.”
Being there for a man in pain
At the end of the interview, Dominic asked whom Kaczmark wanted to serve beyond God and his own family.
“I would like to be here for other men that are going through a hard time,” he said.
He recalled speaking with a man from his workout group whose father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Kaczmark’s experience with his sister gave them something painful they could discuss together.
The man was physically strong, someone Kaczmark described as a tough guy. The conversation still mattered.
“Dude, thank you,” Kaczmark recalled him saying.
For Kaczmark, that encounter connected his own suffering to the service he hoped to offer.
“The suffering and pain unites us all, and it allows us to reconnect with other people,” he said.