When Jeff Schiefelbein Watched His Children Nearly Die, Prayer Became Action, not Afterthought
Catholic entrepreneur and father of seven says the work of a protector begins when a dad is out of options and still refuses to quit
Jeff Schiefelbein believes that real heroism isn’t a viral moment. It’s a dad who jumps into the sewage tank or sits by the NICU bed and refuses to stop praying when he’s out of options.
He walks through his own “kid tragedies” — a newborn whose lungs wouldn’t open and a three-year-old with aggressive brain cancer — and how they forced him to stop chasing status, start living in the sacraments, and treat prayer as real work, not a last resort.
He talks about the mentors and “unsung heroes” who formed him: professors who really see people, executives who serve, and adults with disabilities scooping ice cream with more joy than most people bring to cushy jobs.
In the end, he says he wants to be a brother to dads in the trenches and build dignified work for his ice cream crew, the kind of man who is always ready — whether that means jumping into the tank or dropping everything to pray.
A father’s last breath
When Jeff Schiefelbein thinks about heroism, his mind does not go first to saints in front of firing squads or leaders on a stage. It goes to a backyard on the East Coast and a sewage tank.
Asked on the Heroic Stories podcast to share a story of heroism that lights him up, Schiefelbein did not hesitate. He went straight to the story of a man he has come to ask for intercession as a father: Tom Vander Woude.
Tom, he explained, had several grown children. One of his sons had special needs, a young man with Down syndrome. In their backyard, the underground tank for the sewage system could be opened for cleaning and repairs.
“One day his son with special needs fell into the tank,” Schiefelbein said. “When he heard him calling, Mr. Vander Woude, who’s a grown man with grown kids, doesn’t hesitate. He jumps down into the tank, into the sewage, into a place where you can’t live for very long, and finds a way to take his son, who’s not a light, small kid anymore — he’s a grown man — and hoists him above his shoulders and holds him up and yells for help.”
Rescuers eventually arrived and pulled the son out alive. When they went back in to get Vander Woude, he was gone.
“He had passed away from the last effort of his being,” Schiefelbein said. “His whole being was for his son.”
For Schiefelbein, the story is not just sentimental. It is a definition.
“You asked what lights me up?” he said. “I love this concept that as men, we’re not called to be the provider. We’re called to be the protector. God’s the provider, but we are called to be the protector of the faith, the protector of our children, the protector of our communities, of our church.”
There is now a cause to promote Vander Woude’s life for possible beatification. Schiefelbein said he already turns to him in prayer.
“I have asked for that man’s intercession as a father,” he said.
On the front lines of “kid tragedy”
The story of a dad giving his last breath for his son hits Schiefelbein in a very particular place. He and his wife are raising seven children. Twice, he said, he has found himself on what he calls “the front lines of kid tragedy.”
The first time came the night his sixth child was born.
“When he was born, his lungs didn’t open and they didn’t have any skin-to-skin time with my wife after a full-term, perfectly healthy pregnancy,” Schiefelbein recalled. “We found out the gender of our son and then he was taken to the NICU because his lungs wouldn’t open.”
Doctors sedated and paralyzed the baby. They put him on fentanyl and dopamine. They pumped air into his tiny body, so much that it began tearing open the ends of his lungs.
“I went down at midnight that night with my wife to say goodbye to my son,” he said.
Every doctor told them the baby would die. At 25 hours old, they decided to have him baptized in the hospital.
“After the baptism, the very next X-ray, his lungs opened,” Schiefelbein said. “We got to hold him when he was eight days old.”
The second front line came years later with another son. A golf club hit the boy in the head. At the emergency room, doctors discovered not only a concussion but a brain tumor.
“They did brain surgery on him the next morning to remove the tumor,” Schiefelbein said. “A month later, after the removal and a whole lot of genetic testing, they concluded that my then three-year-old son had a very rare and aggressive form of brain cancer.”
The boy’s tumor had been growing fast in his left temporal lobe. There was no way the family could have known about it. The golf-club accident revealed what was already there.
“Here I am again watching them wheel my son down the hall for brain surgery,” he said. “And then a month later they’re telling me we need to start proton radiation, that my son was going to be sedated 40 times in the year that he was three years old for tests, for radiation, for lumbar punctures and so on.”
In both crises, the same frustration roared inside him.
“I couldn’t do anything for him,” he said of his newborn in the NICU. “With my hands or my strength or my knowledge, I couldn’t do a single thing for my son.” The same thing was true when the three-year-old went into surgery and radiation.
And yet, he said, that feeling was only half the truth.
“That isn’t true because I prayed without ceasing,” he said. “I called for the prayers of others. I had him baptized. There were things I could do, but I couldn’t do the thing that felt like it was me physically doing it.”
Vander Woude could jump into a tank. Schiefelbein could not climb inside a ventilator or a radiation machine. So he learned to treat prayer as action, not an afterthought.
“I never think that prayer is something to put in the rearview mirror,” he said. “It’s always first. It’s always foremost. It’s formidable. It’s the most important thing I can do for my family.”
Looking back at Vander Woude’s story, he understands why it grips him.
“We often want to have the physical, manly moment of sacrifice,” he said. “I would have traded places with either one of my sons if there was a way. And Tom, when faced with the same situation, literally switched places with his son and held him up to his son’s thriving and to his own death. That is beautiful. I think we’re all called to that, and I hope that in those moments — whether it’s, are you going to pray for your son in the hospital or are you going to jump in that sewage tank and lift him up — that we’re all formed every day to be the fathers and the protectors that we’re called to be.”
From Fifth Avenue to Golgotha
Schiefelbein was not always the man whose first instinct is to pray.
He describes himself as a cradle Catholic raised in a post-Vatican II world who assumed he would get serious about faith later.
“I figured that someday I would be 65 years old and get serious about my faith and be an usher,” he said. “I didn’t think there was going to be a lot to it.”
As a teenager and into his early 20s, he chased what the world offered.
“There was a lot of adventure in there,” he said. “Fame, popularity, authority, money. And it was so shallow or hollow or vapid. There was nothing in it.”
One moment in particular exposed the emptiness. He was in New York City, on Fifth Avenue, being treated like a celebrity in a parade.
“I was in a parade on Fifth Avenue in New York City being treated like a celebrity in front of tens of thousands of people,” he said. “And I could just feel the echoes of how pointless it felt. I’m not saying those things aren’t fun. There was just no fulfillment. I thought, this is it. I’m in this big celebrity moment and this is it.”
Around the same time, he went on a Christ Renews His Parish retreat and began to see other men trying to take faith seriously.
“I was seeing all these people I looked up to, thinking they were maybe holier than me,” he said. “I realized we’re kind of all in this together. We’re all human beings on a pathway trying to know and love Christ.”
Then came a trip to the Holy Land. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he climbed the stairs to Golgotha and reached down to touch the rock where the cross once stood.
“As I walked up to put my hand in the hole in the rock where the cross is in Golgotha, the strangers around me were singing, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’” he said. “I was so shaken to the core that I wanted to do nothing else but serve our Lord with whatever gifts or talents and opportunities he put in front of me.”
By his own admission, he had probably heard the hymn a hundred times before. In that moment, it came with power.
“Before they said the word ‘tremble,’ I was trembling,” he said. “I was trembling in this ultimate sign of gratitude that I even get to be a human being who is following Christ. Not just that I get to be on pilgrimage, that was awesome, but that I even get to have this life with all of its trials, with all of its potential joy.”
The joy he discovered was different from celebrity applause or a fun adventure.
“The true joy is a joy that never would leave me because it wasn’t based on the externals,” he said. “It was based on something that I didn’t write, didn’t imprint, that came before me and exists throughout all of time and space in Jesus Christ and through our participation in the sacraments.”
That moment marked a clear dividing line.
“It was that duality of: this doesn’t work, and this is everything,” he said. “It was a clear line. I could never go back on the other side.”
Formation, reordered loves, and a hospital month
The shift did not turn him overnight into a perfect husband and father. It did set him on a practical path of formation.
Having gone through public school and only mild involvement in faith in college, he started to pursue daily prayer, Bible studies with older men in his parish, and retreats.
“I started going to really deep prayer,” he said. “The morning Bible study with the 80-year-old men in my parish, going to retreats like Christ Renews His Parish, reading documents about what the Church teaches. I found that every time I gave time to the Lord, I would get back something that satisfied and didn’t leave me.”
That hunger led him to the sacraments and then to daily Mass.
“It was never, let me try this on for a bit,” he said. “It was always, I want more of this. This is real. I want less of this other stuff. This is fake.”
Before he and his wife had their first child, he had already wrestled through the order of his priorities.
“It became very clear to me that God’s always first, first and foremost, above my relationship and love of my wife,” he said. “If I get that part right, I can love my wife properly, I can be the man my wife deserves as a husband. And then if my wife and I both come together in that same love of Christ first and each other second, we can be the models for our children that come third.”
He is explicit that the love and relationship with his children is not on the same level or above his love for his wife.
“We started praying together about it, studying it, reading great Catholic authors and psychology books about childrearing and all the stuff we could just to figure out who we are as parents,” he said. “It became very clear that we’re called to something higher and bigger and more important than the stuff right in front of us and the comparisons to other parents and trying to be popular. There’s something so much more substantial here.”
Years later, when his wife underwent a surgery that did not go well, that formation was tested and deepened.
“Instead of being in the hospital for maybe a day, we ended up there for almost a month,” he said. “Watching her suffer while we had a child at home that my mother-in-law was taking care of, and knowing I could have done anything — I could have sat around watching Netflix, I could have been on social media, I could have worked all day.”
He chose instead to lean further into prayer and study.
“I fell in love in a true relationship with Our Lady of Guadalupe reading a book called Maria de Guadalupe,” he said. “I fell in love with some of the writings of Pope Benedict. I fell in love with some of the stories of the saints. I found myself feeling the prayers of others, not just appreciating them.”
That month changed the way he prayed and committed.
“I felt myself connected to a community of persons through the Eucharist and making commitments that were no longer bartering — like, ‘God, if you let us out or if you do this, then I’ll start doing this,’” he said. “It became, ‘God, no matter what, I will start attending daily Mass when my wife is released or when we’re done here. God, no matter what, the rosary is now part of my life and I will be praying the rosary.’”
It was another release into something more intentional.
“I started to realize how far away I was from truly living the Christian life,” he said. “It’s like, I know so much now that I’m smarter than I had ever been — I can never go back to being that stupid. But now I know so much that I realize how stupid I really am, how far away I really am. And that’s not negative. It’s ‘thanks be to God, I can grow in virtue and grow closer to you, Lord Jesus, every day, if I take that step forward instead of lateral and especially not backward.’”
Living that way, he said, is “so fulfilling” that he has trouble imagining going back.
“It’s so fulfilling to be Christ-centered and virtue-based in every aspect of your life, completely undivided,” he said. “I have trouble ever imagining that I would be lazy again or passive or selective about when and where I would apply those important principles of my life.”
When Mass stops being a transaction
Many men, he acknowledged, still feel like they are “just going through the motions.” They go to Mass to keep the family together. They are not sure what they are getting out of it.
He understands the feeling and warns against cementing it.
“I don’t blame people for having that feeling,” he said. “You have to be careful not to act on it and to start to talk about it so much that a feeling becomes a reality. If ‘I’m not getting something out of it’ becomes my repeated internal dialogue and I speak it out loud, then it’s going to become a cemented reality.”
He suggests a different internal script.
“I would say instead, ‘I haven’t felt as closely connected to the faith as other people that I’ve heard of or as deeply as I’d want to be, and I’m open to it,’” he said. “Now I’m not painting myself in a corner.”
For Schiefelbein, the turning point in his own life of prayer came when he stopped trying to manufacture something during Mass and just showed up.
“I found myself getting so deep into the just-being part that I was no longer trying to come up with what the prayer was going to be,” he said. “I was no longer trying to figure out what were all of the Latin versions of this prayer because I’m flipping through my Magnificat.”
He describes realizing that God had been speaking all along, and that the noise in the way was his own.
“If I’m trying to get something out of Mass or out of the Church, I’m probably having a dialogue that nobody else is part of,” he said. “The voice that’s getting in the way is probably mine.”
His own prayer at Mass began to sound more like availability.
“I started saying, ‘Holy Spirit, I’m here. Where do you want me?’” he said. “‘God, I don’t need anything out of this Mass. What do you need from me? How can I be useful to you?’ Now it’s no longer about ‘give me, give me, give me.’ It’s at the service of the Church. It’s at the service of our Lord.”
Sometimes, he added, the answer is simply to be quiet.
“Even in the silence, maybe what the Lord needs from me right now is to just shut up and sit there so that my heart can be calmed and down the road I can actually hear what he’s saying to me,” he said.
Prayer like breathing
Asked not just what he prays but how he prays, Schiefelbein described a life where prayer has become as constant as breathing.
“My mornings start before everybody wakes up,” he said. “Seven kids. I also have a dog, a cat, and four donkeys. So my life is crazy. My day starts early.”
He begins with Scripture.
“I read one part from the Bible every day just so I can get started with the right piece,” he said. “Then I pray for the day ahead and anybody who’s been on my heart since I woke up. I always think there must be some reason.”
During certain seasons, he joins his team in novenas or consecrations.
“Right now, my team is doing a consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for our company,” he said. “So then I go through that set of prayers.”
Throughout the day, he looks for “timeout moments” to pray for what is next.
“I’m always going to find the timeout moment to pray for what’s next,” he said. “Let me be present to this conversation. It’s rare that I’m in a meeting, a meal, or even sometimes a phone call that we don’t start off with prayer, even though I run a for-profit business and we have clients of all different natures. We start every single meeting in prayer.”
At home, prayer is woven into daily life with his wife.
“My wife is so beautiful,” he said. “We will pray for each other out loud as we’re saying goodbye to one another. If I’m on the phone with her — and she did this today — she’s driving by the clinic where our son got his proton radiation. She’ll say, ‘Stop, hold on, pray with me,’ and she prays for everybody inside the clinic, doctors and people receiving their service.”
For their family, he said, prayer has become “like breathing.”
“Prayer is infused in everything,” he said. “It’s praying without ceasing. Sometimes it’s out loud, always in our hearts. Sometimes it’s specific and particular. At other times it’s open and praiseworthy. Even when I’m alone, I will pray out loud because I find that it keeps me on track.”
He credits prayer even in small things, like the day he rescued the family cat from a wall crawl space after days of searching.
“I remember giving an earnest prayer to God before I walked in this garage,” he said. “An hour and a half later, I walked out, the cat had been rescued and delivered to my wife. Somebody would say, ‘Good, you found the cat, great.’ And I’m like, no, we should praise God in all times. We should worship God when it’s hard and give our struggles to him and be grateful. And when things are good, we should give credit to God and thank him and worship him in those moments just the same.”
That conviction shapes how he responds when people mock “thoughts and prayers” or treat prayer as a placeholder for action.
“My lived experience is such that I will counteract anyone who says, ‘Enough prayers, now it’s time to do something,’” he said. “No, we should double down on prayers. Or somebody who says ‘thoughts and prayers’ or sends an emoji but has never prayed and didn’t pray for me — they just sent the emoji. Please don’t do that. Your emoji has done nothing for me. Your prayers, though, are huge.”
His son with brain cancer continues to go in for scans.
“Next Thursday my son is having a three-hour sedation to get scans on his brain once again,” he said. “I don’t need people to get us dinner that night. I don’t need somebody to take care of my stuff at work. I want, need, appreciate and love the prayers of people I know and of complete strangers. That is the greatest way for us to pay it forward.”
For those who feel awkward offering to pray, he suggests two simple steps.
“If somebody shares bad news with you, you can say, ‘thoughts and prayers, I’ll pray for you, I’ll remember to pray for you later’ — or I’ll give you two other options that are a thousand times better,” he said. “Stop and pray for that person just in the silence of your heart: ‘Dear Lord Jesus, please be with my brother as he’s going through this time. Send down your peace,’ and just pray for this person. It’s real. And then the 201 version of that is, ‘Do you want to just pray about it right now?’”
That simple question, he said, unlocks something.
“You will watch hardened hearts break open,” he said. “You will watch people see differently when they are prayed for out loud to Jesus Christ with others. I love rote prayer, but it’s both. Let’s do both.”
Heroes, ice cream, and being truly seen
Schiefelbein divides his heroes into three groups.
“The first is authors or speakers who had a profound influence on me,” he said, naming Andres Widmer, Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, Alexander Havard and writers like Michael Naughton and Cardinal Michael Czerny, co-authors of Vocation of the Business Leader. “These people that I read something and it forever changed who I was. There’s a couple that are not even from the Catholic faith, like John Mark Comer and The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Those people have profoundly influenced me.”
The second group is successful leaders whose lives go far beyond writing checks.
“They would be lauded and applauded for writing the big checks,” he said. “But that’s not what they actually spend their time doing. They do write the big checks, but they’re the same people who are volunteering every single month at the Ronald McDonald House for 14 years and cooking. The same ones who are rolling up their sleeves and tutoring at St. Vincent de Paul for a junior high math student.”
He admires them precisely because they could stop at public generosity and choose not to.
“You could write the $100,000 check and everybody would say, ‘You’re amazing, you’re amazing,’” he said. “But what’s really amazing is that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Those people are my heroes because they don’t have to do the other work for people to give them a pat on the back, but they care more about doing the other work than they do about writing the check.”
His third group of heroes is people who are disadvantaged and still show up with joy.
“Those that are just disadvantaged and show up with a smile and continue to get through the sludge of life, the hard trenches, and keep on going,” he said. “There are a million versions of this, but today I’m actually wearing my ice cream shirt.”
His firm recently became part owners of Howdy Homemade Ice Cream, a company that employs adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, including autism and Down syndrome.
“Our company became part owners of and the executive team for an ice cream company where we employ adults who have intellectual and developmental disabilities,” he said. “It’s a 10-year-old company. It’s phenomenal. It’s won a million awards and now we’re part of it.”
They plan to grow the business aggressively.
“We’re going to add a lot of company stores and a whole lot of catering, to the tune of 50 stores in five years,” he said.
But what stays with him most are the shifts he works alongside their employees — including his niece Sarah — and the way they carry themselves.
“When you go in and you work an eight-hour shift in the ice cream shop and you’re being trained by a young man or woman who has Down syndrome, you see the joy by which they serve,” he said. “You see how much they praise the Lord and give credit to God for everything. You see how much they see the dignity of work and are grateful for it, while people who have corporate jobs and cushy 401(k)s are complaining about the most minute pieces of their business day. I look to each of those folks as a hero because they remind us of what God built us for.”
One of the most influential heroes in his own story is his college mentor, Dr. Ben Welch, who taught management and ran student leadership programs at Texas A&M.
“Under his purview, I did the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said.
The hardest thing he ever did
As a 20-year-old student, Schiefelbein started his first nonprofit, a program to reduce drunk driving that still exists more than a quarter century later.
“It’s now 26 years old,” he said. “It’s the nation’s largest program to reduce drunk driving.”
By any normal measure, launching it should have been impossible.
“You can’t rent cars if you’re not 25, and I was 20,” he said. “You can’t get hundreds of people to work for you for free, and I found a way to get them to pay to be a part of it. You can’t go and operate as a student organization if the university wants you to be shut down.”
He remembers facing nine lawyers lined up against him.
“I had nine lawyers try to beat me at a game of business chess,” he said. “But we had out-prepared, out-thought and out-planned all of them, and at the end they threw their hands up and said, ‘We can’t stop you.’ They later became really dear friends because the work that we did was so amazing.”
He does not describe founding the nonprofit as the hardest decision he ever made, because he did not feel like he had a choice.
“I would almost say I wouldn’t call it the hardest decision, I’d call it the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “Because it was impossible. The only reason I would say it exists today is because I couldn’t give up on something that God had already shown me existed.”
Years later, he did face a wrenching decision: leaving the energy company he co-founded, where he served as chief culture officer.
“I have made tough decisions when I’ve proactively left,” he said. “My last organization was a phenomenal company that’s still doing really well. I left the comforts. I left something where I really didn’t even have to work anymore. I could have coasted.”
He felt a tug toward a different challenge.
“I felt God tugging on my heart that as men we’re called to challenge, we’re called to rise to an occasion and to feel that sense of accomplishment and that camaraderie,” he said. “I just wasn’t in that same place with the energy company I was running. I loved them very much. I wanted a challenge where I could go and take the same principles that worked there — Catholic social teachings — and bring it to organizations of all shapes and sizes and not just the energy company.”
Who he hopes to be a hero for
When asked who he hopes to be a hero for — aside from God and his own family — Schiefelbein answered in two parts.
“I’m going to cheat,” he said. “I’m going to give you two answers.”
The first is fathers facing the terror of severe or terminal illnesses in their children.
“I live a very public life,” he said. “Praise be to God, a lot of these dads are introduced to me or I find them or vice versa. Often, for good reason, we worry about the kids, we worry about the mom, but people forget to ask the dad how they’re doing. They forget to really walk with the dad.”
He sees it as a gift in his life to walk side by side with those fathers.
“The second one is these heroes that work for Howdy Homemade Ice Cream, who would normally be otherwise unemployed,” he said. “We are right now doing a capital raise and putting the full throttle of everything we know — finance, accounting, marketing, operations, efficiency — because I want to create dignified work for the heroes that are at home looking for friendship.”
For those employees, work is more than a paycheck.
“They love coming to work because now they get to be a part of something and not sit at home,” he said.
He is blunt about the cost he is willing to pay.
“I’m willing to continue to sacrifice sleep and sanity as we grow this amazing organization,” he said. “And I even will dress up with an ice cream button-down.”
In all of it — the nonprofit work, the ice cream shops, the capital raises, the podcasts and leadership consulting — Schiefelbein circles back to the simple image that still undoes him: a dad in a sewage tank, lifting his son into the air and refusing to let go.
“I think we’re all called to that,” he said. “And I hope that in those moments, whether it’s praying in the hospital or jumping into the tank, we’re all formed every day to be the fathers and the protectors that we’re called to be.”