Deconstructing Faith and Finding Jesus with Philip Yancey!

When we hurt, we want God to just take it away, to heal us. Well, it obviously doesn't happen all the time. It happens sometimes, I believe, but not all that often because everybody eventually dies. And I have learned over the years you can suffer bad or suffer good. People who suffer bad are just miserable, and they make everybody around them miserable.

People who suffer well are people who somehow find a way to redeem it. Pain redeemed impresses me more than pain removed. You're listening to the Provoke and Inspire podcast. Welcome to the Provoke and Inspire podcast, learning how to follow Jesus in a post Christian context and culture. My name is Ben Pierce.

I am the host of the show, and I have a very, very special episode for you today. I had the privilege of interviewing Philip Yancey. For those who are unfamiliar, he is an American author whose writings explore the most basic questions and the deepest mysteries of the Christian faith. He's written many best selling books, including the Jesus I never knew, what's so amazing about grace, and prayer. Does it make a difference?

His books have sold more than 17,000,000 copies in English and have been translated into 50 languages. This makes him one of the best selling contemporary Christian authors ever. I'm very, very excited about his most recent book. It's a memoir, Where the Light Fell, and this is what we spend a lot of time talking about. His story is brutal.

It's gripping. He's so honest and vulnerable. During the discussion, we talk about deconstruction. We talk about how you can speak to someone who is far from God. We look at some of the things that drew him to Jesus on how these can be powerful tools for the people in our lives who don't know God.

It's an awesome conversation. One of the best I feel like I've maybe ever had on this podcast. I could not recommend that you check this out anymore. I really think you'll be encouraged by it. And just as a reminder, this podcast is part of a missions organization called Steiger.

We reach and disciple the global youth culture, basically young people, really anyone who is far from God, and we mobilize followers of Jesus to do the same. This is our passion. We want you to get involved with us. And for more information and resources, you can go to steiger.org, steiger,.0rg. Also, if this podcast means something to you, if it's encouraged you in any way, would you leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this?

That would mean a ton to us. Alright. That's it. I hope you enjoy this interview with author Philip Yancey. Like I said, I am beyond grateful.

You know, you've been so faithful for so many years. God has used you so powerfully. So thank you. Thank you for joining the Provoke and Inspire podcast. Absolutely.

I wanna talk about your most recent book, Where the Light Fell, and go through your story if you'd be willing. Sure. But just selfishly, are there maybe some unique opportunities and challenges that writers, artists, content creators face in your mind? Yeah. You know, in in a way, I I guess I would say this is the best of times and the worst of times to be a writer.

It's let's start with the worst. It's the worst of times because it's hard to make a living at it. When I started out, it was possible. I started with a magazine, and then I started writing books one by one while I was still had a job. And then I was able to, for the last forty five years, make a living, by writing books about things that I wanted to explore.

I write books for myself trying to figure out answers to questions. And if anybody else reads, that's great. Well, now every everybody wants the Internet to be free. All content should be free. Right.

So the the good side is that you or anybody can write something today that could be read by thousands of people around the world today. You know? Yeah. It's amazing. That has never happened before in history.

So it's a great opportunity, but it's just hard to make a living. And I am glad that I lived when I did. I kinda lived under the old rules. I don't know about these new rules. In terms of creative content, I think it's really helpful, Ben, to develop an artistic community.

It sounds fancy, but it just means people who wanna create something, they get together and and share it. I know there's there's a good one in, in Nashville. For example, Andrew Peterson was one of the key guys in starting that. And these are people who get together and share the material. They read it out loud.

They get that initial critique. And and I I guess I like that intermediate stage rather than just immediately going on a blog and putting down your first draft. You know, that's not that's not gonna teach it any bet to be any better. Right. And if you have a regular group you meet with, people you trust, the only people who help you are people who say that really doesn't work.

You know? Yeah. When I share my stuff with readers, most of them say, oh, it's so good. It's so good. That doesn't help me at all, so I never go back to them.

I I go back to cranks, people who write in the manuscript margin. I am falling asleep. This is so boring. I think, well, it stings, but I I gotta know that. And and I pay attention to them.

So that that intermediate layer of feedback before you actually publish, no matter what you publish, I think is is important. And and I do that too. I've got some people around me here in Colorado. So even before I publish a blog, my assistant and couple of other people go through it and challenge me on this and that, and that's an important step that I need. Just in the same way, when I used to write articles for magazines, the editor would do that.

And I think we all need, we need that layer of editors before we publish regardless of how we publish. As you said, the the medium that people write through now, it it almost necessitates speed, and, also, it allows for it. Like, it allows for you to be lazy. Right? Because you can write something or produce something and then just hit publish, and boom, it's gone.

I so value the few rare people in my life who are willing to give real honest feedback, and and yet it stings even after all these years. Oh, it sure does. You you don't like it, do you? You have to keep asking for it because I think the natural tendency is to avoid it and to wanna just think, no. Everything I do is perfect the first time.

Yeah. I had a funny experience along that line. Every once in a while, as you're writing, you come up with some phrase or some analogy that is kind of edgy, and you're not quite sure whether it works or whether it's pushing the envelope a little too far. So I do that all the time. And I had this one friend who I had never used as an editor before, and I asked him to give me some feedback.

And he went through, and the funny thing is he put little little check marks by every one of those kind of experimental artistic jumps for me. Sure. And I thought, oh, that's great. I I was really cooking that day. Every one of these, he likes.

He understands. I this is my kinda guy. And then he told me, no. No. Those mean, this needs extra work.

It's just not working. This is not working at all. Yeah. Check marks is a little deceiving there. Right.

Yeah. It reminds me of there's the brilliant book Creativity Inc. I don't know if it's the founder of Pixar. Okay. What he developed was what he called a brain trust.

And it was people in the industry, directors, writers, producers. The only rule was they could have no skin in the game. Mhmm. And when they had problems with their writing or their scripts or their plots, they would bring it to this brain trust. And their job was to provide, take it or leave it, brutal feedback.

Yeah. Yeah. And I I've always had that in my mind. Like, I need a brain trust. I need people in my life who are like, this is just not good, and you need to make this better.

Right. What role does reading play in your writing? Because I I I feel like reading's kind of becoming rare, and maybe I'm not. I know some of the statistics are back and forth on that a little bit, but I had this maybe very anecdotal evidence of I had a couple of younger guys, like, young gen z's in my team, and I brought up some book. And they very almost proudly were like, oh, we don't read.

Like, I don't I don't I don't read. Like, that's not and they but they didn't say it with any sense of, like, shame or, like, oh, I should, but I don't, like, working out. No. Just just unashamedly, oh, we don't read. So I don't I don't really know why you're bringing that up.

What role does reading play in your writing? And and and then maybe a more narrow question is, what do you read? I mean, there's just so much. I sometimes feel like I'm just picking things out of the giant basket of options, and I just don't I I just don't know. I don't know even know where to start.

Yeah. Well, if I could turn this this little camera here and you could see the rest of my office, you'd find 7,000 books. And and that's my life, for forty five years. That's what I've done. Reading is my is my way of thinking, for one thing, trying to figure out what I believe, and it's also my way of of aspiring.

It teaches me what good writing is. So in the early days, I would come across people like an Annie Dillard or Frederick Bickner, and they would just they would explode. It just lit up. This this is a new terrain I've never seen before. I can't I didn't know you could do that with words that you could carry people along and then hit them right at the end the way, Frederick Bickner or a nanny dealer does.

And over the years, I've always kept a a database. I I started right when computers started, unfortunately. And and so every time I read a book, I make notes in the front of the book and type in where where that came from, you know, what page number, where where it is in my library. So if I'm gonna write a book about Jesus, for example, on that database, I just pull up the word Jesus, and I'll have hundreds and hundreds of these references. And I go back to the books, and I look at them through this filter now because I know I'm gonna write about Jesus.

And and that's my way of thinking, and some of it I I wrestle with again. I don't I don't see Jesus that way now the way I used to when I read that twenty years ago, and I kinda work through that. And then it gives me the source material that I can I can, use them as the authorities? So how do I choose what to read? I usually find a person that I I experience as stimulating.

It takes me in a new direction, and I try to read everything they've done. So, you know, I went through a Henry Nouwen stage and a Richard Foster stage and, of course, a CS Lewis and GK Chesterton and a Dorothy Sayers. And these were the foundations of my faith. And, frankly, I I think it's only that kind of committed deep reading that has allowed great writing over the years. And I fear for the future because I see these, the way we shorten everything, even these one word sentences now Yeah.

And and the little abbreviations that you see in in, emails and messages. And even books are becoming more like emails. Just Right. Quick things to get through. Right.

And, boy, I I think that's gonna catch up to us, especially if you're trying to deal with things like our faith, what we believe, and and consider alternatives. What do you think about this? What do you think about that? You you can't do that with these little one word sentences with little blip of messages that come over the, over the, Internet, and then you just hit delete as soon as you read them. That doesn't bode well for our future.

No. And I I feel like I struggle with the tension of I've heard you say in other places that we're not gonna write something new. Right? So it's more about your take on it. It's about what would God have me say on this topic maybe through the lens of the life that I've lived.

But we do live in a culture, I think, that values producing things more than learning and absorbing and living and experiencing. And and so it's all about you just gotta you gotta produce. And so even if you're not qualified, even if you don't really have anything to say, even if you're not necessarily very interesting on that topic, you just you gotta keep putting stuff out there. It's more about output than it is absorbing. And I guess my struggle or question would be, how do you know when you're even ready to write anything?

Do you know what I mean? When do you write? What what's that when is that moment where you're like, now I'm ready to write on this particular topic? Yeah. I had the great fortune of starting out my very first job, real job, was writing for a magazine, a youth magazine called Campus Life magazine back in the early nineteen seventies.

And it was wonderful because I was around words all day, And they would assign me, write the liner notes to to some record album. Well, I didn't know anything about music, especially Right. You know, Jesus music kind of in the nineteen seventies. Or they'd say, write a write a brochure copy on, why you should buy this magazine. Well, I didn't know how to do that.

But it forced me that I mean, writing is about I've got an idea. I've got a message. There's a target audience out there. What's the best form to get this message to that audience? I mean, it's it's that simple.

It it's me Right. And the audience out there in the in the form I choose. And so I did that in so many different areas. Our magazine had a column. This this shows you how dated it was called Girl World.

So it was, you know, advice on makeup and fashion and that kind of stuff. Well, the person, who wrote that column regularly, quit unexpectedly, and we've gotta go to press. So for the next three months, I wrote the girl world column. And, actually, you you know, that kind of, it was a it was a good experience for me to have to put myself in somebody else's shoes. That's what we do as writers.

And then think about the audience and think about how can I reach that audience? That's what writing is. So I I had that kinda built in by my job, and, I I don't know how you do it starting off. It's so easy now for anybody to start writing a a blog or doing a podcast or something. Right.

Your question, when should I start, or when should I not start, is an excellent question. But, you know, as long as you're producing, as long as you're cranking out words, you will eventually find out this one worked, this one did not work. Sure. The good thing about blogs, you can give immediate feedback. You can kinda see, not higher.

Yeah. How many people tuned in and how long you know, how many seconds they spent before they bounced to somebody else. So so you have immediate feedback that I I never had. We got it Right. Two months later after we did a survey of the January issue in March.

And So, again, that's one of those opportunities of our modern age of writing, I guess. So Exactly. Good and bad. Probably like every age. Right?

So, I'd love to to talk about your story. It's so gripping, and, there's so many parallels in it, as I said, to the to the work that I think still goes on as it relates to reaching people. I feel like the way your story progressed, I I encounter that kind of person all the time, not maybe to those exact details or even maybe that extreme, although sometimes, but very powerful. And so I'm sure you've told it a million times, but would you mind just sharing the basics of your story? I told the whole story in this book called Where the Light Fell.

Yes. And that's, a memoir. And I've waited almost fifty years to write that book, which I call a prequel. It it goes back and explains why I write about the things that I write, you know, suffering and grace primarily. And we all have a story.

You you hear Christian testimonies. Oh, I was saved from drugs. I was saved from alcohol or sex addiction or something. My story is I I was saved from a toxic church. Yeah.

I grew up in the, in the South in in the middle of the civil rights movement, and my church was on the wrong side of everything. It was anti civil rights. It's, black people, people of color as inferior. They'll never reach beyond a certain level. It was very legalistic.

You know, these days, the evangelical church in The US is primarily fixated on politics. It wasn't true when I was growing up. Back then, it was fixated on rules. You know? Don't do this.

Don't do that. Very legalistic church. And we're trying to be more spiritual, more holy than other people. And, my story is realizing over time that not everybody who claims to speak for God actually does so. That started when I was very young.

I was just a year old. There was a pandemic going on. It wasn't COVID nineteen. It was polio. Yeah.

And my father got polio, a serious case, over 90 years, 23 years old, freshly out of the navy in World War two, and then he he married my mother and had two kids pretty quickly. My brother was two years older, and then I was just one year old. And when my father got sick, he was carried away completely paralyzed. There was only one hospital that had an iron lung in Atlanta. It was a charity hospital.

He didn't get good care. He was in there for a couple of months, and he was planning to be a missionary, Ben. He was they were going to go to Africa. They had a mailing list of several thousand people who agreed to support them and pray for them. And that those people decided, can't possibly be God's will for my father to die.

So he if we pray hard enough, maybe he'll be healed. Yeah. And they started praying and finally convinced word of prophecy that he would be healed. And they, against all medical advice, removed him from the iron lung. And it looked like he showed a little bit of improvement, but a few days later, just a couple weeks, he died.

And that determined my life. It was a crushing blow to my mother, who was one of those who believed in god, that god was gonna heal him. And, of course, she was unprepared for life. She she had moved from Philadelphia. She's now in the South.

She has no money, no income, and just kinda scraped by, and and that determined, my childhood. We lived in a trailer home most of the time, very small, eight foot wide, forty eight foot long, and three of us in that trailer. And then she she kinda went off the rails in certain ways. I I wasn't aware of it at the time when you're growing up. It's that's just normal life.

You know? Right. You think every family is like that. But, people who read the memoir now say, oh, boy. There was some mental illness going on in your family.

And and and then I started encountering other things that caused me to question the church because, we believe we had the truth. We were the ones who knew it all, who are going to heaven, and everybody else is going to hell. Heaven was a very small place. Heaven hell was a very large place. Right.

And one of the things that was a trigger for me was race because we were taught that black people were inferior. They make good servants. I mean, it's hard to even say these things now, but it that's what we were taught. And people were calling Martin Luther King, who was, of course, Atlanta native, Martin Lucifer Coon. That was the word they used for him, in church.

And, I went to work one day. I I got a fellowship at the Communicable Disease Center, now called the Center for Disease Control. And, I I polished up because, I knew my supervisor was a man named doctor Cherry. He was a renowned biochemist who's who is specializing in staining bacteria. I tried reading some of his papers, and I couldn't even understand them.

I'm I'm a sophomore in high school. And I walk in to meet him the first day, and doctor Cherry is a black man, African American. And bells go off, morning bells, ding, ding, ding, ding. It was clear the church had lied to me about race. And if the church lied to me about race, maybe they lied to me about the Bible, about Jesus.

Yeah. So I went through a period I went through an an agnostic period questioning everything, just kinda suspending it. My brother, again, was two years older, and he he went a different direction. He also realized the things we were told growing up just weren't true. So he was gonna go as far away from them as he could possibly do.

He became one of Atlanta's original hippies. He kinda fried his brain on LSD, moved to California like most hippies. In the book, you said he had a mustache and long hair, and I currently have a mustache and long hair. Oh, no. Watch it.

Watch it. I'm not doing this just to relate. I promise. Yeah. Let me ask one quick question.

Your your mom doubled down on this fundamentalism instead of rejecting it because of the tragic experience that she faced. Why do you think that is? Why why do you think instead of, because you would think that that there may have been just as likely of a chance that she looked at what happened to her husband and the failure of that, you know, of God intervening there, and she could have gone in the other direction. Maybe. Why why why do you think that she rather than going, I'm out, in maybe the similar way that your brother did or you did eventually, why why did she double down?

She was a devout person. She really believed it. And and, you know, years later, I wrote a book called disappointment with God, and I'm sure she looked at that and thought, how how can you even use those words, disappointment with god? God is god. You know?

We're we're the ones who are wrong here. And the other thing that happened, I I describe in the book, the scene where she she dedicated her sons, my brother and me Yeah. To fulfill my father's mission that he was going to do. And if and and the story was like Hannah offering her son Samuel in the temple to God. Yeah.

And we we were just normal teenagers. We, I mean, we weren't bad kids at all. But if we didn't become a missionary in Africa, then then we were rebelling against God. So so all that disappointment and probably anger that she could have her she could have directed toward God. She instead directed toward us.

Oh. So my brother and she haven't seen each other in fifty two years yet. There was a complete split there. Yeah. And her thinking, I'm a little closer to where I should be than my brother is.

He's an atheist. I write Christian books, but it's not her form her form of Christianity. You know? So she claims she doesn't read my books, which is probably a good thing. But she really believed.

She had a conversion experience. She really believed, and she Sure. She believed that God would ultimately answer the prayers for my father through her two sons. And her frustration about that is what drove her to take some pretty extreme measures. So your your brother, he he enters into the hippie movements?

Yeah. And, how does the story progress from there? Well, then I went to Wheaton College and got a graduate degree, and that's when I started as a magazine editor. And in those days, my faith was still up in the air. I call it a cocoon phase because I was still trying to figure it out.

And I came across this man who is something like a saint to me and ultimately became a father figure. His name was doctor Paul Brand. So for about ten years, I followed him around and wrote books with him, fearfully and wonderfully made, In His Image, the gift of pain. He was, an orthopedic surgeon. Brilliant.

He was offered the head of orthopedics at Stanford and at, Oxford University and turned them down to work among the lowest people on the entire planet. Then I promise you, it doesn't get any lower on the social scale than somebody in the Dalit, caste, the untouchable In India. In India who had leprosy. That is the very bottom. They're kicked out of their home, their village.

They live off in a cave somewhere. People take a little bucket of slot food for them. Yeah. And and here's this brilliant orthopedic surgeon who spent his life among them. It was kinda like Mother Teresa with a modern laboratory.

Wow. Because he was a brilliant scientist, made all sorts of discovery, and his book on hand surgery is still used in medical schools today. And doctor Brand had a fully integrated faith. And when I look back, I I almost feel like God said, okay, Philip. I've shown you the worst that the church has to offer.

Let me show you the best. Yeah. And that was true. And then later, I started writing for Christianity Today, and I would go to those people I wanted to learn from, I wanted to be like, I and I wanted to emulate. And over the years, I've I've been able I've been free just to explore my faith and and try to come to terms with it and sift through the messages mixed messages I was given as a kid.

This is worth keeping. This is heresy. I gotta throw this out. I gotta keep this one. And, it's it's been wonderful.

I I feel blessed. That truly is the right word. I feel blessed to be able to spend my life doing that, thinking through, struggling through, and then going to people who can help me. And you probably I'm sure you've heard the phrase, exvangelicals. There are a lot of people.

Yeah. There are a lot of people who grew up in circumstances a little bit like mine, probably not as severe. But, you know, they they went to a Young Life camp. They went to a small group at church or something and and have good memories of it, but then somewhere along the way, the church failed them. Right.

Either the way it treated somebody, the way it treated gay people, the way it told them stuff about science that they later found out was not true. And I've often been in conversation with these people, and, you know, they'll say, what do you do? I'm a Christian author. Oh, really? Well, I used to be into that kinda of stuff.

Well, what happened? And they tell me their story. And I say, oh, it's a lot worse than that. And I said and they they turned to me and said, wait a minute. I thought you were a Christian author.

I say, well, I am. But it it would be a bad trade to trade away the possibility to connect with the God of the universe who created everything there is because of the way the church failed you thirty years ago. You know, that's a bad trade. Yeah. And and I've been able.

I've been blessed, through the grace of God. I've been able to climb back to a robust faith Right. That, has has defined my career for four decades. Yeah. I was gonna bring that up.

Deconstruction is such a in vogue term. You know, it's very divisive and contentious. Some people think it's crucial. Other people think it's just pop become popular, and people jump on that bandwagon. One of your quotes from your book that I love is, you know, you you say, I bend over backwards to honor the stance of a skeptic.

Yeah. And I just found that so inspiring, and I and I can hear that, in your writing, and I can hear that now. With that whole process or or the approach you take to someone who's going through that process, You know, you you obviously your story in many ways is a story of deconstruction. And then Mhmm. You know, like you said, by God's grace, reconstruction.

What role in your mind does does revelation play in that? Because that is a big part of your story too. Right? You had this supernatural encounter with with God. And I did.

And I have found that that I'm able to counter some of the deconstruction arguments like you just mentioned. Hey. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Look. Lot of no one lives up to their ideals, and you can't reject Jesus because of bad Christians and all that.

But it it feels like often what's missing is that sort of renewed sense of the presence of God or maybe for the first time for it to become from something academic to something that they've experienced for themselves. Could you talk a little bit about the role that that played in your life and maybe how important that is for someone who's going through that experience today? I I think there was a stage before the experience you refer to. The the name of this book that tells my story is called Where the Light Fell. Yeah.

Yeah. That that comes from a quote by Saint Augustine who said, I I couldn't look at the sun directly, but I could look on where the light fell. And and that was my story because I couldn't look at the sun directly. It had I was scorched by that sun. You know, I had this image of god as this scowling, angry, murderous Yeah.

You know, just, cock up in the sky trying to smash people. Yeah. Yeah. And then the three things that that initially softened me, I would say, because to get through high school and get through the home experience, I developed this really hard shell. I don't feel pain.

I don't feel cold and, you know, that kind of stuff that teenagers do. Even breaking your arm to break your ass off. I did. Yeah. We didn't have cutters back then, but probably I would have been a cutter, you know, if I knew I could have back then.

But, the three things for me were, classical music. That was my one solace. Well, two, actually. And nature is another one. We always live near the woods in Atlanta because we were living in trailer parks.

Nobody wants to live near them. They put them out in the middle of nowhere. And I would go out in the woods, and I loved insects, and I loved plants and trees. And and the closest thing to that I had to a spiritual experience took place in nature. So you got nature.

You got you got music. And then, romantic love occurred to me when I was still in my teens too in college. And those three things softened me, and and they made me question in a good way, wait a minute. That image of God that I have, the scowling supercop in the sky, couldn't possibly be true. Because if if God created these things, he's not that scowling super cop.

And there is a there is a quote I came across that GK Chesterton, said. He said, the worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a deep sense of gratitude and has no one to thank. Right. Yeah. And that's how I that's how I felt.

I I was ready, but I, you know, I had I had grown up in this church environment. I knew how to give testimonies. I knew how to pray. I knew how to do that stuff. And I and then I had decided for years that it was all fake.

One year, I went to camp, and and one week, I was the camper of the week. The next week, they tried to kick me out. You know? I I believed that the whole thing was a game. It was just this learned behavior stuff.

And, and then I did have this revelation that was unplanned and undesired, unsought, that I've never talked about in full detail before. The reason is I'm not trying to set up a standard and say, look. You need one of these. You know? A lot of people don't have them.

My wife didn't didn't have a revelation like that. Right. But I in in my particular circumstances, I think I think God knew I needed something that would I needed a kick in the butt. You know? Sure.

Yeah. Something that would that I could not possibly say, well, that was just that was just me projecting, or it was me manufacturing some spiritual experience. I I didn't want it. It. I didn't like those Christians around me.

And and and yet I had been softened. I had been prepared. And and when I realized that God is not that super cop, God is compassionate, loving, grace filled God, and and all the good things on earth are reflections of of that God. And then I realized, here, I am kicking and screaming, and I'm probably the neediest one of all and was transformed from that, from that one night. Yeah.

My life changed, forever. And that that happens for some people, and for some people take a different path. You know? God Right. God finds what we need.

Yeah. But I I had been softened and was ready, and then, then it happened. I appreciate your commitment to the idea that it it's not a formula because I think it's maybe similar to the way you meet and fall in love with your spouse. Right? We can hold hold up these overly idealized ideas of what it should look like, paradigms in my head that I had to actually overcome when it came to even meeting and then eventually marrying my own wife.

And so I think in the same way, if we're not careful, we can turn, you know, highly personal experiences that god and his grace ordains for each person and and make them into things that we now chase as yet another religious formula, that adds more of a burden than than a freedom. Yeah. So I I really do appreciate that. On that, I I love that whole section and where the title of your book comes from. One quote I found so great was goodness has become believable.

I feel inspired to dismantle the shell, rejoin the human race, and stop being a jerk. And I totally relate to that, and that's a work in progress in my life. What I love about that is, as I said, in our mission, everything we do is about trying to communicate the love of Jesus outside of the church. One of the things we often talk about is we need to learn how to have spiritual conversations in a nonreligious way. And what I mean by that is that, as you say, there is evidence of God everywhere.

It is, as you say, everywhere if people would be willing to look. But I feel like similar to maybe your experience where you were told to get out there with the tracks and the the door to door evangelism, we still kind of utilize that method of gospel presentation outside of the church rather than looking at all of this embedded transcendence outside of the church and and maybe use that as a common ground starting point that would lead to a gospel conversation. You discovered that, and it sounds like in some ways on your own, but do you think that that would be or that's an underutilized approach by the church to recognize nature, music as starting grounds that could be the fertilizer for spiritual conversations leading to the gospel. Yeah. I do.

In fact, one of the most powerful books of apologetics, I've read it in a long time, is a book by Tom Holland called, Dominion? Dominion. Yeah. Yeah. And, Tom is not a Christian.

He's very, very close, but he's not quite there. We had him on the podcast, actually. Oh, wonderful. Okay. Yeah.

And as you know, I mean, he starts out he was a classic scholar, so he specialized in Greece and Rome. And then the more he read about Greece and Rome, we realized these are pretty brutal, awful societies. They they exploit people. They have slaves. They are misogynist.

I mean, they're just brutal. And and as he looked at history, he realized that everything that he valued, human rights and and care for the poor and humility and care for the sick and care for the earth, you know, freeing slaves and all that. Everything that was important to him came from Christians Yeah. Throughout history. And he he never quite, at least from the last I heard, never quite has stepped over and said, okay.

I'm one of them. I believe in Jesus died for me in the resurrection and all that. But he he says, basically, by your fruits, you shall know them. And and that I think that is something that people don't think about, you know, because especially today when when Christians take some particular political point of view, if you have a different point of view, you oppose them, and you think it's because they're Christians. Well, not necessarily.

You know? Right. Look at look at the world before Christ and look at the world after Christ. Sure. And and that's what he did in this book, Dominion, you know, big, thick, 600 page book where he just went point by point and said, education, science, you know, all of these things came out of Christian sources.

So the what the light fell for me on those particular three things, but it's actually fallen on the world and shown itself in remarkable ways that define who we are as people, the things that we value. Such a powerful testimony. I went to Sweden one time. First time I went, I was very impressed. I said, man, what a great country.

It's charitable. People are honest. They're relatively friendly. They're still Swedes, but, you know, they No No one's perfect. Yeah.

I know. They care for the Earth. They're they're just good people. It's and it's a clean, great place to visit. It's like IKEA.

Just Yes. There you go. IKEA. Well, I happen to be reading a book at the time on the history of Europe. And it I had just read before we went to Stockholm that for two hundred and fifty years, most prayers on the continent in Europe ended with this prayer, this line.

Lord, save us from the vikings. Amen. And I thought, wait a minute. What happened to transform this place that used to be full of warring, pillaging, raping monsters into modern day Sweden? Well, the gospel happened.

Yeah. Yeah. And and you can come back and say, well, most weeds don't even believe in God, which is true. Right. But Jesus said that's how the kingdom of God works.

It's like a little seed falls into the ground, grows into a great bush, and the birds of the air come and nest in its branches. And I think that's what Tom Holland is saying in this book. Look look at the branches. You know? Yeah.

Look at the fruit that came out of this thing, and and, he's not quite there, but, boy, he's he's mighty close. Yeah. He was very gracious, and he points to the the dinosaurs Yeah. Right. Similar to a Jordan Peterson.

There's this clear resonance with the realities of God Mhmm. Woven into existence, and yet there's that that last step of of submission. It can be a chasm for some people, especially very brilliant people often. A chasm or or a bridge, actually. I don't know if you've read, Bono's latest memoir, surrender.

I have not. Yeah. Surrender. That's the he says that's the theme of my life, and it was only until I could do that. And he he makes it very simple.

He said, there's two ways to look at at Earth. It's it either runs by karma, where you get what you deserve, or it runs by grace, where you don't get what you deserve. And he said, I'm gonna go with grace. I know myself too well. I don't trust that karma stuff.

No. It's a better a better gamble at the very least. Yikes. So from what I understand, there's been some pretty serious developments in your health. You've been very open about that, and I've been reading your blog.

And, yeah, would you would you be willing to share about that, your insights into that? Like you said, you've been writing about grace and suffering for a long time. Well Mhmm. This kinda seems to continue that theme. Would you mind sharing a little bit?

Sure. It started almost exactly a year ago, when I was skiing. I live in Colorado and ski whenever I I can. Yeah. And there were some trees around, and I was making a right hand turn.

And I gave my orders to my legs to change my skis in a way that I would turn right. And they just disobeyed. They didn't follow my orders. And I smashed into a tree, and I was I was not able to ski for the next couple months from a leg injury. And just kinda tucked that away.

That's strange, you know, because I knew I knew how to turn right, and I gave those orders, but it just didn't work. And then over the next year, I found little other cases where my body just wasn't working the way that it had been working. And, then people would would say things like, you're you're moving kinda slow today, Philip. And so finally, I I gotta get this checked out. And just, in in early two thousand twenty three, I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

And it's, it's a strange syndrome. They don't know where it comes from. It's incurable, and it's wildly unpredictable. There are some people who can live with it for twenty five years, and you could hardly tell they have it. There are other people who who are all bent over and can hardly walk and and are crippled.

Doesn't kill you, but it can make life really miserable. And, also, you you can die with Parkinson's, but not probably from Parkinson's. So that was a wake up call. I'm an outdoors person. I live in Colorado.

We've climbed all 54 mountains over 14,000 feet. I'll have been exercising for fifty years, running and and doing all that stuff. Like skiing, like a lot of outdoor sports, mountain biking. And one by one, I'm gonna have to let some of those go. The week after my diagnosis, I tried a new sport, pickleball, and that was a mistake.

You think, well, that's a sport for senior citizens. Right? Well, I I was diving for a ball and fell, tripped, and I had no reflex at all. You'd normally you put out your hand. You'd kinda break your fall, and I fell smack on my face and ended up in the emergency room for eight hours that day.

And I realized life is different now. Life is going to be a bit of letting go. And and in a sense, any of us who reach a certain age, you start doing that. You know, I can't do things that I used to do. You you start letting go of things that are important to you.

And as you say, I I've written a lot of books. I've read wrote a book called my first book was where is God when it hurts, and another one, Disappointment with God, The Question That Knows That Goes Away, all of all of which circle around that important question of why there's so much pain and suffering in the world, and and how should we live, how should we cope. And, I've interviewed a lot of people. I've I've thought through that a lot and came away with a slogan, almost like a mantra on pain, and and it goes like this, that pain redeemed impresses me more than pain removed. Yeah.

You know, when we when we hurt, we want God to to just take it away, to to heal us. Well, it obviously doesn't happen all the time. Happens sometimes, I believe, but not all that often because everybody eventually dies. You know? And Yeah.

Most people who are dying are saying, heal me, Lord. And, the same percentage of Christians die, I found, as non Christian, hundred percent. You know? Still the same. Yeah.

Yeah. And I have learned over the years from people who, I mean, you can suffer bad or suffer good. People who suffer bad are just miserable, and they make everybody around them miserable. The people who suffer well are people who somehow find a way to redeem it. And and in my books, I've often told stories of people like Johnny Erickson, Tada, and and many others who who started out saying, oh, god.

If you could just do one thing in my life, take away this problem. And later looked back and said, god. That was the greatest gift you gave me because out of that and they go on and and tell their stories. And CS Lewis uses this phrase. He wrote a book about called The Problem of Pain, and he said that God whispers to us in the good times and shouts to us through a megaphone in pain and suffering.

It's the megaphone of God. And then I've always struggled a little bit with that, analogy, the megaphone of God, because I I don't think God is saying, okay. You get polio, Philip's father, and and you get leukemia, you three year old daughter. I don't I don't think that's the way it is. I I could tell you why it's not.

And when people around Jesus would try to pin him down on stuff like that, he would blow away their theories. But the pattern we have is that out of bad things, good things can come. Yeah. Out of terrible things, great things can come. Out of the worst thing, the murder, the execution of god's own son, wonderful things can come.

The salvation of of the human race, you know, the resurrection. Right. Life everywhere. That's the pattern. Right.

We live on a we live on a broken planet, a spoiled planet, beautiful planet, wonderful planet that thinks it's got some problems. It's a broken planet. Yeah. We we have a promise that it will be remade one day, and we also have a promise that we are part of that redemptive process by being faithful. And and I I kinda look on this new chapter.

That's my that's my stewardship. You know? I I've interviewed people, and I I have found that your people I've interviewed are more likely to be stewards of hard things, of suffering, and of poverty even than the people I know who are stewards of happy things and, success and riches. You know? I Right.

When I when I look up the two two side by side, the unlikeliest people are the ones who impress me most. And Jesus, of course, go back and read the Sermon on the Mount. Blessed are the the the beatitudes. Who is he talking about? The rich people?

The successful people? No. Right. Oddly enough, the really the blessed ones are the ones who believe that and allow God to redeem, to make good things out of bad things. Well, well, I'm really encouraged by her attitude and perspective in this difficult time.

And I I my my thought goes to people who face this world with no God. Right? How do you do that? And especially in an age now where youth and being strong and being beautiful when when these flimsy, fleeting things are held up as what makes life worth living, and it's so unattainable. And if it is attainable, for only so long, I was laughing that, you know, my my kids are now apparently gen alpha.

And I was I was having this funny fantasy in my head about the day when they will mock gen z's. You know? Like, how my kids will eventually make fun of these old crusty gen z's and just Yeah. And how you're young and cool for so short of a time. Yeah.

And then you're not. Facing this world with those kinds of measurements of success when life will happen. I just I just it really it really makes me feel grateful for the understanding of relationship with the lord that I have, but also compassion for those who don't and who need to to be told because how do you face this world without god? Boy, I that came home to me in a in a stark way because I've written about pain. I'm often called when there's a problem like Columbine Sure.

Shootings, Virginia Tech. And the hardest one by far, was when I was called to go to Newtown, Connecticut after the Sandy Hook killings there, these 20, six and seven year old children slaughtered, massacred in their in their school. And, people said we're having these two community wide meetings. There'll be more than a thousand people at each one, and they these people are are just speechless. They're heartbroken.

Could you come and minister to them? I mean, what can I say? I happened to be reading some of the new atheists at the time, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, And I had a collection of quotes. I was writing an article for Books and Culture magazine, a collection of quotes about how, this universe is exactly what we should expect. If there's if there's no good or evil, there's no you know?

Yeah. Just blind, pitiless indifference. Right. Blind, pitiless indifference. That's the word that Dawkins uses.

And I I was watching, like, the New York Times because when a tragedy like that happens or 09:11 it's funny. They never call on Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens in their op ed pages that go to priests and pastors and rabbis. Yeah. And we don't act like the universe is blind to the list of difference. No no parent, as Sandy Hook says, oh, well, that's too bad.

I lost one child, but I got another one at home. Everything's fine now. No. The rest of their lives, they're partly defined by that, shattering event. We treat them as if they matter, as if something was cut off.

And I I could go to them and say, you can reunite with your child. Let me tell you how Jesus treated children. He said, suffer the children to come to me. He said, I go away to prepare a home for you. I and we we have hope.

We have belief that there's something more than that six year old life, that that human being will be resurrected. And here I thought it was gonna be this big challenge to my faith, this dark moment. How can you possibly explain it? And then compared to the other message that you get, I I said to them, you know, there's I wrote a book called where is God when it hurts. That's a really hard question.

Yeah. But there's an even harder question, and that is where is no God when it hurts. Yeah. That's that's tough. If you could just stand in front of those parents and say, too bad.

It's blind, pitiless indifference. What do you expect from a random universe? Yeah. It doesn't do it. It doesn't feed them the nourishment they need.

No resilience and suffering, and I think that's one of the greatest apologetics. Philip, I have been really, really encouraged and blessed by this conversation. Thank you for your time. You could be talking to a lot of people, so I I really appreciate it. And, everyone needs to go get this book.

The is your website the best place to to stay in regular contact with you? It is. Just philipyancey.com. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. And I I'll put that link in the description, and we'll make sure we share that everywhere. And I know God is my prayer is that he just continues to use you even more powerfully in in the days to come than he has in the past. And, if you wouldn't mind, could I could I pray that over you and and over? Okay.

Please. Yeah. Jesus, I I am, greatly encouraged, by all that you have done through Philip, lord, and I I thank you for, his life. I thank you for his testimony. I thank you for his resilience in the face of a difficult past, lord.

It it's it's not been easy, and yet you've been faithful, and you have truly he he is a living testimony of your redemption in hardship, and and that gives me great courage for whatever comes in my life in the days to come, and I'm sure it does as well for those listening. But, lord, I ask now in in your mighty power that you would fully realize everything you have for Philip in the days to come, that that the days ahead would be the best days, the most prosperous, fruitful, impactful, powerful days, of his life. I pray that they would be filled with good times and and that you would allow him to do the things that he loves. You would allow him to see you in in in nature and music and in love the way he has all his life. Let him maybe experience those things even more powerfully than he has in the past.

And I I pray for more, lord. I pray for for more fruit that as he continues to offer his five loaves and two fish, let them be multiplied even more ridiculously. Let them be multiplied even more beyond what makes sense, Lord, as you have already done. And, I just pray you you would bless my my dear brother. Thank you for, his life and his example, and I I just pray for great days ahead.

In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Thank you so much, Ben. Yeah. I really appreciate you, and, I I hope we can talk again.

Okay. Alright. Well, we'll be in touch, and, have a great day. Thank you for listening to the Provoke and Inspire podcast. If you enjoy this content, consider leaving us a rating and a review on iTunes.

Got questions for the guys? Send them to provokeandinspire@steiger.org. Thanks for listening.

‍