Welcome to In the Seams, a podcast by Broken and Mended.
And now your host, David Heflin.
Well, I want to welcome you back to In the Seams.
It's kind of exciting as we kick off a new year, a new chapter for us.
We're going to try to be a little bit more regular in our podcast postings.
And so we've got an exciting interview we're going to be starting off with.
And as you know, many times we've addressed either directly or indirectly
the crossover between mental health and chronic illness conditions.
And there's a lot of overlap there.
A lot of people that listen to this podcast that are struggling with both.
I certainly fit into that category.
And I have found the power of being able to speak about it,
the transparency of finding others that share that burden with me.
It's kind of that spirit that we have Pierce Taylor Hibbs here today.
And we're just getting acquainted, but Pierce is a writer.
He's written pretty prolifically.
He has over 20 books published or at least 20.
Is that right, Pierce?
OK. And working on more, I'm sure.
And it maintains a really good website that will be in the show notes
and also has a YouTube channel.
I'll also link that in the show notes and
really write some interesting and a wide variety of things.
And which comes out of at least certain in its origin, a place of struggle
and in pain for you, Pierce.
And so I want to welcome you, you know, to in the scenes.
And just appreciate you being here.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
It's all the things that you guys are addressing are things that are
deeply rooted in my own spiritual walk with the Lord.
So always excited to talk about them.
Yes. Well, you know, and that was the thing.
And just I could sense that in reading your your biography there on your website.
Listen to a little bit of your YouTube videos and some of your other writings
that were accessible online
that it's very intentional for you that what you went through.
You wanted to see God get glory through your struggles and stuff
and to be able to help others.
And and so that's something that I don't know.
It resonates with me and something that we're we're trying to do with with broken
and mended. So I think there's a lot of just sort of common spirit
between us in that regard.
And we know that you've dealt with some hard things in your life
and you've talked about this, I'm sure, in your books as well as on your website.
But you lost your father very young at, you know, 18 years old.
And there was a resulting struggle there with mental health.
I think you particularly mentioned anxiety.
And one thing I was curious about regarding that,
it has to do with your relationship with your with God
and how it was impacted by that struggle.
And I ask because sometimes our expectations of God are one way
before we go through something and then they can be changed by what we go through
and how we see our relationship with God and what we expect from him.
And I won't say anything further about that.
I'm curious how that experience has been for you.
Yeah, well, there's a lot to unpack there.
But, yeah, I would say that.
Well, first, I guess people have a little bit of knowledge of who I am
to situate things.
I'm a dad of three.
So I have a 10 year old, eight year old and five year old and a wonderful wife.
So all of my spiritual struggles have usually been lived
and worked out, especially within my marriage.
So I'm very thankful just to have a wife who was understanding,
empathetic and supportive in all of those things.
So I would say that there are maybe two ways I would approach
how my relationship with God was impacted by the struggle that I've had.
And I'll focus on kind of grief and anxiety for this part.
But there are many people who have listened to this.
You may be a Christian who was raised in the church.
And that's what I was. I was a pastor's kid.
When you're raised in the church, it can be very hard to figure out
whether your faith is authentic.
Do you really believe this stuff or is it just the most familiar to you?
And there was a sense in which when my father died of cancer,
this was a long struggle for him because he had a brain tumor for 12 years.
So he went through three major surgeries.
As a kid, I was probably ignorant of what that meant until closer to the end.
But anyway, he passed away.
And that was the first shock I had of,
hey, you have this Christian faith that you've been raised in.
Is it relevant to the grief that you're now feeling that's very raw and painful?
What is the interface between your faith and this really painful absence
that you now have to work around?
And I was frustrated for a few years.
I think I was just dealing with frustration in that kind of spiritual dilemma
because I didn't know how it really affected me.
I was upset and grieving, but hadn't lost the faith in that sense.
But it just was disheartened.
I found a lack of people who resonated with what I was dealing with
or who didn't have answers to the questions I was trying to ask.
And so there was a little bit of despondency on my part.
But in the end of that struggle or frustration, I hit an anxiety disorder,
which my godfather is a counselor.
He told me afterwards, you were probably dealing with PTSD
because not many people experience this,
but I was physically present at my dad's bedside when his final breaths were given,
which is just a monumental experience.
To watch someone you love literally leave the world
as you're sitting next to them is a haunting experience.
And some people have told me in hospice care,
it's just an intense honor to be able to be with another human being at that stage.
But for me as a kid, it was just haunting.
I had never experienced anything like that.
And I think as I was processing that, I was dealing with that kind of PTSD response to it,
intense fear and reflection over what happened and trying to understand it.
And that kind of rolled into an anxiety disorder,
which I think looking back on my life and other people who experience anxiety would say the same thing.
You can almost see a proclivity to anxiety because if you're a highly sensitive person
or things just seem to strike you a little bit harder than they do other people,
I had a proclivity to that.
And then that was what threw me into the hospital a few times.
It just felt very crippled.
And of course, anyone who deals with chronic illness can resonate with that.
But I was homebound for weeks.
I felt like I couldn't get out of my house.
Just to walk down the street 50 yards to the stop sign felt like a huge challenge
just because the anxiety that was coursing through me was kind of threatening me every second
by saying you're going to stop breathing.
You're going to stop breathing any second now and you're going to die.
And I had these paralyzing physical and mental symptoms.
So it was kind of a body and spirit thing.
And the first part that I think I would mention is that that anxiety forced me to commit.
Like do you believe in God and are you going to find hope in this Christian faith that you've raised in
or was it just a veneer?
Are you going to look elsewhere?
And I think that was a very conscious decision the night that I was rushed to the hospital by my fiance,
who is now my wife, as we were speeding down these back roads to get to the hospital,
I was all in on faith.
I was like, all right, if I have to choose, I'm going to choose the God that I have learned about
and I'm going to go all in on faith.
And that was when that was the first time that I kind of completely gave myself over to reading the Bible.
I had my dad's Bible with me everywhere, in the car, into restaurants.
I was reading nonstop.
It was kind of like I'm all in this.
And that was the first major impact, I would say, the grief and the anxiety had on me.
It made me choose.
Are you going to be all in or are you going to go somewhere else?
And by God's grace, I chose to be all in.
The second thing that it did in terms of affecting my relationship with the Lord, I think,
was just reveal my sense of dependence.
Again, anyone with chronic mental or physical health understands that so well.
You're so dependent on not just other people, but even the normal workings of your body and mind
that you don't have full control over all the time.
You're so dependent on the sustaining and regular work of God in your life to just wake up every morning
and do normal things.
We're fully dependent creatures.
And that's not a bad thing, which is really hard for people in our culture to understand.
They think independence is the goal.
You want to be self-sustaining.
And I think, no, God did not make us ever.
Even before sin entered the world, He never made us to be independent, as in apart from Him
and not leaning fully on Him and on the church and His people.
So we were never created for that anyway.
So I think those two things were the catalysts that are still at work in my relationship with the Lord
and kind of pushing me all in to actually pursue the answers to the questions I have in the context of my faith,
but then second, to realize that I am fully dependent on the Lord,
and I'm fully dependent on the people that He's put in my life.
And I need to lean into those people and remain humble,
knowing that the progress that I've made is not because I just pulled myself up by my bootstraps.
The progress that I've made has been purely by God's grace and patience with me and teaching me bit by bit
how to just walk through life with a debilitating condition at times.
So those are the two things.
Those are powerful lessons.
They were hard won, obviously, for you.
And part of what I thought about when you were sharing that,
you talked about some time that elapsed from the death of your father
to being able to even gain any kind of perspective as to what was happening with you
and how that was carrying out when you're in a relationship with God.
And I think sometimes we want to, I don't know if you've experienced this or not,
but there will be people that will pressure you in a time of grief to go ahead and just be okay, you know,
and kind of move on, you know, and especially if you start manifesting something like anxiety or depression,
they may be out of a good place or worried about you,
but they almost try to correct that in your life instead of trying to...
had you experienced any of those kind of attitudes?
Yeah, definitely.
And again, I'm glad that you said sometimes it comes from a place of goodness
and other people who really care about you.
But I think in a few different ways, the grief component, thankfully, I was given space with.
You know, people who loved me were not encouraging me to speed up the grief process.
You know, they had questions that they would ask me at times,
but I was blessed by having some people in my life that were just really good listeners.
And that is a jewel.
You know, we really undermine or undervalue the weight and the preciousness of a good listener.
You know, someone who's not just waiting for their turn to speak,
but is actually paused and focusing on you and just letting you talk.
So I had that with grief, but the anxiety was very different,
especially within a Christian community.
And for most people who deal with anxiety, they'll understand what I mean by this right away,
but many people that I knew would say, why are you anxious?
Like you have good health, you've got your family, you know, you've dealt with some loss,
but you're okay.
You know, why are you anxious?
And I was always so frustrated with that question because I thought, I don't know the answer to that.
And that makes me even more anxious.
Like I know that logically I should not be anxious, you know,
and even biblically I have this guilt or pressure telling me I should be okay
because of what my Lord and Savior has done for me and who I am in Christ.
So there's guilt that compounds it.
It makes you feel like, oh, I feel this way, but not only do I feel this way,
I also feel guilty for feeling this way.
And that was really tough for me to process and led to some painful discussions with people,
and I thought, you really aren't listening to me.
And that's very hard to not be heard is very hard.
And yeah, so I think that there is at least a branch of the Christian community itself
that even out of a sense of wanting to help you, treats anxiety, and in that broader sense, pain.
I hope we'll talk about this in a few minutes, but any kind of suffering or pain,
they treat it as something to be excised or ripped out of your life.
In other words, your goal in living is to pursue pleasure and peace
and to avoid pain and suffering at all costs, full stop.
And if you're experiencing anxiety, you need to figure out a way to get rid of it.
So, you know, take your meds, go to counseling, which I fully support, by the way.
You know, I'm transparent with people about the fact that I take meds,
I've gone through counseling, and it's great, you need to do that.
But the main goal of that for a lot of Christians is your goal is to get rid of this thing,
get it out of your life.
And for people who deal with chronic illness, that is horrifically discouraging.
Yeah, it is.
Because it doesn't leave.
And again, the guilt compound comes back in or defeatism,
and you feel like I should be past this, but I'm not.
Why am I not past it?
Is there something wrong with me?
You know, why can't I do this?
So I think that that was partly what pushed me into understanding
the place of suffering in the Christian life.
That involves mental, involves physical, and I hope, you know,
we'll talk about that in a few minutes, but completely revolutionized my approach to suffering.
And I'll explain how I think that differs from the rest of the world,
which sadly is somehow the way the church thinks.
Yeah, you're absolutely right, and those have been my experiences as well.
And, you know, I think about the listening thing.
So for our listeners today who are listening to us,
maybe an encouragement for us all to work on being listeners
and not feeling the need to always intrude or to correct, to just be...
I actually had an experience recently where someone came to me.
He'd lost his son.
You know, horrible thing.
And the reason he came, he told me on the outset,
he knew what to do, what to expect.
He says, I just need someone to listen to me because everyone that I try to talk...
They tell me they're going to listen, but they don't listen.
You know, they start trying to tell me, well, this is what you need to do and that, you know.
And so I understood what he said, and I just sat there and I just listened.
And he told me at the end, certainly didn't make everything better,
but he felt better for that day because someone had listened to him.
So much value in that.
So I appreciate you sharing that.
Thanks, one, be a listener, but also you need to find someone that you can,
that will listen to you that way without judgment.
It can be tricky sometimes for people.
And I'll tell you one of the tricks I've learned,
and coming mostly from my failure to be a good listener,
is when someone is talking to me, I'm such a problem solver.
Like when I see a problem, my goal is like, I want to fix this as fast as I can.
So I'll offer some advice or I'll give you a suggestion.
Not helpful, you know, sometimes.
But what I learned is if I immediately respond to someone who's trying to get me to listen
by saying, oh, your experience is like mine, let me tell you about mine, then I failed.
Like I've dropped off.
It's like, no, I've made this about me, you know.
And it's hard, you know.
It takes a lot of, you know, failed attempts to listen.
But to be able to hear somebody and not immediately follow that with,
here's how your story is like mine, but instead, let me just go further with you and your story.
Like what was that like for you?
You know, what was, how did you feel, you know, during that time?
You know, how do you feel right now about what you've experienced then?
How have you grown?
You know, questions that keep the focus on the other person and just let them talk and you listen.
Super hard to do.
And I say that as someone who's failed many times because sometimes we just get excited to talk about our own experiences.
Sure.
And we pull other people off and then they say, you know, that wasn't so helpful.
And we think, why? I listened.
Right.
A little self-awareness thing we can all work on, I'm sure.
And pray about it.
Pray, ask God to help you be a better listener because it's so important and so needed.
You know, and I wanted to touch on another theme you've actually touched on a couple of times.
So this idea that something comes out of suffering that people, they, if it's this idea, we just want to get rid of it.
Right. And that's certainly a problem for people in chronic illness community.
And it gets compounded because there are those out there and I've dealt with them from a theological perspective.
They will tell you if you don't believe God's going to heal you, now you're failing in your faith.
You're giving up on God.
And they cannot imagine the idea, because I try to explain it, that you would surrender to God and say that if God's not going to heal me,
then I want God to somehow use this in my life.
First of all, to draw me closer to him, to create the dependence that you're talking about, you know, that.
And there are things I've gained through chronic illness, chronic pain, and the resulting mental struggles that I could not have gained otherwise.
And if you were to ask me to go back in time and just erase everything I've been through, I couldn't do it, you know, because, you know, it would have saved me some suffering,
would have saved me some pain, would have saved me a lot of money, too, by the way, because there's a lot of big financial costs that comes with all this and a lot of time.
But God is at work, and I don't want to, I don't want to second-guess him in that sense by saying, oh, I'd go back and do it a different way.
And so we have a lot of people in this community, and I'm trying to say this sympathetically, who get stuck with the idea of surrendering, you know,
or the guilt factor, because others are telling them, you know, they can't.
And it's not questioning, I just want to say it's not questioning whether God can heal you.
But it's obvious that God does not choose to heal everyone fully all the time. Otherwise, none of us would ever die, right?
And there is a resurrection where that's going to be taken care of for good.
So I appreciate you really touching on those things.
And you mentioned Tim Keller, or maybe that was in our prior pre-conversation.
But I just think he's a guy that's made a big impact on me in that regard, too, in talking about these issues, trying to think what that book was called,
something like Walking with God and Suffering. Anyway, it was a great book and so helpful to me.
And yeah, go ahead.
I think if I can just interject a little bit for some people, I think most people are familiar with the prosperity gospel.
Yes.
You know, prosperity gospel meaning, you know, God wants good things for you and good things only.
And so if you have your faith in him and you don't doubt, you are kind of manifesting your good life.
That's what God wants for you. He wants good things.
And a lot of Christians who are familiar with the Bible will say, well, that's not true.
You know, I don't think the prosperity gospel is true.
But then there's another version of the prosperity gospel that deals with this thing that we're talking about,
because it doesn't say, well, God only wants good things for you.
But it does say that the main point of suffering in your life is to be gotten rid of.
And when I listen to that, I think that's a form of the prosperity gospel.
You're telling me that God only wants good things for me.
And the way that I've tried to teach other people about the importance of suffering in a Christian life.
And this is stuff that I've learned from others, especially Richard Gaff in an article called The Usefulness of the Cross.
And I'll try to send you the info so you can link to it for people.
But looking at passages like, you know, 2 Corinthians 4, 7 through 11, or Philippians 3, 10,
or passages where Jesus talks about taking up your cross and following him, you know, or Romans 8, 28 and 29.
Most people love Romans 8, 28. They don't like 8, 29.
8, 28 is, you know, God has good things planned for you.
They don't read on until it's just 29.
It says, well, what are it? What's the end goal?
Well, the end goal of all those good things that God has for you is conformity to the image of his son.
And so here's how I usually phrase it when I talk to people.
Biblically speaking, let me ask a question.
What is the best possible thing that could ever happen to you?
You know, you could probably get lots of answers from that.
You know, I'm close to Philadelphia right now.
If I went on the streets of Philadelphia and said, what's the best thing that could ever happen to you?
I'll get tons of answers. You know, people will be like good health, you know, money, you know, meaningful relationships.
You know, these are all the things.
And then people sometimes think that scripture must have a less exciting answer than that.
You know, maybe it says something about holiness or, you know, that's what God wants for you.
And I think, yeah, that's fine.
You know, but I really just want the health and the money.
That's the way that people think of it.
Scripture actually has an answer that is mind blowingly better than what other people are asking for.
And the answer is in 829.
It says that the best thing that could ever possibly happen to you is that you be made more and more like the son of God.
Like that is ridiculous to even imagine like that.
I would be called to more closely image the son of God.
Like when you think about it, it almost seems blasphemous in a sense that you're like, is this really possible that I could look more and more like Jesus Christ?
And yet that's what the scriptures teaching is that your God's plan for you is to conform you more and more to the image of his son.
And if that's true, if that's the best thing that could ever possibly happen to you, then the question becomes how?
How is that going to happen?
And the answer that I found from Jesus Christ, from the Apostle Paul, and from people who have exposited the text pretty clearly has been the mechanism that gets you from who you are to who you are in Christ is suffering.
That's the road, you know?
Yeah.
And suffering comes in many forms.
I can remember struggling in my probably my 20s in prayer, you know, praying that prayer from Philippians 3.
I expressed it as a prayer anyway.
And getting to that part where, you know, he says, I want to share in the fellowship of his sufferings, you know, and thinking, I don't know about that, you know, because I wasn't suffering anything like that at the time.
And I think, you know, suffering can come in many forms.
There are some forms that we may choose on behalf of Christ.
And there are some forms that come to us in different ways where we might have suffered, whether we knew Christ or not. But the point is that Christ will do something redemptive in our suffering for a greater purpose.
And I also, you mentioned a lot of great passages.
I'll throw in Romans 5, 1 through 5 there is, you know, one that talks about, you know, the development ultimately of character, you know, which I would relate also to, you know, fruit of the Spirit.
I do want to talk about transparency for a moment just because you've chosen to be very transparent about your struggles.
I don't think it would be possible for you to do what you do if you didn't.
And I'm so glad for that because it's still kind of rare.
And I want to know, was that an intentional decision?
Is that a gradual decision or that, you know, that kind of come naturally to you?
And I think we've touched on this other one.
But if you need to, you know, it was kind of have you experienced any blowback from speaking out about mental health issues.
So you can expand on that if you want, but especially just curious how you really came to that decision to be transparent with your struggles.
Yeah.
Well, I will say that I wrote quite a bit before I wrote my book on anxiety.
So coming out and being fully transparent about my mental health was not the first thing I did.
But once I decided to do it, it felt so freeing to actually be an open book and say, you know, I've had conversations with other people where I've said what I think I should say.
But I haven't really laid out like the rawness of the pain and the anxiety that I dealt with and then made the connection to how that functions in my faith.
And if I'm going to show how it functions in my faith, I have to be really open about what the experience was like.
So did I would say that resonated with people in ways that I didn't imagine.
And they'll say in God's providence, I published my book on anxiety called Struck Down But Not Destroyed two months before COVID hit.
And I had no idea that COVID was coming and that all these people were going to then get surges of mental health issues from isolation and a whole host of other issues.
But then people came out of the woodwork to just thank me for being open about it.
And I thought, well, it was easy to be open because it felt so good to finally voice things that were buried inside me for so long.
So, yeah, it was a conscious decision to be transparent.
And I wouldn't go back on that.
I think, you know, if people think less of me for being transparent, that's OK.
I don't really spiritually I don't need people to think better of me.
You know, I might want that, you know, my sinful self wants that, but spiritually I don't need that.
You know, so people think less of me for it. Go ahead.
You know, that's OK.
I'm it feels like, you know, God sees all of me anyway.
So, you know, I can hide things from other people, but he knows what I've experienced and he knows the struggles that I've had and he knows the mistakes I've made with it.
So I might as well lay things all on the table and then maybe that'll help other people be more open and lay things on the table.
And I think that has happened to a certain degree.
People have felt more encouraged to just be open, especially in the context of faith.
You know, there's still a fairly strong stigmatism on mental health in the church.
And I say that as someone who experienced it within my family, because, you know, my mother has dealt with anxiety and depression as well.
And my father was a pastor at the time, treated that as a faith problem.
And I think he frankly I think he just didn't know any better.
He wasn't you know, he died when he was 47.
But just in his own context and setting, you know, mental health was not talked about very much.
So he solved it the way that he knew how to solve it, which was to say this is a faith problem and you need to get your faith built higher and stronger so you can defeat the anxiety and the depression.
And again, that leads to huge amounts of guilt for Christians because it's not a simple fix.
But as I've learned and tried to articulate a little bit, it's also completely unbiblical.
Like my job is not to eliminate suffering.
My job is to walk faithfully through it and to be looking all the time for how God is conforming me to the image of Christ as I go through it.
And that and that sense, I think I'd talk about anxiety and other kinds of chronic illness as a bitter medicine.
You know, when I was younger, we took cough medicine.
It was this nasty red syrup.
Oh, I remember.
You give our doctors these names and it tastes like, you know, grape punch or something.
But when I was a kid, it was disgusting.
This stuff made you spit it out of your mouth.
And yet you took it anyway.
You know, why?
Well, because you knew that that bitter thing was actually meant for your good.
You know, it's similar with, you know, a lot of other treatments you get when you go to the doctors.
It might be painful, but it's actually for your good.
And I think that that was what I needed to learn and voice more loudly in the Christian mental health community is there were tons of people who thought, oh, I struggle with anxiety and God's going to help me defeat it.
And I thought, no, how about you struggle with anxiety and you're going to hold Christ's hand as you walk through it?
Because he's got a lot of teaching to do.
And guess what?
That teaching probably wouldn't take if you didn't have the anxiety.
So I can look back on my life now and say, you know, did I want that?
Did I want my dad to die early?
Did I want an anxiety disorder?
Like, no, you know, I'm not a lover of pain.
You know, I don't enjoy that experience.
But I'm also fully convinced that if those things didn't happen, I would not be conformed to the image of Christ in the way that I have been so far.
Like, I just can't see it happening.
So in other words, if I'm comfortable and I'm living a life that is fixated on pleasure and peace, not a lot of Christ conforming is going to happen there.
You know, I'm just going to stay the same.
And I think that that can be detrimental to people's spiritual lives because they get stuck on that and then they look at everyone else around them and they say, oh, why are you still battling anxiety?
Why are you still battling this chronic illness thing?
You know, doesn't your faith want to take you away from that?
And I always think, no, no, no, your faith takes you right in there.
Like, there's a sense in which we experience pain.
I was thinking about this as I was driving to work today.
Our immediate response to pain and pleasure is revulsion and repelling.
Like, get this away from me.
Right.
And the most encouraging thing I learned from Christ and the Apostle Paul and theologians like Richard Gaffin, who wrote the Use from the Cross article, was that you have a lot of encouragement to go through those painful experiences.
And yes, you'll feel that reflex of like, oh, I don't like this.
This doesn't feel good.
I don't want this.
And yet, instead of saying no, I can say yes.
And there's profound power in that because suffering is not going to go away.
And I've talked with some people who read my book on anxiety.
I remember one person who was actually kind of frustrated that I wrote a book that suggested that anxiety is a tool that God can just keep using.
And he said, no, you should be able to conquer it and get it out.
And I said, what happens then?
And he said, what do you mean?
I said, well, let's say you take all these medications, you go to counseling, which are good things, and you eliminate your anxiety.
It's gone.
Now what?
And he said, I don't know.
And I said, do you think that some other kind of suffering is not going to take its place?
Like, you're going to have to work through this.
And I feel like it can be super defeating to look at these hard experiences and think, oh, my goal is to get rid of this.
And it's almost like Christians in that frame of mind are working toward this weird sense of nirvana.
Like, I'll get to a place where I no longer experience pain because I have no desire.
It's very strange.
And I think biblically speaking, you have to look at suffering in that lens of how does Jesus talk about suffering?
How does Paul talk about suffering?
What's it doing?
And then look at your experiences of suffering through that lens instead of looking at it through the kind of natural worldly picture of, oh, I don't like this.
I should get away from it.
I should run from it because the Christian message is much more encouraging.
So it's like the thing that everyone else in the world is afraid of and is running from and is trying to get out of their lives.
You run right into that and you will be immensely blessed by it.
You know, that's a huge encouragement, I think, because for people in chronic conditions, that's kind of like saying,
you're on the Christ conforming road right now.
What's God teaching you?
Yeah, that's you.
You've got examples all around you.
That's so powerful.
You know, and I was wondering if there could be some in people's minds, some some category confusion over some words I give you.
You know, somebody might quote to an anxious person, don't be anxious about anything, you know, cast all your, you know, and I'm thinking, OK, but what Peter is talking, I think it's Peter.
You can correct me if I'm wrong.
I think it's Peter talks about casting your anxieties on him.
James, I think Peter anyway, whoever it was, was an inspired author.
And, you know, he was talking about what I think is a type of obsessive worry, you know, kind of over worldly things.
And you see that go on to what Jesus is addressing that not not worrying about all these things that the pagans run after.
He's not talking about a mental health issue in that in that sense.
That's that's something going on inside of you that it's the same as if something was going on inside of your heart or, you know, or a chronic illness.
I mean, it's something that needs to be addressed in as many ways as possible and certainly spiritual seeking God's help.
And that well, that's the main thing we want to do.
We want to seek God's help.
We want to see it not necessarily, like you said, just to remove it, but to walk with it, walk with us through it.
So that's and I think I'll go ahead.
I think that the question that people can ask in those situations is, you know, how does God want to conform to Christ in this situation?
And that, I think, is a better approach to certain kind of often referenced text.
So to take anxiety, for example, Matthew six, probably the most abused text, you know, comes to anxiety and people say, well, Jesus said, don't be anxious.
So don't do it. And it's laughable.
You know, if you have kids, you understand this.
But if your child is feeling something and you just shout, stop it, what does that do?
It does nothing.
You know, like God is not in through Christ and scripture saying, like, just stop it.
Just stop. You know, that the whole context of the passage is actually about what your primary focus should be.
And it's the kingdom of God.
So he's saying, don't worry about these other things that the rest of the world is chasing after.
Make your priority the kingdom of God.
You know, as a text that virtually has nothing to do with mental health.
But people see the word anxiety and they're like, oh, look, there's a passage about anxiety.
And you really have to, first of all, understand the text in context.
That's right.
So look at what's actually being said.
And people love to cherry pick verses, which is a horrible strategy for applying scripture.
Look at the context, but then also understand the spiritual purpose that God has for your pain and suffering,
which is something you can extract from Genesis to Revelation, but especially in Jesus and the Apostle Paul.
And say, OK, you're experiencing anxiety, but what's the purpose of that?
And again, you can't have that answer of like, well, the purpose is to get rid of it.
I think that's that undercurrent of the prosperity gospel telling you that your whole Christian life should be about pleasure and peace.
Yeah, absolutely. So it's it's there's those extreme forms that so many of us recognize.
And there's almost subtle forms that really have infected most of the church here in America.
And so it's a that's that's a good point.
So I'll let our audience know here that part of my preparation for an interview like this is I lay out multiple questions that we like to go through and talk about.
And I think we just finished the second one.
And so we're but that's fine. I'm glad that I'm glad the way the conversation has has has flowed today.
There are a couple of things I do want to touch on because I want our readers to know about it.
And we talked about this book. You mentioned finding hope in hard things.
And I'm just going to say that you got all your books less list on your website
and people can go and they can find maybe which one that they think fits them the most.
Is that the best one for those maybe initially struggling with anxiety and wanting to know how it kind of mixes with their faith or connects with their faith?
Yeah, I would say for people looking at anxiety struck down but not destroyed.
OK, that's the one that focuses really on anxiety.
But I have had people tell me that after reading that they thought it gave them a good kind of template for dealing with any kind of hardship.
But yeah, the one that deals with more with with suffering in general, including grief, is finding hope in hard things.
And then I am a human was really kind of a memoir about my my father.
So, yes, it's meant to give some kind of hope and meaning in the midst of the grieving process.
That's so that's that's important, you know, because grief, you know, well, and that's a different, you know, thing for me, Chase.
Yeah, as you know, as a writer, I think that I am a human is the book that probably has gotten least attention and it's probably the book that I'm most proud of because it took so many years of emotion and turmoil and finally put them down on the page.
Yeah.
Said this this has to come out. And yeah, when I read through portions of it, sometimes I think like, wow, I can't even remember fully writing some of this down, but it was stirring in me so much.
So, yeah, all that to say as a writer, sometimes the books you think are your best are the ones that people don't even look at and the ones that you think, OK, you know, some of them will benefit more from that.
So, well, maybe people don't have control over how good yes, that is what we do.
That's true. And maybe there will be a season where that gets a little more attention.
I just say for people dealing with grief, and there are a lot of people you can have grief over more things just loss of loved ones, including loss of your health.
But I would also mention, you know, people that are going through a recent loss that might be a good one for them to check out.
And I know several people we've had in my church and some people in church are also in broken amended just had immense amount of loss of people losing their parents lately, even siblings, people losing in few cases, their children.
And so grief is a very real. And it's kind of, you know, when you're dealing with chronic illness, it doesn't mean the other things don't come to you.
You're going to come to you as well. You're going to compound. You know, you're going to lose loved ones.
You're going to go through grief and you're going to have to process that. So that's just a few of the books you've written.
I'll just save time. Just mention they're all they're all there.
And but we just will highlight those. And I know for myself, I'm probably going to start with that finding hope and hard things.
And that other one you mentioned, what was that again? Yeah, that one. Yeah, I'm going to start with those two.
But those that's great. I did want to just touch. I know we're running out of time. I want to touch on poetry for a minute.
Oh, yeah. I can go further. If you ask me to talk about poetry, I'll just keep going.
Well, I'll tell you, I'm a major. So yeah, this last year I read more poetry than I ever had.
And I've never considered myself a good poetry reader. Just I would just my mind would wander somewhere and I'd get back, you know, and it just was hard for me.
But I ended up reading Lost in Paradise or Paradise Lost. I'm sorry. Lost in Paradise.
Paradise Lost by John Milton. And it kind of changed me.
I mean, the way that I thought about, you know, you know, creation and Adam and Eve and the war that was going on behind the scenes there.
And I realize a lot of that's imaginative, but that's that's kind of the point because it becomes evocative and it and it becomes something that just sticks with you.
Even though I was reading in this ancient kind of old English, you know, that I had to struggle through.
Eventually, I got used to the rhythm of it and it wasn't it became I couldn't wait to get back to reading it because, you know, Paradise Lost is pretty long.
But so I had this tremendous experience with that.
And every time now I'm preaching of things related to the Garden of Eden or creation, it's always there with me now, you know, and I'm always.
And so I've learned from a personal experience just recently how powerful that can be.
And you kind of mentioned that, you know, obviously, you got a lot of theology books, a little bit dry.
They might be interesting for those that are interested in that subject, but, you know, they don't exactly evoke a lot of emotion as you're going through it.
You know, and so just want to get your take on that and how this really brings up.
You can bring something to the table and helping to write more poetry and verse.
Yeah, yeah. So a few things to say.
So I was a nerdy English major. I love to write.
I had actually planned to and had started a writing program before God redirected my path and sent me to seminary.
So then when I was reading a lot of the theology, I think.
Of course, it doesn't have to be emotionally evocative all the time and clarity and simplicity is a form of beauty.
So I'm appreciative of that as well. But I would say that because human beings are body, spirit, image bearers.
We have a, you know, we have a heart and the heart is always the central issue throughout scripture.
You know, God is looking at the heart. He's trying to lead his people to get a new heart.
You know, as Ezekiel talks about, you know, you get a new heart through Christ, through the life giving spirit.
The heart is always central. And when you ask most people, most theologians, what is the heart?
They'll say the heart is the seat of the emotions.
Something like that. And that is pretty provocative because it means that, oh, all the things that I feel
that my faith might have told me to not listen to because those things, feelings can be dangerous.
They can be unstable. I don't want to trust my feelings. Actually, I can't discount those either.
God has a plan for those worked into my life as well. He often talks about the heart.
And so it's good and right, I think, to want your heart to be drawn into what you're reading.
And I think especially now that I'm doing a lot of reading with my kids,
I want their imaginations to be captured by the biblical story, not just their minds,
their imaginations and their longings and desires to be wrapped up in that biblical narrative.
And I think that maybe because some people are afraid of the emotions, and I'm fully open about how,
with anxiety, for example, I can feel certain emotions that I know are flat lies.
I have thoughts during anxiety that say you're going to die, you're going to die, and I think that's a flat out lie.
So you can't just unabashedly listen to every emotion that comes into your heart.
There's biblical filtering that needs to happen.
But when you're reading theology, I want not just to understand the gospel. I want to feel it.
I want to imagine it. I want it to permeate my whole person.
And so when you read poetry and you get the sounds of the words and you get the imagery,
it starts to do things in you that just a flat explanation would not do.
It doesn't mean an explanation is not good or appropriate or needed,
especially in areas of scripture where the passage is already super symbolic and full of imagery like Revelation.
But it does mean that you should be heart drawn to the truth of scripture.
And I think some people were especially concerned about doctrine, which is a good and right concern to have.
You need to be concerned about the doctrine.
But you can be so overly concerned about the doctrine that you actually neglect the heart.
And that leads to people, you know, I work at a seminary, so I work around people who study theology all the time.
Not all those people are kind and warm and loving.
You know, they know a lot of theology, but sometimes it hasn't permeated the heart.
You know, so sometimes people get very focused on, you know, well, theology is where I get the truth.
And it needs to be plain and simple. And I can't have my feelings contaminating it.
And I think, you know, first of all, you don't have control over that anyway.
You know, no one has full control over their feelings.
But second of all, even the story of scripture and the way scripture is written is very evocative of the imagery that's all there.
And you want to be able to make connections between the life that you experience and feel and live every day
and the life that you are living in the context of scripture.
So I'll give you an example.
Ever since COVID hit, my wife and I have loved gardening.
You know, so a lot of other people do the same thing. We all have these gardens.
We have this elaborate garden.
Every year we go through catalogs with our kids. We pick out these seeds we're going to plant.
And sometimes I'll hold the seeds in my hand and how tiny they are and weird, you know, shaped and different colored.
When you read Genesis, there's a line that talks about how God made the plants with all the seeds in them, you know, and fruit bearing seeds.
A lot of times we just skip over that. We're like, OK, yeah, you know, it's plants and seeds to grow.
You know, God mentions that in Genesis.
Why did he mention it?
Because when you look more closely at scripture, you see that that seed, that physical seed that Adam and Eve could touch
that we can see and touch when we plant seeds in our garden, that actually is much more meaningful and is tied into a whole theology.
Because the same Hebrew word is used for Eve's line of children.
The seed is going to be the one who fights against the seed of Satan.
And when you look all throughout the Old Testament, you have these prophecies of the seed of Jesse or the seed of David.
And then you get to the New Testament, you have all this language that's that's garden like talking about God planting Christ inside you.
You know, Paul talks about how God planted and I watered, but you know, or Christ planted, I watered, but God gets the growth.
So all I'm saying in that example is you don't ever get theology that's disembodied.
It's always in a form and poetry and poetic expression tends to focus on that form.
And I think that you can't sacrifice that because when you do, you're giving up something in scripture.
Scripture blends together in a way that you can't take apart the physical, experiential things that you have at your fingertips and the broader, deeper theology that then God weaves through those things.
So I think in one sense, you know, it's dangerous.
And I always do this to myself when I read a theology book, I get to the end and I think, how have I changed?
Because my heart changed at all.
Am I thinking a little bit more sensibly about something? Because if there's no heart change, I might have wasted my time.
You know, because my heart is meant to be developed and pulled.
And a lot of times it's that imagery and poetic sensibility and imagination that really starts to pull the heart in and educates both the heart and the head.
So I'm a huge advocate of fiction, poetry, and part of that, I think, goes back to the truth that we're body, spirit, image bearers.
We're in our body and our senses, our experiences, we're meant to interact with the world.
And so we want that from the theology that we read.
And of course, there's much more theology now than, you know, I went to seminary in 2008.
I started and I'm sure there was poetic theology then too.
It's not like it was a Genesis after I was at seminary, but there was definitely a lot less of it in terms of what I was given in the curriculum.
Yeah, you know, I was speculating without researching, which is always dangerous.
But I just wonder about the impact of modernism on, you know, the prolificness of theological poetry, you know,
and because I think probably in church history, it's always been important, as art has been as well.
And if some of those things kind of got de-emphasized with the advent of modernism and maybe postmodernism,
that'll be a good thing about it that I know not everything about postmodernism is good,
but maybe, you know, it will kind of help bring back the value of arts, the value of poetry.
Obviously, the Bible is huge on poetry.
So, you know, and I think even some of the people like I love, you know, Dutch theologians, one of them is Gerhardus Vos.
He taught at Princeton for a while, and you can read his dogmatic theology stuff, and it's pretty dry.
You know, it's just explanation and stuff like that.
He gets to the end of his life, and what does he do?
He has a collection of poetry.
That's like the culmination of his, you know, his theological insight is like worshipful, expressive poetry.
And I love that.
You know, that's actually what you're driving to.
Like your theology actually needs to come out of the heart, not just the head.
And I think a lot of people are focused on the head and not the heart.
And I think there's no question in my mind that in Scripture, the heart is primary.
Head is critical, and the heart feeds the head.
But you've got to have some kind of poetic, imagery-driven, creative sensibility just from reading Scripture.
Sure.
Because that's just useless.
Well, we'll kind of close with that.
I do want to ask, so I know you have some of your poetry available online on your website.
Have you published any books of poetry?
I have.
Okay.
Just two.
So one is called Borrowed Images, and then the other one is called Word by Word.
Okay.
And so some of those will probably deal with a little bit of grief, but also elements of faith.
So yeah, I love those two, and I think my next writing project,
I've now made a promise that I have to finish this before I do anything else, is a fiction project.
Oh, that'll be very interesting.
So yeah, it's called The White Door, and I could talk more about it.
But I think that's, it takes a lot of creative, I have such an appreciation now for Christian imaginative artists,
because it takes so much to put together a gripping fiction story.
So yeah, I'll be doing that, I hope, next.
And then after that, maybe a short book on what we call autonomy,
which is going to be a kind of flat-out biblical assault on the idea that you should be independent.
And it's going to focus much more on the goodness of relationships.
Well, maybe when you finish those, or I'll have to have you back, because obviously we could talk longer.
And it's a sign of a good conversation when we go over time a little bit.
But Pierce, I want to thank you so much for being with us today,
and so many insightful comments, and your story, your experience,
your insights on how poetry can bless us, and your theology of suffering.
It's all very, I think, fitting and fits well with what we're trying to emphasize in Broken and Mended.
So it's been a very good conversation, and I think a blessing for those that will be listening to this.
And so with that, I want to remind our listeners they can find links to a lot of the things we talked about,
unless we forget it, but we'll put it in the show notes.
And also go to brokenamended.org for more information about what we're doing there,
and support groups and other resources, including this podcast will be there.
But we're glad that you were here with us, and until next time, we hope that you are walking with God.
All right, God bless. Thanks.