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- [00:00]
Chris Knowles
Like many of you out there, I enjoy shooting guns in my free time and in my busy time.
- [00:06]
Host/Interviewer
Now I thought I had it pretty.
- [00:07]
Chris Knowles
Good until my friends over at Silencer Shop showed me what I was missing. Shooting suppressed is not just quieter, it's just all around better. Less noise, less recoil. A lot more fun. Once you try it. You will wonder how you ever shot guns without silencers. Your ears, your range neighbors, your aim, all of those things will thank you. Now Silencer Shop is not just another gun website. They're the go to for suppressors in America because they make the entire process super simple. They help handle the paperwork, connect you with a local dealer. And best of all, Silencer Shop is here to help you move fast so you can get your suppressor faster than ever. They also happen to be one of the strongest advocates for the second amendment in the industry. Silencer Shop puts in the work, funding lawsuits, fighting bad legislation, and protecting your rights. If you've been thinking about getting a suppressor, now's the time. Make your firearms quieter, safer, and a lot more fun. Go to silencershop.com knowles k n w l e s to get started. Silencershop.com knowles silencershop because your rights and your ears are worth protecting.
- [01:10]
Stitch Fix Advertiser
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- [01:12]
Chris Knowles
I can never find anything in my size.
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Guest/Interviewee
I don't even know my size. I buy my clothes the same place I buy my groceries.
- [01:19]
Stitch Fix Advertiser
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- [01:28]
CookUnity Advertiser
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- [01:30]
Stitch Fix Advertiser
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Guest/Interviewee
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Host/Interviewer
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- [02:01]
Guest/Interviewee
Head to blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a free professional measure. Rules and restrictions may apply. I saw these chains appear all around her. They were covering her from the top of her neck to the bottom of her ankles. And at the end of each was a was a demon. And they pulled and twisted the chains in such a way that caused her to slump her head back down. But that didn't really matter because for the very first time in my life, I saw Jesus standing there. Jesus leaned forward and he kissed her on the forehead. And the moment that he kissed her on the forehead, every single link in the chain exploded like firecrackers. And as the last link in the chain broke, there was this Bright flash of white light. So bright that it completely blinded me. I couldn't see anything.
- [02:49]
Host/Interviewer
A priest friend of mine says he's not the first to say it, that it's a wicked generation that seeks after a sign and a wonder, and to none will it be given but the sign of Jonah. But that it's a stupid generation that ignores signs and wonders, you know, certainly. Which I think is an important, you know, addendum perhaps, to that.
- [03:07]
Guest/Interviewee
Yes, absolutely.
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Host/Interviewer
So even there was a great professor I had who is a Dante scholar who made the point in a work on Dante called Dante, Poet of the Desert, that Christians. And maybe this was my extrapolating from his point, but I think it was basically the point he was making, that Christians, before we're called to activism or something like that, we're primarily called to interpret. We refuse to. So many people refuse to interpret the signs of the times. You can't say, you know, that we, you know, being physical but also spiritual, also intellectual and having will, that we have to draw meaning out of things and then, you know, act in accord with that. But I don't know, that doesn't really appeal to our activist age. We always want to be doing something, but we are kind of primarily contemplative. We're not the chief actors in salvation. We are recipients of grace, but we're not saving ourselves here. We. Well, I don't know. To a wicked generation, no sign will be given. None but the sign of Jonah.
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Guest/Interviewee
Yeah. And it was interesting, this tension between. I didn't realize it really until retrospect, but I kept trying to understand the things that I was seeing in terms of their utility.
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Host/Interviewer
Yeah.
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Guest/Interviewee
And it wasn't really until not really one moment or experience, but the kind of reflection on cumulative experiences over many years that I realized that the statement was often the most powerful thing that was there, rather than the utility. And when it comes down to it, I think someone like God, utility means a very different thing when you're omnipotent.
- [05:03]
Host/Interviewer
Yes, right. Right, of course. I mean, I've had a number of experiences that I would call numinous or religious experiences. Maybe not quite as frequently and vividly as yours, but when I've described them. One friend of mine, he said, what do you think the purpose was of that experience? What do you think we were supposed to do? What do you think? And I thought, maybe I'm lazy or thick or something. But I thought when those experiences happen, I consider it to be a wink of providence, a reminder of God's order in the universe. And if I am to draw any particular meaning out of it, often I will just say, well, I suppose I was supposed to be there. Right place, right time, I guess, and I'm content with that. Maybe that means I'm uncurious or something, but I don't know that I can do much better than that.
- [05:55]
Guest/Interviewee
Yeah. Even though this is such an integrated part of my life, holding it somewhat loosely seems to be part of the process, at least to me, that I, you know, anytime I've. And people sometimes pull on me in these ways of, like, anytime we try to derive, like, you know, hey, who's gonna win the election? Or what should I do with my job? Or things like that. There are occasionally moments of things that are insightful to that. But I. When I. Anytime I've tried to go down those paths, it just hasn't felt right. What has always felt most right is how does this reveal God's nature? What does it say about him? And any other interpretive metric to me has just not led me into a helpful place. I remember this one time I was working at a warehouse store when I was younger, and I was the little guy on the totem pole. So I was cleaning up at the end of the night, and last few shoppers are there, and I'm looking. And as I've seen for years, every single person I see has a personal angel with them that's walking alongside them carrying something. Something that has to do with the purpose that God's called them to. And, you know, again, I'm just running these series of questions in my mind. This is, you know, around the time we were rounding up to 8 billion people on the planet. And I thought, okay, there's 8 billion people on this planet. Does that mean there's 8 billion angels wandering around? You got so many people, you know, dying every second. So many people being born every second, you know, is, you know, if someone dies, are they reassigned to someone else? What's the logistical structure of how this.
- [07:26]
Host/Interviewer
Is there any sabbatical you can take?
- [07:28]
Guest/Interviewee
Yeah, do they get a. You had a really rough one. So, you know, you can, you know, running this all through my mind, and I don't think it's wrong to speculate on these things. But as I was speculating about that, this man walked in front of me, and he's, you know, shopping for some things, and I look at this angel that's with him wearing a kind of simple blue tunic, and I'm just kind of running these thoughts in my mind. And this happens very rarely. Usually the angelic stuff I see it is very focused on whatever task it's called to. It almost never shows me attention of any kind. But this particular angel, just for a moment, looked and made eye contact with me. And again, at this moment, I had this vision just play through my mind. And in it very rapid fire, in kind of a montage sort of way. I saw this young girl being born. And I saw this very same angel with her. And I saw this girl throughout her life. I saw all of. And unfortunately, she had a very painful life. She had a dad who didn't treat her well. She had a very tumultuous household. And I just saw the angel with her in these moments, hiding with her when she was hiding from her father, covering her when she was crying at night, walking with her and comforting her as she would go to school with clothing with holes in it and be embarrassed about that. It was still with her when she started using drugs when she became a teenager. It was with her when she ran away from home as a later teen. It was with her as the hardness of life that comes to people in these cycles came bit by bit. And I saw at the end this angel with this woman in an alleyway when she was being attacked. And she was on the ground being attacked, and this angel was standing above her. And I saw just all this darkness encroaching in from every direction. This angel was fighting off this darkness, a sword in each hand. And I still to this day, have in no film or historical account seen a fight that was more furious, more intense, more impassioned. But even despite that, as this angel fought this darkness off, I watched it encroach in and it kind of blackened the vision. And when it kind of opened again, I just saw that the woman had died. And the vision then continued to the same angel being with a young man who was being born. And this man grew up in a much more pleasant life. His parents were with him. He maybe wasn't wealthy, but had had enough the whole time. And I watched that child grow into the man who was standing in front of me. And, you know, when I, you know, I entered into that vision asking a logistical question of are they reassigned? Is there. You know, you've got your answer? Is there a rain file? And what I got was, again, a picture of the statement that's being made. You know, I had. Somewhat like yourself, from what I've heard from some of your stories. I had a short tryst as an atheist, believe it or not, really only lasted a few weeks when I was a teenager.
- [10:50]
Host/Interviewer
But how does a guy who sees angels and demons, why an atheist?
- [10:53]
Guest/Interviewee
Well, I'll share this story and I'm happy, I'll finish this story first and then I'm happy to dive into that. But I, because of that, I run into things like the logical problem of evil and different sort of things like that. And there's questions that I've run into substantial answers for and then some that remain mysterious that atheists bring up and maybe they always will be. But I remember after seeing that vision and going in the back room at my work there to cry a little bit, I was even though this problem of evil, like why do bad things happen to people? Why does God allow? Of course, a question I get a lot is if all these people have an angel with them, what are they doing when something bad is happening? And while that woman still had the outcome that she had, and I can ask about God's sovereignty and whatever else in that situation, I can see that the attitude of that angel is the most desperate fight that I have ever seen in my entire life. And so while it doesn't answer the question, at least it at least gives me some insight into God's character and posture towards these moments. And yes, it's a mystery of why can't he just snap his fingers and make that bad thing not happen, but at least showed me that his heart is passionately for the well being of every person that's on this planet in a way that is honest and true and real. And that to me was the answer of that logistical question is yes, there is logistics as to how heaven works and how the spirit realm works. But they all exist to serve God's character, His nature and the revelation of it.
- [12:35]
Chris Knowles
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- [12:48]
Host/Interviewer
Course of the future.
- [12:49]
Chris Knowles
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- [13:36]
Host/Interviewer
Really, really good advice and really good insight and somehow you wind up an atheist. How does that happen?
- [13:45]
Guest/Interviewee
Well, I definitely never made it all the way over there. I never became a practicing atheist, whatever.
- [13:50]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, you were not a devout atheist.
- [13:52]
Guest/Interviewee
But as I grew older, I had this period from kind of 12 to about 15 where was learning a lot more about these things that I saw. But then also as I got older, my parents were involved in church leadership and I saw the good and the bad and the challenges that come with that, you know, Pastor Kidd experience. And then also I've always been hungry for knowledge and of learning and reading and understanding the world as best as I can. And so some of it was just running into ways that at least the churches that I was at, the way that they would treat scientific things, subjects that I enjoyed and like studying, they would kind of treat them with a scorn that started to not make sense to me. And then again, some of these problems that I would see that would be brought up either by atheist arguments or whatever else. This problem of evil, problem of divine hiddenness.
- [14:47]
Host/Interviewer
What years would this have been?
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Guest/Interviewee
This would have been, gosh, I guess that would have been around like, oh, total brain fog here. Probably around 2001, 2002, three, around there.
- [15:01]
Host/Interviewer
I ask because that was around the same time I became an atheist. There were a number of reasons for that. Mostly my own hubris as a punk little 13 year old kid. But that was the time of the rise of the so called new atheists.
- [15:16]
Guest/Interviewee
Yes. And I definitely read a lot of, I read a lot of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and different people. And again, I wasn't so much immediately compelled by, oh, this is all so right. But it was more like this does ask questions that I'm asking. And when I ask these questions in the environment that I'm in and with people that I do still trust, they seem scared of the question. And that was hard for me to reconcile. And so I went through this period where I said, okay. And of course I started to realize that hey, this experience could be false. I could be just a high functioning schizophrenic. I read about things like sleep paralysis, I'M like, some of this is just a phenomenon that might just be explained by our physiology. And. And, you know, I'm kind of running through all this and start to become concerned about it, you know. And so I went through this period where I just said, I want to take everything that I believe and not throw it away, but set it on the table and decide what I want to pick up and what I don't. And in many ways, I.
- [16:22]
Host/Interviewer
For those who are listening, I think we should keep talking. There is a very strange squeaking. It might be some animal or something. And I will mention as we continue to chat, because I like to ignore these things.
- [16:36]
Guest/Interviewee
Yeah, sure.
- [16:36]
Host/Interviewer
When I sat down with Father Rehill, we had more audio problems than I've ever experienced in an interview. And I asked. It was annoying me at first. We were stopping and going, okay, reset. More audio issues, sounds and things. We were in a new location. But then at one point, he seemed nonplussed. I asked him, I said, does this happen to you often? And he doesn't miss a beat. And he says, story of my life, all the time. And I said, okay, well, never mind. Let's keep rolling. We didn't have sound problems.
- [17:10]
Guest/Interviewee
Again, wow.
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Host/Interviewer
So you don't know. Are there purely. Is it a purely natural explanation or something else? I don't know. It doesn't bother me too much.
- [17:19]
Guest/Interviewee
These things do happen both ways sometimes, I think, but.
- [17:22]
Host/Interviewer
So you have this question, which is, am I a highly functioning schizophrenic?
- [17:28]
Guest/Interviewee
Basically, yeah. And I approach it with a level head, as I, of course, grabbed a few books about schizophrenia and try to understand how it operated. And I was reasonable. There's a lot of symptoms that I could theoretically have. There's a lot of symptoms I clearly don't have. And so it didn't throw me off the cliff, but it brought this question up. And so it wasn't really a singular moment. It was this kind of one by one selection of these different principles, these ideas that I had been given, given, and choosing to pick them up back again and again. You know, ironically, I say I became an atheist. I talked to God about it a lot during that time. And it really was, I see, just a season of reconstruction where I. And the other part, too, was I noticed that with all this stuff that I saw, there's plenty of times that there was stuff that I saw that I would say to someone that involved knowledge that I couldn't have known otherwise. And so there was a certain verifiability in that. But I didn't like trusting in that. It's like I don't. And I couldn't quite put my finger on why exactly. But it's just this. It's too easy for me to try to delude myself if I insist on looking for proofs that what I'm doing is valid or right. And so I just kind of decided to set that entire idea again on the table with everything else. But bit by bit, I would start to pick things back up. And you know, I was raised to, you know, you shouldn't have sex before you get married. I'm like, okay, maybe I don't know why I'm not gonna just go run out and do that real quick, because that's a thing. But let me.
- [19:11]
Host/Interviewer
Can't take it back.
- [19:12]
Guest/Interviewee
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Why? Okay, well, great. Why? And again, I would just have a short vision where the Lord would show me something that would just mean that, oh, that sexuality is thing that you can create a context for how you experience it. And things are of different quality depending on the context in which we experience them and are of different value based on the context we experience them. And so what kind of context do you want to create for sexuality? Do you want that to be something that you share with one person or something that's just of lower value, that can go anywhere? And so I thought, okay, that one goes back on the table. And you know, there was one experience that I had that was kind of the most transformative. And it really. I didn't walk away from it fully transformed or knowing that this was now it, but it was the one that started the snowball of doing. It's a little bit of a long story, so I apologize for that.
- [20:08]
Host/Interviewer
But it's a long show.
- [20:09]
Guest/Interviewee
Don't worry, it works out. It works out. But I was on a missions trip with our youth group and we were in Europe. And so we were at this conference at the end of it. Youth pastors used to always kind of do something more relaxed or fun at the end of. Cause we were usually working pretty hard for the rest of it. And so it was this big youth conference that was being held outside of London. And it was being held in this big cattle auction house, a double decker stadium seating kind of situation. And there were so many kids coming to this thing that they had actually set up tents in the fields that were around the area there. And so we were staying in the tents, going to the conference slash concert. And you know, flash forward to the very last session last night of the conference. And I'm Sitting there. I'm in the upper back row. We're going to be flying out the next day. And it had been a long trip, so we're pretty tired. And, you know, I've grown up in church. And so by the. By the pentameter and rhythm of the way that the preacher is speaking, I can tell that he's kind of gearing up for a gospel message, invite people to receive Jesus for the first time. And, you know, I've been saved since I got saved at the post office when I was three years old, which is a separate story, but I. And so I decided that the best thing for me to do was to try to take a quick nap. And so I.
- [21:24]
Host/Interviewer
Very spiritual during the gospel message.
- [21:26]
Guest/Interviewee
Yeah, you know, very spiritual decision. I'm also in the middle of this kind of tumult with my faith at this point as well. So I put my feet up on the empty chair in front of me and leaned back and leaned forward for no real particular reason one more time, just to look back down. And for the very first time in my life, I saw Jesus standing there. He was in the space between the stage and the chairs, and he was just pacing back and forth in that space. And he was pacing in such a way that his gaze was remaining fixed at a point somewhere at the back of the room. He would turn his head so that he could keep looking at that spot. And so I followed his line of sight to the place that he was looking. And I saw this girl, you know, 14, 15 years old. And there was this divider between where the stadium seating started and the rest of the chairs were. And she was leaning down with her head kind of rested against this divider. And immediately, the second I saw her, I knew that that's who Jesus was looking at. And I heard a voice in the back of my mind say, he sees no one but her. And the way that he was walking, it had this. This purposefulness, this intensity, this. This. It wasn't anxious, it wasn't nervous, but there was just this. This purposefulness to the way that he was walking. And it was so strong that it felt like all my other senses were almost shutting down or growing dull just so that more attention could be dedicated to watching the way that he was walking. And so it was distantly that I heard the preacher begin to invite people up to the front to receive Jesus if they hadn't before. But as soon as I heard that, my eyes immediately snapped back to the girl and I saw her. Just for the briefest moment, she was Laying there with her head against the divider. And then she just peeked up. And the second that she peeked up, I saw him move. But it didn't take him any time to get there. Jesus was pacing at the front, and then he was standing right there in front of her. And again, I'm just feeling the weight of the moment. My attention is being just drawn more deeply, being almost magnetically pulled towards. Towards this. And she had slumped her head back down in those intervening moments. And so one more time, as he was standing in front of her, she just raised her eyes for just the briefest moment. And as she raised her eyes the second time, I saw these chains appear all around her. They were covering her from the top of her neck to the bottom of her ankles. And they went off in four long strands. And at the end of each was a. Was a demon. And they pulled and twisted the chains in such a way that caused her to slump her head back down and rest it on this divider. But that didn't really matter because Jesus leaned forward and he kissed her on the forehead. And the moment that he kissed her on the forehead, every single link in the chain exploded like firecrackers. Just every single one of them. And the demons flew back from the loss of tension. And as the last link in the chain, there was this bright flash of white light. So bright that it completely blinded me. I couldn't see anything. And after a few moments, my vision faded back in. But when it did, I couldn't see the stadium. I couldn't see the chairs. I looked down and I couldn't even see my own body. I couldn't see myself. All I could see was Jesus and the girl. And he was standing there with his arms open wide. And, you know, before, she'd just been wearing some normal clothes. But in that moment, and, you know, it's something of a Christian cliche, but she was wearing these robes that were whiter than white. The whitest thing I've ever seen before or since. And she leans forward and she hugs Jesus around the waist. And as soon as she does, I feel this sense of heaviness from above me. And so I look up and I see this hand coming down, and it's big. Each finger is about as big around as a baseball bat. And it's coming down, index finger extended. And it touches me on the forehead. And as soon as it does, all of reality suddenly snaps back into place. The stadium chairs. Everything just pops into existence. I find myself standing. I'm not entirely sure when that happened, but the snap back to reality is so sudden that I kind of stumble backwards and fall into my chair. And I'm sitting there feeling overwhelmed and kind of get. Get my wits about me just in time to sit up to see the girl running up to the front to receive Jesus, even though she already had. Now, that was obviously a very impactful thing to see, and I felt very shook by it in the moment. But what really changed me and changed the way that I was understanding these things that I saw in the Spirit is what happened right afterwards. I was sitting there and I was again feeling like a truck had run over me. You know, just like feeling. Feeling just shaky and processing, almost feeling like the heat of having seen that radiate off of me. And all of a sudden, everyone around me stands up and starts walking, and I'm like, oh, I guess it ended at some point. And so I get up and I start walking. And I'm pretty good at getting lost in my own neighborhood in broad daylight, so I'm not entirely confident in my ability to make it to the correct tent that our group staying in. And so I, you know, 3,000 kids leaving this thing all at once. And I look and I see one of the girls from my youth group and kind of fix my gaze on her and think if I. As long as I keep my eyes on her, I'm not going to get too terribly lost in this situation. So, still feeling shaky, little unbalanced. I'm walking and have my eyes fixed on this girl. Now, this is a girl from my youth group. I know her, but we weren't super close friends or anything. But as I have my gaze fixed on her, I see everything there is to know about her life. I see every moment of joy, every moment of peace, every moment of fear, and every moment of pain. They flash through my mind. Pop, pop, pop, pop. One right after the other. Not just as it. Not just like a slideshow, but as if they were memories that I had had. As if they were memories about someone who I cared about very much. A sibling or a dear friend. And I saw all these things. And then I saw her entire future. I saw every decision that she could possibly make. I saw all the decisions that she would actually make. I saw the perfect, beautiful path that the Lord had laid before her. And I saw which parts of that she would choose and which parts of that she would not choose. And all of this, everything about her past, everything about her future just swirled and congealed together into this overwhelming feeling of love. This feeling of love that was so massive. It was like an idea. It was like a sensation that was too big for my mind to hold. It felt like trying to grip a ball that's five sizes too big. You can kind of almost get it, but not quite. And it just got bigger and bigger and bigger until it was painful to look at her. So I had to turn away and look in a different direction. And next to me was another person. A person I never met before. But as I looked at them, I saw everything there was to know about their life. I saw every decision they'd ever made, every decision they would make. I saw all of it. And it all again, swirled and congealed together into this overwhelming feeling of love that again, became so overwhelming that it began to feel painful. So again I turned and looked away. But as I mentioned, I'm in a very large crowd. And so I would look and see this person and saw everything there was to know about their life, saw this person, saw everything that there was to know about their life. And I'm ping ponging from person to person, unable to slow that down, unable to control it. The rate at which it's getting to the point that it's overwhelming, happening faster and faster and faster. It's like my eyes are magnets that keep sucking from person to person to person. And again, I describe this as a feeling, but it felt like more than that. It didn't make me want anything from the person, but it demanded to be expressed to them. I wanted to hug them, I wanted to kiss them. I wanted to pick them up the air and spin them around. I wanted to give them words of encouragement. I wanted to grab them and scream in their face how much God loved them. But anytime I thought of anything to do, it was so painfully and woefully inadequate in comparison to that love that it felt almost insulting to do something so small in the face of something so big. And so I finally got a bright idea and looked straight at the ground. And so I'm shuffling through this crowd of 3,000 people staring at my shoes when I kid you not, someone's foot kicks out in front of me and I see everything there is to know about their life. I see every decision they've ever made. I see every decision they will make. I see the fullness of their potential and how far they're going to make it along that line of potential. But again, I fall completely and totally in love with this person before I even see their face. And, you know, somehow I found my way back to our campsite and just fell down face first to my pillow. And then thank goodness, when I woke up the next day, whatever that was was gone. Because I honestly don't know how I would be able to function if I hadn't. But that experience was the first of many that really, the way I like to describe it, I guess, is it set the compass for how I am to navigate these things that I'm seeing. You know, I can talk now out of the retrospect of numerous experience and talk about how important it is to only try to understand these things within the context of who God is, to not try to just spiritually discern this or that. That's what, you know, witches and people like that do, but to know instead try to understand it by God's perspective, how he sees it, how he wants us to understand it. And you know, as it says in Scripture, one of the most sublime and true pictures of his nature is love. And I experienced just a snapshot of it that day, just a small piece of it. And that was the interpretive compass that I needed to try to make sense of these things that I saw. And at least for me, that and experiences that I had afterwards became the answer to my atheistic conundrum, which was really what it came down to. It is I didn't really care if what I was seeing was right or a construction of my mind. If it served that kind of goodness, that kind of love, then it couldn't be just something that I manufactured. It couldn't just be something else. This is something that is worth serving. And even if I might feel uncertain about this, or even though this question might still be hanging in my mind, if it serves that goodness, then I don't need to know all the details. I don't need to understand.
- [32:41]
Host/Interviewer
So you're not saying it's not a utilitarian calculation? Well, I don't know if it's true, but it's for a good purpose, so it's fine. No, you were saying something. No, no. The love is manifestly true and it is serving the love which is true. So I'm not gonna worry about the doubts in my mind. Do I have that right?
- [32:59]
Guest/Interviewee
Yeah, the best way I can describe it. It's funny because even to this day I can get down that utilitarian way of thinking and ponder on it and think about it, but the reality of that love is so profound that all of those ideas seem so small in comparison to it, that why, even though I still have a value for that understanding, for those questions, for what answers might lie behind Those, they are so secondary is too small a rank for the distance between this other thing. And I would gladly serve that mystery and all.
- [33:35]
Host/Interviewer
St. John Henry Newman had a great line which has stuck with me, which is 10,000 questions don't make one doubt. Of course you have questions, but that doesn't make one doubt. It sounds like that was your experience.
- [33:48]
Guest/Interviewee
Yeah, absolutely. That realizing that to doubt the reality that was behind that was impossible. Now to my advantage, I think it's that sense of having questions, of not, I guess, you know, not really believing in myself, not believing in my own gift, but believing in God. Yeah, yeah. And if this gift serves him, then it is a worthwhile venture that has actually to me been of benefit because rather than trying to get my questions answered, I'm trying to understand this love more.
- [34:24]
Host/Interviewer
But you said something very troubling in that, which is you said you could see every choice that people could make and the whole path God had laid out for them and how far they were going to make it down that path, basically. And how they were going to reject certain goods that God had laid out for them, how far to their potential they would make it. But we all sin, and so we all presumably get off the path and maybe we can then conclude we don't live up to our full potential. Or maybe not. This is a troubling thing for me. What if I blew it? What if I just don't make it to my full potential?
- [35:02]
Guest/Interviewee
Absolutely. I walked away from that experience, especially once the heat of it cooled down and I started to run through what the implications of some of that might be and how to understand that. And I still wrestle with the same questions of I don't pretend to be able to unravel the mystery of God's sovereignty versus free will. And again, many minds have wrestled with that one. But that somehow in his sovereignty, that he could create and create the opportunity for an ideal, for an ideal that is up to the standard of his goodness, which of course is impossibly high. He could create an absolutely golden and clear opportunity for that. That we could in our sin, all fall short of that, because I didn't see one that didn't in that option. And yet that the response to that and the sum measurement of all that was this overwhelming adoration, this overwhelming love, that I felt almost as if I was seeing the whole of what a person is in that moment and feeling how much God loved each and every one of those people. And it's hard because, you know, we all know that while we were yet sinners God loved us. You know, it's true. Yet we still have this. And we. I still, of course, recommend everyone live as righteous a life as possible. Like, of course, it's to your own benefit and to the benefit of everyone around you, knowing that every one of us, myself included, will fail. Yet, I guess the best way I can put it, and this is, you know, maybe it just leaves it more open than it does close it, but that God knew what kind of thing he was creating when he made us. And even though it is true that there is maybe a better version of each of our lives, it is also true that he made us this way and wanted us this way. And so is it somehow also true that this is actually the best? And that's a mystery that I don't know how to unravel.
- [37:08]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, yeah. Like, Adam and Eve didn't have to sin. They chose to sin. And so that was that. And they get kicked out of the garden and sin and death pervade the world. But also Christians say on Easter, oh, happy fault that won for us. So great, so glorious. A redeemer. No sin, no need for the redemption. Yeah, I'll take it.
- [37:36]
Guest/Interviewee
It's a grand mystery.
- [37:37]
Host/Interviewer
I'll take it.
- [37:37]
Guest/Interviewee
Yeah, it's a grand mystery, but it's, you know, again, I don't pretend to know the answers, but I also know that if a book doesn't have a villain, doesn't have challenges to overcome, I know that it's a book that we tend to not be compelled by. Even though I can sit on the edge of this and want good things to happen to these characters in the book because I'm like them, I will be dissatisfied with any story that I read that the conflict doesn't add up to something that is of substance, of meaning. And whether that's, you know, the nature of the wrestle that we have and that that itself is pleasing to God, or it would maybe be more pleasing to him if we walked that line exactly right. The best I can find is a truth that's in a great deal of tension in that.
- [38:36]
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