Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Echoes Podcast dives into real-world questions about community, faith, and human connection. Guided by hosts Marcus Goodyear and Camille Hall-Ortega, each episode explores personal journeys and societal challenges with inspiring guests—from faith leaders and poets to social advocates—whose stories shape our shared experiences. Through conversations with figures like Rev. Ben McBride, who moved his family to East Oakland’s “Kill Zone” to serve his community, or poet Olga Samples Davis, who reflects on the transformative power of language, we bring to light themes of belonging, resilience, and the meaning of home.
From the creators of Echoes Magazine by the H. E. Butt Foundation, The Echoes Podcast continues the magazine's legacy of storytelling that fosters understanding, empathy, and action.
The problem with Christianity is you have this victory narrative because after all, Jesus conquered death. After all, Jesus is victorious and Jesus wants us to be victorious. So it makes it harder for us. And likewise makes it harder for us to deal with the fact that we are complicit in so many terrible things in the world.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Years ago, I attended an intensive coaching course that took place over a long weekend. The course was intended to help women like me align our lives with our deepest values and find purpose in who God designed us to be. The process included dreaming about what brought each of us life. But along the way, it was imperative to also identify things that held us back. And with that part of the journey came some pretty tough discussion.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Around me, I heard women talk of job loss, pregnancy loss, and times they simply lost their way. But there was a rule the leaders tasked all of us with adhering to: allow each other to walk through the tough stuff without attempting to offer words of comfort or passed down Kleenex. Because, the coaches warned, those actions are often more for the comforter than for the one in need of comfort. We quickly observed that those trite learned behaviors were not truly helpful in those delicate moments. But what is helpful when we're on a journey through life's toughest tests and traumas?
Camille Hall-Ortega:How do we begin to overcome deep suffering? And where is God and faith through it all? From the H. E. Bot Foundation, I'm Camille HallOrtega, and this is the Echoes Podcast.
Camille Hall-Ortega:On today's episode, we're welcoming author, professor, and biblical scholar Doctor. David Nienhuis. Dave studies Christian formation, church history, and doctrine, and his new book, And the Sea Was No More, outlines how, in his times of anguish, the Bible gave Dave words when he had none of his own. We're excited to welcome Dave to the podcast. I'm here with my co host Marcus Goodyear.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Hi Marcus.
Marcus Goodyear:Hi Camille.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And welcome Dave.
Dave Nienhuis:Hi, great to be here. Thanks so much for the invitation.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yes, we're thrilled to have you truly honored. We know that in just a few short months, people will be able to get your new book And the Sea Was No More. And you call this book, it does quite a bit of work because you call this book a memoir, but you also say it is also a confession and at times a Bible study. Can you tell us what work you did to kind of identify what this book is meant to be and do for you?
Dave Nienhuis:I tell you what, I just started writing and I was waiting to see what was coming out. Mean, people ask me, Why did you write a book about suffering? And I didn't set out to write about suffering or to write a book. I was at a place of such disorientation and I had lost my capacity to speak about what I was dealing with that I just simply was writing, trying to sort of write my way through suffering. And over time, I began to realize, Oh wait, something's happening here.
Dave Nienhuis:And then eventually I realized, Oh gosh, I think this might be for other people, which was a little alarming. But what came out was this weird combination of Bible study, but also a memoir that was very much a confession. I just simply wanted to be able to name what I had gone through. So it's an interesting combination. I like to call it a memoir in scripture.
Camille Hall-Ortega:So it sounds like if we ask you what led you to write about suffering, it was almost as if it was this therapeutic thing that happened to you, kind of.
Marcus Goodyear:Well, yeah. Was it literally therapy that led you to writing?
Dave Nienhuis:You know, therapy was very much a part of it. I don't know if you guys know what it's like to truly lose your words. I think there's places of suffering where it's just really hard struggle, but there's a kind of suffering that just throws you into this world of not knowing. Like your mechanism for understanding just stops working. It's one of the reasons why it's so dangerous for somebody to come to you and say, Oh, I understand, when you're going through something horrible, because of course you don't understand.
Dave Nienhuis:Right? And so, just sort of intensifies the sense that there's something wrong with me.
Camille Hall-Ortega:You're like, You understand? Tell me about it. Can you explain it to me? Help me.
Dave Nienhuis:Would love to understand. Yeah, exactly. I know. And so, theology, this is part my strength, but also a weakness, I'll just confess. Theology is really focused on articulacy.
Dave Nienhuis:Being able to speak about faith is essential to the task of theology. And yet when I went through this, like that part of your brain that controls speech just got shut off. I couldn't articulate what I was going through. And then all of my tools in my toolbox, which included both my own coping mechanisms, but also my standard sort of theological discourse to talk about these sort of things, it all just fell short.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And so you talk a lot about how the Bible gave you many of those words and that for some that might feel strange because obviously we can agree that the Bible can be a source of comfort. But there are plenty of folks who would think that talking about our deep suffering or mental health issues or depression, anxiety, panic attacks, which we'll get into, there can be sort of, it can be taboo in the church community.
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And so instead, you're really leaning into this and talking about how the Bible gave you language. Can you tell us more about that?
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah. I went through therapy and that got me to a place of at least a little more stability. I wasn't constantly panicking anymore, but I was always on the verge and it was really like white knuckling it, you know? But around that time, I started taking up speaking invitations again. I went through about two, three years where I just wasn't, I was barely functioning, and I wasn't doing any speaking engagements.
Dave Nienhuis:And it was in March 2013, my buddy, Steven Pursell, invited me to come give her a retreat talk at Laity Lodge. And I said, yes. And I don't know whether it was the first or second or third retreat, but at one point along the way, I was just in this calmer place back in my room. And as I opened my Bible, I always tell students, Don't just flip your Bible open, like have an intention. But in this case, I just flipped it open.
Dave Nienhuis:And I ended up in the Psalms and I read Psalm 69, right? That famous Psalm, Save me, O Lord, for the water has come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire where there is no foothold. I'm drowning in the waves of the sea. The flood sweeps over me, all this.
Dave Nienhuis:And I'd known about that Psalm. For years I'd known about that Psalm. But I had this weird epiphany like experience, and even epiphany is too grandiose because it wasn't like that. I just suddenly had this feeling that that Psalm was speaking for me, That it wasn't just speaking to me. It wasn't just giving me a model.
Dave Nienhuis:It was as though Scripture was speaking for me. I didn't have words. Does that make sense? When I experienced it, I just felt like that was me saying that. Yes.
Dave Nienhuis:Not even that, Oh, I can relate to that. It wasn't even that. It was, That was me.
Camille Hall-Ortega:It's making me think of a conversation that I had with Ashley Cleveland, who I'm sure you're familiar with, of course. We've had her on the podcast, but we spoke with her for an Echoes Magazine article, and she described a time in her life, as you know, she speaks very openly about overcoming addiction. She's an addict, and so overcoming that time of active addiction. And she spoke of the hymns in this way. And she said that in her darkest hour when she could not see up from down and she was, you know, begging for something to hold on to, the words of hymns spoke to her and for her in this way.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And so it's reminiscent of that for me.
Marcus Goodyear:I love that scripture can do that and that we can have these moments where we're praying through the Psalms as a community and we are able to own what the Psalms are saying. And like you said, they feel as if those words are speaking for us. And I think there's also this really important thing where we pray through the Psalms and we don't align with them. Where I may be having a great day and I'm praying Psalm 69 and what needs to come from my heart is actually not in that Psalm, but it's a way to experience atonement with people who are in that place.
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah.
Marcus Goodyear:And you you talk a lot about atonement in your book and at one ment. I wonder if you could just revisit some of what you've learned about unity and joining others.
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah. I mean, that really is there are a couple of things that hold this whole book together, and that's one of them, is just sort of dealing with the reality that we are not individuals. And that our culture and even our churches too often just sort of throw us back onto ourselves. Like I was told all my life, read your Bible every day, and I just couldn't really do it. I struggled.
Dave Nienhuis:I didn't have the discipline. But then one day I was at an Episcopal church and the priest was like, Oh, you're a seminarian? You're going to lead morning prayer every day. And I was like, Oh, okay. And then what do you know?
Dave Nienhuis:All of a sudden, I was reading the Bible every day. And I realized later, Oh, I needed a community to basically enable this practice. And that totally changed my whole life. That was years ago, but that changed me big time. And I think likewise, when it comes to suffering, our tendency is just to kind of think we're on our own here.
Dave Nienhuis:And so many models of discipleship are kind of heroic models of discipleship where stand firm, be strong, the Lord wants you to be able to walk on water and all that kind of stuff. As I read the scripture, I just don't see it. I don't see that. What I see is a community of people struggling to live in relationship with God and with each other, and that the task of faith is about somehow linking arms and trying to make it through.
Marcus Goodyear:It's like there's a dark side to what I think of as the holiness movement. That's kind of what I heard underneath what you were saying, that my role as a Christian is to this sounds terrible but to make myself holy through discipline in a way, and to then be a holy offering to God. And so that it puts a lot of pressure on the individual, and it puts a lot of heroism on the individual, and it also takes us away from the beautiful community that faith can offer. And it separates us from the community in a way that takes us off the hook. We don't have to then work on behalf of the community and intercede on behalf of the community.
Marcus Goodyear:We're only responsible for ourselves.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah. And what's great that you're talking about there, Dave, is that God didn't intend it that way. That's us making it that way. God never intended it to be that way.
Dave Nienhuis:That's right.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Dave, of course, throughout this book, there is a lot of water. Can you talk to about the water references this through line that you that of course is a through line in your book, but that you point to is a through line in the Bible. And can you just talk more about how how you begin to write in that way?
Dave Nienhuis:You know, before I ever came across Psalm 69 at the lodge and all that, I was having nightmares about waves, about water sort of inundating me and sinking me and overwhelming me. I narrate in the book that my first real major panic attack was in response to seeing the videos of the Indian Ocean tsunami, and it just sent me into a tailspin. I had no idea why. That turned into nightmares over time, but then eventually when I got to the point of getting calm again and reading that Psalm, it all just sort of opened up all of a sudden because as a Bible scholar, I know that this theme of water runs all the way through Scripture, that when God creates all things, when God begins to create, what emerges at the very beginning is this chaos, this formless, normless void mess that is characterized by darkness and water, right? And it's not good.
Dave Nienhuis:And then God begins creating good things. But God doesn't destroy the darkness or the water, right? God doesn't seem to will it, but God allows it to exist. The world God wills is the world God speaks into existence, right? But there are other things that God allows to be, the darkness and the deep.
Dave Nienhuis:And then you get all the way to the end of the Bible, Revelation 21, and when the New Jerusalem comes down, it says, And the sea was no more. And it goes on to say, And therefore death was no more, and mourning and crying and pain was no more, for the first things have passed away. And so the whole Bible is framed by this problem of the chaos water that is just simply a part of our world. It is out there all the time, right?
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah.
Dave Nienhuis:Even though in the mystery of who God is and what God has done, the way the story narrates it is God restrains these things, but God does not destroy them. God chooses to sustain them. And as a result, God can sometimes use them, but they're also free. They can come busting in when we least expect it. Can overwhelm us and destroy us.
Dave Nienhuis:And God doesn't look at that and say, Oh, that's good. Right? That is a world in rebellion.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Which I'd love to hear more about that because, of course, when I first kind of read back of the book info and that kind of thing, I thought, is this going to be a telling of Dave's dark knight of the soul? And so then I thought, oh, what's the difference between the dark knight of the soul and the deep? And then of course you extrapolate really well on that because you are distinguishing the darkness from the deep, capital D deep. Can you talk more on that as well?
Dave Nienhuis:I can, yeah. They go hand in hand, right? They're often right next to each other, there in first sentence of the Bible, darkness was over the face of the deep, right? But they are distinguished. Darkness and the deep, not the same thing.
Dave Nienhuis:And when I was first going through the rough time, when I was in my really bad space and just sort of reaching out to try to tell people, Christians wanted, if they didn't want to automatically comfort me in ways that weren't helpful, the other thing that they would do is they would default to this darkness of God motif and yeah, you're going through the darkness. I'm really impressed by your willingness to face this. And I was like, Dude, this is bad. There's nothing good about this. I don't want to go through this.
Dave Nienhuis:I want to be rescued from this. God isn't disciplining me or sharpening me. Need God to rescue me, right? Yes. And so that really did send me on a little journey to think about the distinction between these.
Dave Nienhuis:And again, just sort of paying attention to how it plays out in Scripture. As you say, like that darkness of God motif is ancient. It goes way, way back. And, you know, the key figurehead would be like a John of the Cross in the dark night of the soul. And that is a purposeful experience that God leads believers to go through.
Dave Nienhuis:In that, like John would say, that, you know, when somebody first becomes a Christian, God just floods that person with signs of God's presence. But then eventually, it's this powerful, and everybody should read The Dark Knight of the Soul. At one point, he says, But a time will come when God will bid the soul to grow up. And at that moment, God pulls back all those pleasures and all the things you get out of it. Because God wants you to learn to love and obey and follow God for God's sake, not just for what you're going to get out of it.
Dave Nienhuis:And so that's a maturing process.
Marcus Goodyear:You know, that I mean, you've shared is very intense for people who have experienced what you're describing. There was a time in my life where I went through a deep, deep depression and getting out of it was it took years actually to get out of it. And it still is kind of on the edge sometimes and I have to pay attention to it and manage it. But I'm thinking about this point in your book where you say God is the creator and then you have a little parenthetical statement that I'm comfortable saying that now. Yeah.
Marcus Goodyear:And I wonder about the time when apparently you were not comfortable saying that. And was that part of the darkness for you? Was that part of the deep?
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah. In that section, if I remember correctly, I'm saying I recognize that God has created all things and that that includes the darkness and the deep. Right. And I went through a long stretch where I really was saying, I don't Is that like not God? Is that the absence of God?
Dave Nienhuis:Is that all the You know? And I was like, No, it is simply part of God's world, and it is part of the world God made. And it's not a perfect world. The Scripture never says the world's perfect. It says it's good, which means it's full of potential, which means it can go either way.
Dave Nienhuis:Can go well, things can go really poorly. Was going kick out of this, if I can just point out along the way, people want to throw all the problems of the world on the fact that humans sinned. If you go to Genesis chapters one, two, and three, it's like, everything was great until humans sinned and then sin entered the world and everything got screwed up. But that's not When you read it, why is there this lying snake in the garden all the way before humans ever Right? Like, why is the darkness in the deep allowed to It's not because God wants bad things to happen, but it's because God creates a world of freedom and potential, and that's what's good.
Dave Nienhuis:And it could have gone either way. Humans rebelled, you know.
Camille Hall-Ortega:It's near and dear to our heart as an organization, and for many they'll know about Howard Butt Jr. Describing his bouts of depression and how Lady Lodge largely was, as he spoke about, a tool in his hand for his healing. And you give some very vivid descriptions of your panic attacks and of what you were plagued with. I was sharing that it reminded me of how some of my dearest friends who have experienced postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety have described some of their own symptoms where they're walking with the baby and they have an overwhelming intrusive thought that will not shake of, oh no, I'm gonna hit the baby's head on the wall, or I'm gonna fall down these stairs and the baby's gonna go flying. And these things feel very dark.
Camille Hall-Ortega:But I think it's so important how your descriptions really come alive. Can you talk about those experiences a bit and also about writing about those experiences?
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah. Yeah, that was the big shocker for me through this whole experience was I just realized how rational I assume. Assume that my brain is going to be faithful and it's going to work properly on my behalf. And I used to use the phrase, Oh, I totally lost my mind. You can use that colloquially.
Dave Nienhuis:I saw somebody and I totally lost my mind. But when that happened, I actually lost my mind. It was doing its own thing. It was operating in ways beyond my control. I was having intrusive images.
Dave Nienhuis:I was experiencing things that weren't there. I never went fully into psychosis, but I was right on the edge and I felt like I was holding it the whole time. I describe it as flinching in the book because I still do it to this day. I'll never shake it. And I think it's kind of a fairly common PTSD kind of a response, like an image will come to my mind and I'll just jump.
Dave Nienhuis:I just, it My body reacts before my mind is able to know what's happening. So your mind isn't always your friend.
Marcus Goodyear:Right. Yeah.
Dave Nienhuis:That was hard for me to learn, but I had to learn it. And I needed help. I mean, that's the thing. That's what I really realized so much back to the community thing. I simply did not have the resources within me to solve my own problem.
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah. And God was not going to give me the tools individually in my body and brain to solve my own problem. I needed to be with other people.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And I know we we spoke a little bit about this earlier. And Marcus, you spoke a little bit about it, too, that there's this sort of warped understanding of of a Christian that you should you should have it all together because you've got God. And that if you don't have it all together, you should pretend you do because you're meant to be a witness for God, right?
Marcus Goodyear:Howard used to say that he grew up in a faith tradition, Howard Jr, you were allowed to talk about your vulnerabilities until you joined the church, until you joined Jesus. And then it was all victory. All victory. You were not allowed to have any struggles after that. And his big innovation at the Lodge, which he would say emerged out of his depression.
Marcus Goodyear:Lady Lodge is this adult retreat center that is operated by the H. E. Butt Foundation, the same organization that sponsors this podcast. And at the very first retreat at the Lodge in 1961, he confessed his depression in a way that people had never heard. You just did not do that in 1961 if you were Baptist, much less if you were, you know, just just a a wealthy business tycoon like he was.
Dave Nienhuis:I I really do think Marcus, I think you just used the word victory, that it should be about victory. That is a really important thing to interrogate a little bit. Read some, making my way through all this, I read some Jewish Holocaust theologians. And one of the things I noticed, and this has been long known by others, but Jewish folks have no problem saying, There's evil in the world, bad things happen. God might not let you know why.
Dave Nienhuis:It's going to be tough. Right? Yeah. And some of them will, in great dialogue with Christians, say, The problem with Christianity is you have this victory narrative, and the victory narrative then makes it very difficult for you to talk about why bad things continue to happen. Because after all, Jesus conquered death.
Dave Nienhuis:After all, Jesus is victorious and Jesus wants us to be victorious. And so, right? And so it makes it harder for us. And likewise makes it harder for us to deal with the fact that we are complicit in so many terrible things in the world, right? Because this victory narrative tends to dominate.
Dave Nienhuis:One of things that I was really blown away by again in revisiting Paul especially on this one, is Paul is quite convinced that the power of the resurrection, the power of God's victory over death, is the power to drive you into weakness. Is the power to drive you being a vulnerable, open person so that other people can find their way in. His opponents, in almost all of his letters, are all pastors. I like to talk about it the way he talks about it in Philippians. They're like friends of Jesus, but they're enemies of the cross.
Dave Nienhuis:They don't want to account for the fact that when Jesus comes into our life, Jesus enables us to become broken, weary people in front of others. Because when we confess our vulnerabilities to others, that enables them to confess their vulnerabilities, and pretty soon we're not in the liar's club anymore. Right now we're actually sharing our truth together, that life is hard and that we need each other, right?
Camille Hall-Ortega:That's right. I love, we see that in your book that you talk about overwhelm is not spiritual failure. And I think that's beautiful because it's something that we should know, but that we absolutely need to talk more about that overwhelm is not spiritual failure. And in fact, you talk about it in the imagery of the deep, you talk about that it's not a place where we should be ashamed to be vulnerable. Instead, God meets us there.
Camille Hall-Ortega:What a wonderful God we serve that he meets us there, that he doesn't call down to us saying, get up. Don't you know you're blessed? No. Right?
Marcus Goodyear:That's not what's happening. So,
Dave Nienhuis:honestly, this is, again, I'm getting used to talking about this. I'm still getting used to it. And I don't know how long ago somebody asked me, So what is the deep anyway? And I just was like, I don't have any idea. Even after I'd written the book, I was like, I don't know how to answer that.
Dave Nienhuis:But I've since thought a lot about it. Back to this victory thing, Paul says that death no longer has dominion. And that's a powerful way to think about it because it's not saying you're not going to die. It's just saying death isn't the most powerful thing in the world. And it doesn't mean you're not going to suffer.
Dave Nienhuis:It just means suffering isn't the most powerful thing in the And so, he says, Don't let death have dominion over you, he's not saying you're not going to go through terrible times. He's just saying, You have to always practice and parade this truth that there's a force more powerful in the world than the powers of evil and death that are trying to sink us all the time. And we need communities that enable us to do that. And it's tricky, right? Because again, one of the things that I worry about so much is, especially lots of popular forms of Christianity, it's happened for generations this way, where you of, you get a depiction of Christianity.
Dave Nienhuis:It's like, Well, that's a good life. I really want to have that. And so you want to join and you think that, as I describe it in the book, you think Jesus is going to teach you how to walk on water. Jesus did not come to teach us how to walk on water. Jesus came to teach us how to sink, how to go under the waves, how to face death, and say, You don't get the last word.
Marcus Goodyear:So I'm thinking about this audio clip that Camille found from the Lady Lodge archives. And the context of this clip, it's J. I. Packer who spoke at the Lodge for decades and decades. He would just come out every summer and stay there and just teach and write books.
Marcus Goodyear:And he was a great counselor to Howard. In this particular clip, he has just explained this analogy to World War II, and he says the soldiers invade the continent on D Day, and they get onto the continent. But Victory Day, to use that word again, doesn't happen for quite some time. So in some sense, it's kind of assured, like the turning point has happened, and they know where this is going, but there is a lot of death and struggle before they can get to that final resolution. And so we'll play this, and this is J. I. Packer at Laity Lodge many years ago. We'd love to get your take on it.
J.I. Packer:Jesus Christ on the cross defeated Satan. What was the form of the defeat? Well, Satan went all out against Jesus' mind to convince him that this should not be, to convince him that his father had let him down. He pulled out all the stops and Jesus stood firm. The battle in principle had been won and Satan in principle had lost.
J.I. Packer:Yes, remember, Satan's a defeated foe. As the troops after D Day had a tremendously fierce flow of fighting to go through. So, in the Christian life, we have a series of very fierce engagements with Satan, still to undergo ourselves. But he's a defeated foe. If we stand firm, he will fall back, and the Lord who defeated him on Calvary will keep us standing firm.
J.I. Packer:So do remember that and don't panic.
Camille Hall-Ortega:We'd love to hear what you think about that clip.
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah. Well, I mean, God bless J. I. Packer. I have no complaints, and how dare I criticize the venerable J.
Dave Nienhuis:I. Packer? Honestly, if I was in my worst spot and I was in the lodge hearing him say that, I would have been offended. Don't panic because it wasn't something I had any control over. I had I mean, when you're panicking and somebody's looking at you saying, Don't panic, it's just not helpful.
Dave Nienhuis:When you're massively depressed and someone's like, Well, just don't be depressed. That's really dumb. How would that ever work? It doesn't work that do wonder So, there's so many things to point out here. He is correct.
Dave Nienhuis:I would agree with him. Satan is a defeated foe. Satan isn't our only enemy. In Scripture, death is also an enemy, and death is the last enemy yet to be destroyed. And in Revelation, the lake of fire, the devil and death are thrown into the lake of fire, right?
Dave Nienhuis:These are not the same thing.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah.
Dave Nienhuis:The devil is a tempter who works on our minds, but the devil is not death itself. Death is this other thing operative in the world. They are related, of course. I think we can sort of tease it all out and like we're looking at it under a microscope, but these are not the same thing. So I worry a little bit about that.
Dave Nienhuis:Well, I make a lot in the book about how we have four different Gospels, right? When I read John's version of Jesus' death on the cross, that sounds a lot closer to what J. I. Packer's describing. Even Luke's version is a little closer.
Dave Nienhuis:You get a little more heroic Jesus there. He's not panicking. He's in control. Not so in Matthew or in Mark, and especially not so in Mark. We have these gospels for different reasons because they do different work for us at different times And in our when I see Mark's gospel, really, when Satan was conquered, it was in the temptation in the wilderness, which is much more like the darkness desert experience.
Dave Nienhuis:That's where Satan is defeated and Jesus can move on, right? And Jesus is strong and stands firm and all that heroic language works there. But by the time you get to the end of the gospel and the cross is looming, Jesus is on his knees in the garden begging for it to be taken away. He goes to the cross, but he's dragged there. He's taken there against his will.
Dave Nienhuis:And from the cross, screams out, Why God? And then it just says he screams until he runs out of breath. He, He breathes out. He expired. There, I don't see a heroic standing firm.
Dave Nienhuis:I see someone who is me at my very, very worst moments. And so I don't want I mean, when I hear about Jesus being God with us, that's what I really hear when Jesus is screaming to death on the cross. I'm like, Yeah, I've been there. People are there all the time. And God knows what it's like to go there.
Dave Nienhuis:The real victory isn't that Jesus was able to sort of tell Satan off. Real victory was Jesus went straight into the panic of death itself and came out the other side to prove to us all that there's a power that's just more powerful than death. But it wasn't a heroic thing. It was an expression of powerful, profound weakness and vulnerability.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I like what Packer says here about Satan going all out. He went all out against Jesus's mind. I think that's the beauty is that what we can hear from this, it's not just that we cannot, we should not expect suffering, but that we can see that even Jesus suffered. God himself. On Earth suffered.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And we see that he wasn't unfazed by that suffering. No. But he made it through.
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah.
Camille Hall-Ortega:And I think there's the beauty in that.
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah. Because that was, I mean, the larger worldview was that death was the end and that if anything, went to Sheol, you went to Hades and this was a God forsaken place. God was not there. And even though the Psalmist can say, Even if I descend to the depths of Sheol, you are there, that wasn't the generally held belief, right? And yet God is even there.
Dave Nienhuis:Jesus' death and going to the dead is the fulfillment of that Psalm 139, to show that God is even there. There really actually is no God forsaken place in the world. We experience God forsakenness all the time. And that's where I would say, that's where Satan enters in. That's where the mind starts talking like, Yeah, see, you are all alone.
Dave Nienhuis:See, there really is nobody to help you.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I want also to talk a little bit about we talk about avoiding platitudes when someone is going through suffering, because we know very well from our own experiences that it's not real helpful. And yet it's so in us because we don't want to see others suffering. It hurts us to see others suffering, and it also makes us personally uncomfortable. It's not really just about their suffering. It's also about our discomfort that we want to do something or say something.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Can you talk about what you do find helpful from community in times of suffering?
Dave Nienhuis:I know for myself, when I was at my worst, words could not help me. Words of comfort and platitudes, even well meaning ones, didn't help and often hurt. They made me feel more alienated, ironically. But what did help weren't so much words, unless the words were, I'm with you. I'm here.
Dave Nienhuis:That's good. Those are good words. But it had to be accompanied with actual concrete, right? Like I needed people to say, You should take a nap. I needed people to say, Have you eaten today?
Dave Nienhuis:Right? Which really gets to a core of a lot of this is we're so dualistic in the West and we have this sort of spirit body dualism. We go through things, we think, Well, is it spiritual or is it medical? Like these are opposites somehow. And what I learned more than anything else through all this is I was made to be an embodied soul.
Dave Nienhuis:I am an embodied being. I will never be anything other than embodied being. And when I am restored in the new creation, I will once again be an embodied being. That's the story of being a human. Think about Paul when he's talking about the community as a body, right?
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yes.
Dave Nienhuis:When my hand is injured, like my whole body compensates to deal with the fact that I've lost the use of my hand for a period of time. My hand just needs to recover. I don't expect much of my hand. In fact, if anything, I hold it in close and I protect it and I do things to care for it. And eventually, I wait long enough and I'm patient, my hand will be able to work again.
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah. Love the Lord with your mind, soul, spirit, strength, that these things work together. When I was in my deep, deep depression, the first thing a therapist told me was, you know, there's a couple options. One option is go for a walk every day. And I think I've shared this in a previous podcast, but she said, go for a walk and spend thirty minutes walking away from everything.
Marcus Goodyear:And then turn around and walk back to everything that you want to return to and leave that other stuff out there. That's so simple, but it was powerful. Six, twelve months of doing that, it really set me on the road to healing, along with all the things you're talking about, the community. And one of the things we haven't talked about in this book, we're sort of dancing around this explanation impulse that you describe, and how this explanation impulse is a way that we use to avoid facing the truth. Camille mentioned something like that too.
Marcus Goodyear:But you also say that knowing your neighbor means knowing that sometimes your neighbor wants to hurt you. And this idea that we are all one body, and Paul says, you know, the eye doesn't say to the hand that you're not part of the body. And yet, there is a time when there are parts of the body that do, for whatever broken reason, want to cause pain. Yeah. How do you how do you make peace with that, Dave?
Dave Nienhuis:Oh, I don't. Okay.
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah. Fair.
Dave Nienhuis:That's fair. Yeah. I know when my students are working through scripture with me and they just keep reading in the New Testament all this stuff about suffering, and they finally will say, Well, you know, do we have to suffer to be a Christian? And that's a telling question because it assumes a level of privilege, really, that we could somehow like suffering is an option, that we could avoid it, that people harming us is an option that we can avoid somehow. Right?
Dave Nienhuis:We live in a world that just asserts so much control over the uncontrollable, trying to keep all the bad things from happening, and we just can't keep it from happening. It is going to happen. It is coming for us all in one way or another. If it hasn't already, it will eventually. And sometimes, you know, that comes through other people.
Dave Nienhuis:I wanted to work to make sure we talk about justice while we're talking about the personal stuff, right? The deep gets its job done, not just through phantasms of the mind, but also through people. And that's a real thing. It's a very real thing. And on the one hand, we can't avoid it, but on the other hand, we need one another for help and for protection.
Dave Nienhuis:And especially when we've been wounded, we need protection. We need people to gather around us and protect us in that way. You know, this is that, oh my gosh, it's so hard. I just want to apologize in advance, people who read the book, because there are so many things that make it harder. Like, I'm not trying to make it easier.
Dave Nienhuis:Want us to face it, right? And one of the hard things about Scripture is the primary the real risky people around you in Scripture aren't the enemies. They aren't the people out there in the world who are not God's people. Persistently, it's God's people who hurt God's people. The enemy is the person next to you potentially in the pew, not those enemies outside that are various groups demonized to tell us they're the ones you've to watch out for.
Dave Nienhuis:It's in us and it's around us and it's in the person next to us. And so again, all I can say is that the call to weakness is this call to acknowledge not just my vulnerability, but also my susceptibility to these powerful entities in the world that promise it can be better if I just sign on to this or that project that will require me to tolerate other people being hurt.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Dave, we have talked about the work that you did to overcome so much of what you've experienced. But of course, you have alluded several times to the fact that it's always still there on the cusp, that the dark is there, that the deep is there, that those things don't go away. I think we would be remiss not to just make sure we're noting that. We have talked during our conversation about therapy and that also there is sometimes a need for medication in the coupling with therapy and all of that, and that we know that that is very real and that it's not helpful for us to hide and think that there's only one way to healing and it's just read your Bible or that kind of thing that we know that that's just like those kind of stale, trite platitudes, that too is
Marcus Goodyear:I'm glad
Dave Nienhuis:you said
Camille Hall-Ortega:that not to me.
Dave Nienhuis:I was really blessed, honestly, with family members who also had struggled. My, you know, people older than me, I'll put it that way, who also struggled and also got help with therapy and with medication. And so it was never something in my family that was considered weird or inappropriate. And so that was a good thing. It was kind of a no brainer for me to see a therapist.
Dave Nienhuis:My wife is a therapist, But it is a sad thing. Mean, you still hear it. Not too long ago, a fairly famous pastor and teacher said, There's no such thing as ADHD. There's no such thing as PTSD. It's all a spiritual problem.
Dave Nienhuis:And that is so profoundly, not just dangerous, it's gnostic. It assumes that we aren't bodies. Assumes that we are spirits temporarily trapped in bodies and the call is to somehow overcome our bodies. That's a giant misunderstanding of Scripture. We are bodies and our bodies break very easily.
Dave Nienhuis:And of course, we would go to a doctor if we broke a leg or if we, you know, and we would take medicine for our heart if we have heart troubles. There is nothing, no reason at all why we wouldn't take chemicals to address a chemical imbalance in our brain.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah. You. Thank you for
Marcus Goodyear:that. In the book, when you say, if somebody has cancer, you don't tell them to just stop having cancer. If somebody is depressed or anxious, you don't tell them to just stop being depressed or anxious. It's absurd.
Dave Nienhuis:It's absurd. And yet we do it all the time.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah, of course. Yeah. Dave, we are nearing time and I really just wish we could talk for days. But tell us, when is the book out? How can folks get it?
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah, it's available for pre order now on any place you would buy a book online. It'll come out in September. I think the release date is 09/22/2026. So we're just beginning all the work of rolling it out now and doing some marketing, and this is my first sort of public media event. I'm really grateful for the opportunity.
Marcus Goodyear:We're so honored.
Dave Nienhuis:Appreciate you. We're on. This has been great. Appreciate it.
Camille Hall-Ortega:We're on.
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah. And I want to say, the book is really good.
Camille Hall-Ortega:So It good.
Marcus Goodyear:It is an incredible read. There are some stories in it that are so vivid and haunting, really. Yes. And just readable. But the other thing that surprised me about this, Dave, I read a lot of Bible devotions, I'll just put it that way.
Marcus Goodyear:And there's a freshness to your voice, there's a freshness to the way you unpack scripture that feels really new, like something I haven't read before. And that's really rare. So thank you. Kudos.
Dave Nienhuis:It came through pain.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah.
Dave Nienhuis:Yeah. I don't know what else to say about that. Honestly, if I just have a second, had so much And shame around this the idea of publishing this sent me into new panic attacks again. When I first started to realize, Oh my gosh, I think this is for other people. Even just as of a year ago, I was still feeling deep anxiety about it.
Dave Nienhuis:Now that I have read the final version, I've had other people read it and say some of things you've said, it's just been such a blessing to me because I realized, okay, it's going to be okay. This actually is for other people. And I can share this. But I literally, for a time, I thought about publishing it under a different name. Wow.
Dave Nienhuis:Just because I was so embarrassed about being that vulnerable. Actually, I had a friend
Camille Hall-Ortega:I'm grateful you overcame that because
Dave Nienhuis:it's A friend said, If you publish it under another name, you know, and it's successful, are you going to want people to know it was you who wrote it? And I'll say, Yeah. And he was like, Then you're just being a coward. Like, then you have to publish it under your name. I'm like, Okay, you're right.
Dave Nienhuis:I guess so. Anyway, thank you so much for those kind words. Really means a lot to me.
Camille Hall-Ortega:We're grateful for the time. Thank you so much. We appreciate you.
Dave Nienhuis:You bet. Thank you.
Camille Hall-Ortega:The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Marcus Goodyear, Rob Stinnett, and me, Camille HallOrtega. It's edited by Rob Stinnett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. Our original music is by Johnny Rogers. Special thanks to our guest today, Dave Neinhaus.
Camille Hall-Ortega:In addition to the Echoes Podcast, we welcome you to subscribe to Echoes Magazine. You'll receive a beautiful print magazine each quarter, and it's free. You can find a link in our show notes. The Echoes Podcast and Echoes Magazine are both productions brought to you by the H E Butt Foundation. You can learn more about our vision and mission at hebfdn.org.