Tish Harrison Warren

So why don't we do it? What keeps us from spiritual training? Well, because to be completely honest, consistent training is the boring part of following Jesus.

This is the entire reason that we created montages and films, to borrow an illustration from Tish Harrison-Warren.

Just think about Rocky, for example.

Every Rocky movie follows the same basic arc, right? Rocky loses valiantly in dramatic fashion, then trains for months and months, and then comes back stronger to claim the championship belt, also valiantly in dramatic fashion.

Even though I've spent six or seven hours reading stuff, I still feel like I know nothing.

But in terms of people who it was just a privilege to be in their presence for a while, for me it was probably John Swinton, Isabel Hanley, and then more recently Tish Harrison-Warren as well.

And trying to hold back your fangirl moments.

We're still waiting for the day that Kate Bowler comes on the podcast and Claire goes into like fangirl mode.

Maybe.

Rachel's being faithfully persistent to see how that goes.

So I did come pretty close to fangirling with Tish Harrison-Warren though.

I will say that.

Mm-hmm.

I was just, um, I'm listening to a book by, uh, Tish Harrison Warren.

Is that her name? So she writes about how in our cult- in American culture, there's this, and especially, um, in, in certain elements of evangelical culture, there's these emphasis on conversion stories and then-

Mm-hmm

Writers who make me want to write.

To name a couple of contemporary folks, you just had Tish Harrison Warren on.

She makes me want to write.

Yeah.

And it also names the crisis of faith that comes from an encounter with suffering.

Tish Harrison Warren in her book, Prayer in the Night, which I highly recommend to you, says, theodicy is not merely a cold philosophical problem, it is the engine of our grimace doubts.

She goes on to say, theodicy is an existential knife fight between the reality of our own quaking vulnerability and our hope for a God that can be trusted.

If there is no God, then the problem of pain and also the problem of goodness disappear.

Yeah.

Well, I do want to call attention to Tish Harrison Warren's foreword because it's just so wonderful how she says, like, she's a very opposite personality.

Then she's very type B. She's creative.

And she kind of laughs at herself like, well, you know, maybe sometimes people would say I'm lazy, but.

I was reading, and this feels like a book that would be really helpful for this kind of season of big change.

It's by Tish Harrison Warren called What Grows in Weary Lands.

And it's a book about like the middle of just life and faith and all the things and how the middle is really hard.

But one thing she said that I came across yesterday that I thought was really good is she was actually sharing advice from Mary Carr.

It is one of the destinations that faith travels through, through waiting, lament, and in sadness, but beside the God who remains present there even in absence.

And as theologian and pastor Tish Harrison Warren has written, we are often trained subtly and well-meaningly to minimize suffering, especially when life has otherwise been good.

But scripture and the Christian tradition tell a fuller truth.

Grief is not a problem to solve on this side of creation, but a reality to carry together, waiting one day for hope to become a reality.

We see how hard this has been.

We hope that the LCS community has been a place on this side of creation where God's healing has begun to permeate your family's lives.

So how do we make sense of all of this, especially when many of us were never really equipped in Christian community to do so? As Tish Harrison Warren has observed, many of us have been subtly taught to minimize our suffering, especially if it doesn't rise to the level of total debilitation.

We live with privilege, with safety, with blessing, and with status.