Philip Yancey on Family Wounds and God’s Grace

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Collin Hansen
Welcome to gospel bound a podcast from the gospel Coalition for those searching for resolute hope in an anxious age. I’m your host, Colin Hansen. And each week I’m joined by insightful guests to talk about their written work and how the gospel applies to all of life. Together. We keep looking until we see God working. Wherever you’re listening. Welcome. I’m glad you’re here for today’s conversation. When I worked at Christianity Today magazine, it seemed that readers only wanted to speak with one former editor, Phillip Yancey is writing resonated with readers in uncommonly powerful ways. They poured out their souls were sharing how much his books and columns meant to them. And you’ll see why they felt this way. When you read his latest book, where the light fell a memoir, The culmination of more than 50 years for the ANC as a Christian writer, you’ll see a clear display of his two life themes suffering in grace, which characterize all his books. Where the light fell is a remarkably honest book, I’d say even painfully so at times. That’s no accident as the ANC draws inspiration from God’s Word. He writes this, I know of no more real or honest book than the Bible, which hides none of his characters flaws. Against he joins me on gospel bound to discuss the hinge moment of his life, the scar of his father, the reconstruction of his faith, and more. Philip, thank you for joining me on gospel bound.

Philip Yancey
Well, it’s good to be reunited, we were kind of together virtually anyway

Collin Hansen
I didn’t get the chance to edit your comps. I think when I was there, Rob mall, our late friend was editing your columns and I was editing Chuck Colson columns as you guys alternated.

Philip Yancey
Somebody told me the difference was mine was, I’ve been thinking about something lately. And Chuck’s was I’ve been angry about something.

Collin Hansen
I’ve already figured something out. I mean, it was it was a good it was a good tag team, it was definitely a good way to end the magazine. And those were some those are some good years. They were well, you know, Philip, this is isn’t the first time you’ve told your story. Your books typically include autobiographical elements. So help us understand what makes where the light fell different.

Philip Yancey
There are a lot of secrets in there that I haven’t told before. And I’ve waited a long time, mainly because of fear of how it affects my family. There were some there were some deep family secrets. And I’ve learned over the years that the only way you can really deal with family secrets is to make them not secret. They’re like a wound. And if you close up a wound, keep it man bandaged than it may never heal. The only way to let it feel heal, is to bring it out into the light into the fresh air. And I all of my books, as you know, Colin had been idea driven books, not pure narrative. You’re right. I tell some stories. I am a journalist, I weave stories and everything that I write. But I’ve never really attempted a pure narrative. I tried fiction. And it sounded like nonfiction. And that’s bad fiction. So I stopped that. And, and this was different.

Philip Yancey
So I went out, read a whole bunch of memoirs, just trying to figure out what makes it click. And I view this book as kind of a prequel to my other books. It explains why I take that kind of suspicious, circling around the church view, why I’m sometimes skeptical about what the church can do I, I got a, I got a toxic dose of Christianity growing up, and the memoir explains that. And, and then I had a dramatic conversion experience and later had a wonderful career kind of at the Golden Age of Christian magazine publishing, and then the golden age of Christian book publishing. And my books took off. So I’m not an expert. On any real topic, I’m a journalist, and we tend to be generalists. We know a little bit about a lot of things, but not a lot about anything one thing. And big because of that, when I write I represent the ordinary person in the pew it’s not that I have some vast amount of knowledge that I’m trying to share with them. I have a number of questions that I share with them. So let’s go and just see what what we can do, how we can explore those questions. So it was a revelation for me to to try to put together the jigsaw puzzle of my life. I had A lot of experiences. And when I look back, I look back through through the lens of grace. Healed memories, difficult memories from childhood. But it wasn’t a it wasn’t a hard book to write in that sense. It wasn’t a painful book. It was a revealing book. And it does reveal why I get stuck on those topics. You mentioned suffering and grace.

Collin Hansen
And the book is it’s been out for a little while. Have you experienced some of that healing as these things have circulated in people like me are all of a sudden probing into some pretty intimate details of family life. Like I said, it’s a there’s there it and we’re going to talk about a lot of the healing and the grace in here, but there is a lot of pain. It’s a it’s a difficult read, and a lot of truth.

Philip Yancey
Well, the reason I waited so long to write, as I mentioned was because of my family and the harm that it could do. My mother is still living, she’s 98 years old, she’s a central character, had a pretty sad life, and was not a particularly balanced person to cut out in, in some destructive ways on her children. So she lost her husband. After just three years of marriage, I was only one year old, I really have no memories of him at all. Our brother was three, he has just a few memories. And the two of them crossed during the 60s, you were too young to remember that Colin, but it was a wild and crazy time. You know, people think today is wild and crazy. But it was just as wild and crazy back then very divided country bombings going off everywhere. threat of nuclear war hanging over us, Vietnam, protests in the streets. And of course, the sexual revolution.

Philip Yancey
And the hair, long hair, and Granny glasses and The Beatles, you know, it’s all happening at once. It was that bubble of baby boomers who went through society and just pressed against it changed it. And my brother became one of the original hippies, he was incredibly talented musically, but he dropped out of school, this final semester out of the wheaton conservatory joins the counterculture in Atlanta. And he and my mother have not seen each other and 52 years now. And there hasn’t been any communication, they have not heard each other’s voice. Until interesting. I turned in the memoirs, it was too late to make any changes. But after I turned it in, I’ve gotten them on the phone together three different times. And there has been I wouldn’t call it warming, but there has been progress. At least they’ve heard each other’s voice. And my mother is trying to settle some owe some on heal things in her own life. At the age of bit 98 she realized that she doesn’t have a lot of time left on this on this planet. And she’s trying to to deal with some of those dangling parts of her life. So I really thought it would destroy my family. Instead, exactly the opposite has happened, which is which is a grace in itself.

Collin Hansen
Oh, that’s encouraging. I’m glad to glad to hear that. Certainly a natural question that comes when people realize where your mother is still living? How does she react to these things? Right being out there. Now, one of the hopeful aspects of the book is your conversion, tiny prayer meetings, partially finished dorm room the way you describe it? And I think one reason you’re writing connects is because a lot of people have bad experiences with the church. And a lot of people have bad experiences in their family. Not a lot of them are able or not, as many of them are able to recover a living vibrant faith in Jesus through that. But you have you describe that conversion as still the singular hinge moment of your life. Tell me a little bit about what your hoped readers would see of God’s grace in that conversion and its role still today in your life.

Philip Yancey
Right. You know, this book says has a has its roots in conversations I’ve had with people who have been burned by the church and have left it. Often I’ll be sitting on an airplane next to someone and they’ll say what do you do? And I’ll say I’m a Christian author. And usually that kind of shuts off the conversation but not always. Every once in a while somebody will pick it up, say, oh, yeah, I went to a young life meetings and when I was in high school, and I went to a summer camp, I used to kind of be into that stuff, but I drifted away. And I say, Well, tell me why you drift away. And the explain some wound from the church, the way they treated their divorce parents or the way they treated gay people or their anti science stance or something like that. And I leaned back and say, Oh, it’s a lot worse than that. Let me tell you my story.

Collin Hansen
Usually top it, you can usually top them.

Philip Yancey
And they say, wait a minute, I thought you were a Christian author. I said, Well, I am. But it would be, it would be a bad trait, to forfeit, getting to know the God of the universe, that God who created all that is because of the way somebody treated you 20 years ago. And in a sense, I realized at a certain point that, that God has given me a gift, the gift of my life, in which I endured some of the worst that the church has to offer, and then flourished under some of the best that the church has to offer. So you’re right, I did have, I do have a vibrant faith. And I don’t take credit for that I wasn’t seeking it is the books as I was cynical, agnostic and bitter, and just, you know, a wounded person because of the church wounds. And God met me in an dramatic and unexpected way that I wasn’t seeking. And it changed everything. And it would have, I couldn’t have taken another path. When I was visited like that. It raises all sorts of questions, because you represent the Reformed faith. And you know, you’ve been struggling with that forever. Why? Why does God choose this person, and that that person, and I tell the story of my brother, who was seeking a lot more determined leader than I was, and never connected. And to this day, he calls himself an atheist. So there are mysteries, there are mysteries in every family there. There are things that don’t tie together neatly. And a lot of Christian memoirs, tend to tie together neatly in my mind has grace, but it’s got pain as well. And I wanted to be honest.

Collin Hansen
Well, I mentioned in the introduction, the way that you route, what you’re saying about truth in the scriptures, and their brutal honesty, and we could do a whole podcast on brothers in the back. Yeah, would be a whole, a whole podcast. I mean, they’re, they’re very, very dilemma you raise right there as one that comes up pretty clearly in Scripture in terms of the history of, of God’s covenants with his people. You know, I think, I think fill up the part of the book that has stuck with me since reading, and it’s been some months since I’ve read it, but it’s, it’s still sat here with me. It’s got to be the descriptions of you and your brother looking in on your father in an iron lung. And you could give some of that backstory there, because that certainly that is, you know, your your mother’s faith that he would be healed, and the and the, and the efforts to or the lack of effort to bring healing and the trust in God. And then ultimately, His death is clearly a central aspect of of the book. But you’re right. You say this, my father isn’t even a memory, only a scar. It’s just a powerful, powerful line there. How do you move on or move forward from such a loss? I mean, at one level, there’s nothing you don’t remember anything and yet, clearly, it’s defined your life in so many ways.

Philip Yancey
Absolutely. Right. Yeah. Yeah, the story is, I was born during a pandemic. It was a Coronavirus, it was it was polio, mostly affected children 50 60,000 in the US every year and it cruelly paralyse those that didn’t kill. My father was pretty old to get polio. He was 23. And an unusual case, he and my mother were planning to be missionaries, they had up to 5000 people committed to pray for them to support them. And two young boys, and they were raising support, getting ready to go. And then my father overnight became completely paralyzed. He couldn’t even breathe on his own. So the iron lung machine would, would move in and out, creating a vacuum and force air in and out of his lungs. But he would just lie there staring at the ceiling, he couldn’t turn the pages of a book, there was no television. And the only person he was in a charity household with the only person who really cared about him, was my mother, his wife who would come every day and just sit with him and read to him singing songs, you know, anything she could. And a group of people who cared about him and supported what he planned to do in the mission field in Africa, banded together and prayed and they they perceived there’s no way this could be God’s will. Here’s this bright, young, energetic person who, who was spiritually vital, and it couldn’t be God’s will for him, just to be parallized or die. So they believed he would be healed that surely that must be God’s will. And they against all medical advice and to sign the papers, removed him from that iron lung and put him in a chiropractic clinic. And I didn’t know the story until I was 18 years old.

Philip Yancey
And I came across a newspaper clipping that had a photo of him in this little chiropractic clinic. And the article talked about the apparent miracle that he felt he was feeling, having some feeling in a toe that he hadn’t before, and that he believed in bull Hill healing. Well, I looked at the date on the newspaper, and it was nine days before he died. And that was a secret that had been kept from me. And it was, it was the first, I guess, when looking back on it. What I learned from that is not everyone who claims to speak for God does so these people weren’t against them. They were for him. But they they made a theological error, they took upon themselves something they didn’t have the prerogative to do. Only God determines death and life. And that was the first of others, we went to more and more conservative, very fundamentalist, legalistic churches. And I hit against that principle again, on the issue of racism because this is a blatantly racist church. And I found out that they were wrong. They were unbiblical in their attitudes, and in the in the church need to be so careful because you get one thing wrong. When I learned that they lied to me about race, maybe they lied to me about Jesus, maybe they lied to me about the Bible. And those, those questions can eat away at you and just undermine all trust. So especially today, when the church is so divided, and so strident, we need to be very careful what we are strident about.

Collin Hansen
Well, you lead into this, it’s fun to interview another journalist. You read lighted, you lead right into my next question. Okay. I’ve done a lot of work for a book next year coming out on Tim Keller, you’re just one year older than Tim. And he suffered a similar crisis of faith when he realized that his family and church leaders lied to him about civil rights in the 1960s. I think you’re right to identify some potential parallels in our time. How did you resolve that conflict? As a believer? How did you reconstruct a vibrant, biblically rooted Evan Jellicle faith, when so many of the religious authority figures in your life had had lied and had blatantly sinned against God’s word, while claiming to defend it?

Philip Yancey
I again, I can’t take much credit for that. Colin, I happen to be part of a remarkable Church in Chicago. So we moved to the Chicago area when I was just 20 years old. And I started working at Campus Life magazine, youth magazine that became part of the Christianity to do the stable at one point. And then we moved to downtown Chicago. And I was in a church that was solidly Evangelical, theologically, but very social justice oriented. And about the same time I got paired with Dr. Paul brand, who is just an amazing person. I think. Sometimes I think God looked at me and said, well, Philip, you’ve seen the worst of the church, I’ll show you some of the best and you got along without a father. Here’s one, he’s an adult, you’re an adult. And, and Dr. Brand became a father figure for me, and was really my, my spiritual mentor, and intellectual mentor and every other guy, and he was just a remarkable person. I spent 10 years writing three different books with him. And that was a cocoon period of my faith. In fact, you wouldn’t have wanted me to write my own books during that period, because I didn’t know what to believe. And I remember Dr. Brands General, I said, we had a we had a strange exchange, Dr. Brand and I kind of an odd couple to begin with.

Philip Yancey
He was a British surgeon in the 60s. I’m a white haired hippie in my 20s, you know, but it worked. And I said he, I said I gave words to his faith, because he had had a rich, vibrant faith but had never written anything really just weak. And in exchange, he gave faith to my words. Because what in watching him and knowing him close up and probing, I realized that it was it was true, that what Jesus said was true, and he was a man who devoted himself to the loneliest people on the planet, untouchables in India who have leprosy And yet I had never met anyone more fulfilled, more grateful, more joyful. He was just what we want humans to be what I think God wants humans to be. And I saw one up close and wanted to be like that person.

Collin Hansen
Praise God. Now there’s another interesting encounter in the book is the way your life and the institutions you’re a part of intersected with Tony Evans. He could share just a little bit. It’s just kind of a side comment. But I think it would be love, love for people to hear a little bit about him.

Philip Yancey
Yes. The church I went to, while I was attending, it was a Southern Baptist Church. But they later withdrew, Southern Baptists were too liberal. And they went through and had a had a strict rule against allowing any people of color. And so I reproduced in the book, like a little card that the deacons gave out, if someone if a black person because civil rights demonstrators were trying to integrate Atlantis churches, and if one of them showed up at our church, they wouldn’t be allowed in and they got a card that in essence, said we know you’re not a serious inquire, you’re just a troublemaker, if you really want to know Jesus call this number, but you’re not allowed in this church. They clear. And then they softened over time. There was a Bible college, and a historically black Bible college called carver in Atlanta. And my father actually taught there at one point. And some students came, including one named Tony Evans, and he liked the church. It was very biblical based. In fact, our pastor was one of the regulars on the radio Bible class. And so he applied for membership. And it led to a very heated meeting, first with the deacons, and then with the whole church, and they voted no. And, of course, Tony Evans has a 10,000 member Church of his own, and it’s done a lot in the city of Houston. And then later, I connected with his children who weren’t allowed in our private school as part of this church. But for Priscilla Shire is a wonderful writer herself, and then his son. I think it’s Anthony was a scout for the voice. And we were on a book tour together, he provided the music, and I did the speaking. So it was it was great. And I was reliving some of those days. And they just shook their heads because some things have changed. You know, you can go to any church, you can go to any restaurant, any Fitness Center in Atlanta, regardless of your color when I was growing up, that was not true. So some things truly have changed for the better. But I didn’t know I didn’t know that history about Tim Keller, I have to look that piece of friend. Yeah.

Collin Hansen
Well, I can I can share some more with you as part of why I think I was so interested in your book, as I had just I was in the middle of this three year project of working on this book about Tim’s spiritual intellectual formation. And he became a Christian in college spring of 1970. And after dealing with some difficult situations in his home life with his mother, so I think I was probably pretty primed for reading your book. And I was just taken aback to a tremendous, rich, Evan Jellicle history that he had lived through, but also some remarkable tumult. I mean, when he was in college 68 to 72. So hard to pick when you’re, you’re becoming a Christian right before the Kent State. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. And your whole campus goes on strike. It’s a major part of his life story there. So I’ll send you some stuff, if we can talk about it more.

Philip Yancey
Along that line, Colin, Tim, put me on to a book that is really stimulating to me. It’s called a stone of hope, by David Chappelle. And that comes from a phrase from Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. And he makes two points. When he started writing that book, he was an agnostic, and now he’s not. And he said, northerners and progressives all knew that the Jim Crow laws and segregation was wrong, self evidently wrong. And they just assumed that good people in the South would realize the error of their ways and become anti racist. But they didn’t understand how deep that that evil goes systemic evil, and nothing happened for 3040 years. And it really took it took the moral leadership, virtually all the original Civil Rights leaders Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Andrew Young, were clergy people, and it took that appeal to a higher power really, to break through. And at the same time, he also makes the point that whereas politicians were you uniformly, segregation now segregation forever. You couldn’t get elected if you didn’t believe that the church had it had a guilty conscience about it. They had mixed messages, the white church in the south, even Southern Baptist in the 1950s, theoretically oppose segregation, they would pass laws against it, or principles against it, that were often acted in on in the individual congregations. But it was different than politics. And he says that it is one of the main reasons why a civil war did not erupt, there was still this, this residual moral fiber that the leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. tapped into

Collin Hansen
I yeah, I teach a lot on Birmingham history. It’s another reason why I was so interested in your book, I don’t think I realized you were from Atlanta, and Austin, was that in there. So there was a drive to get away. There was a lot more in there. But I think one thing, Philip, that my experience being a northern Evan Jellicle living in now, the Heart of Dixie, I think there’s a lot of confusion between northern and southern haven’t dealt? Yes, I think they there’s a lot of commonality as well. But I think there are some assumptions, traveling both directions that we assume. So like you, like you said right there. Northerners assumed, oh, the good people of the South will figure this out. They assumed that they but what I teach one of the difficulties here in Birmingham, is that really the last institution to see the problem was the church. The last. I mean, that’s just how it’s difficult to square with what we believe about the transformative power of the gospel, Andrew Young tried to integrate the church that I can practically see outside of my window right now in First Baptist Church of Birmingham. And the pastor was fired for letting him in. So that was one of the things that I thought about was, I think, thankfully, there are a lot of differences. But I’m hopeful that as a lot of Northern evangelicalism who have been fans of your work for a long time, read your book, they may understand some of the differences. Yeah, historically that still have some bearing today.

Philip Yancey
Well, I, I wouldn’t even say this. Colin, I would say, one of the strongest proofs for God. And the truth of our faith, is the fact that the black church accepted it. There had to be something here because here they had been enslaved by whites. And, and, and, you know, forbidden to even go to their churches, but some of the rich spirituals, the songs that came out, and the eloquence of Martin Luther King and Andrew Young and others like that, for them to accept the faith of their enslavers is a powerful apologetic about, there’s something there that they found fulfilling, in spite of all the odds against it.

Collin Hansen
In many ways, they they took the religion of their Enslavers, but they truly made it their own, and in many ways found in the pages of God’s word, a pure version of it, that eventually, they then wielded to bring and demand as King talked about those changes. Right church. Right. That is, I think that I think one of the great difficulties of history is that we act as though everything had to be the way that it was. But if you stop and just allow your imagination to take over, and you think about what you just said, that’s one of the most remarkable miracles of all of church history, if not world history.

Philip Yancey
It really is. And not only that, this book, I mentioned a stone, the pope talks about the Maya Lin’s statue, memorizing those who were martyred in civil rights movement, which is in the King Center in Atlanta, and she’s the same one who did the Vietnam Memorial. And there are 40 names there, if I recall correctly. And each one of those is so important. And of course, each one of those is very sad. But when you think of a massive structural change in society that happened in the 1960s, and quote, only 40 people died. That’s remarkable. People were expecting a civil war. I mean, go to South Africa, see how many have died there. But she could they could only come up with 40 verifiable martyrs as a result of their civil rights activity, which is another kind of miracle of history. Truly.

Collin Hansen
Yeah. Oh, wow. And people are definitely getting a taste of, of all the different so many different fascinating elements. I mean, I think so many of us fill up we love a memoir. We love somebody’s story. We love their testimony to God’s grace. I wondered if I wondered if as your as your talk, I don’t know, probably, I don’t know, how many people are able to write to and speak to as many American evangelicals as you do, all over the country. And I’m wondering, do you are you encouraged or discouraged? I mean, as a as a journalist, you and I both are, we’ve kind of got some instincts to be searching for the bad out there the bleed, it leads that kind of stuff. But at the same time, I think one of the premise of this podcast is we keep looking until we see God working. Do you see some evidence for encouragement beyond what people might might assume when they hear about Evan Jellicle today?

Philip Yancey
Well, what makes the news and when we think about a quarter sort of the divisions is, especially the political divisions, and I am alarmed by that. Because anytime in church history when the church gets in bed with the state, the church loses in the long run. It’s, it looks great at the current time. So for example, in Russia right now, you know, the, that’s the most Christian nationalists country in the world. And the Russian Orthodox Church is bought in holy with this war in Ukraine, and Putin, cynically uses them. And that’s what happens, you know, he needs a you need to power base, he’s got one, and they lose their moral foundation. As far as the King used to say, The church isn’t the master of the state, or the servant of the state, it’s the contents of the state. And you’ve got to have that resistance. And we’re so siloed now, with media, some people watch Fox, some people watch CNN, if you watch the two together, it’s like alternate universe, it is, it is in social media, the same thing. So we need to, we need to look not to politics, we need to look to the kingdom of God for our values and for what we believe and I have been disappointed in how the church has handled the pandemic because we haven’t been that representative of the God of all comfort, the Father of compassion that Paul tells us to, we’ve been angry and hostile. And they’ve made things worse in many ways.

Philip Yancey
However, because I am a journalist, like you, you know, I, I can go to the prisons, I can go to the homeless shelters. I know that people like Bryan Stevenson there in Alabama, who has, who is doing a wonderful work with people who are incarcerated wrongly, or Gary Haugen, who runs the International Justice Mission and, and they don’t get usually on the cover of Time magazine. Now, actually, Brian and Gary, kind of do, you know, they’ve been featured in The New Yorker, but they’re they represent millions of, of Christians, including many evangelicals in the United States, who faithfully visit the prisoners, staff, the pregnancy centers, the homeless shelters, support work overseas. And when you get out of the United States to a less political environment, I was talking with Walter Kim, who’s the director of the President of the National Association of Evangelicals. And he had just come back from the world evangelical Congress, he was the only he represented the United States. Each country only gets one representative and he was Americans. And they were ganging up on him. They said, We hear you don’t want to use the name evangelical anymore.

Philip Yancey
Well, maybe it’s been spoiled in your country, but not in our country. Evangelical means good news. And you say that here and people think of clinics and hospitals and schools and, and anti sexual trafficking organizations, you know, that’s what even dug into this. So we’re gonna keep using it, you can do whatever you want. And I like that. And I don’t know what the word word has been staying behind retrieval. But I keep to it, because it does mean good news. And there is a lot of good news happening on the ground. But the media is so divisive and so binary these days, that it does, that message is going out very, very well.

Collin Hansen
And that’s what we’re trying to do with gospel bound. We’re trying to get that good news. Get that good news out there. When we’re bound to the gospel, we abandon hope that’s what we try to try to do on this podcast. I’ve got final three quick questions here with Philippians that we’ve been talking about where the light fell a memoir. I think we already got the the for one of the one of the three questions, Philip, which is where do you find good news today? But how do you find calm in the storm?

Philip Yancey
I’m in the middle of a storm right now. Just trying to stay on top of everything. It is an unusual moment. economically, politically, internationally, there are some potentially fearful things going on. And it’s easy to get all frazzled and I hope back to Psalm 46. When he talks about the mountains are shaking and the oceans are surging, and kingdoms are falling, and it sounds like the New York Times. And, and then it ends with that, that phrase, Be still and know that I am God. And that word in the Vulgate. The Latin translation be still that word is Makati, the same word we get our word vacation from. And it’s like, you know, Martin Luther said one time that when things are bad, pray and let God worry. Well, of course, God doesn’t worry, which is his point. Be still and know that I am God. And at my age, I can look back and see equally fearful times and divisive times back in the 60s. The people like Tim Keller and I live through and, and we survived and our job is not to run the universe. That’s the message that God gave to job. That’s my job. Your job is just to trust me, even when it looks like I didn’t know what I’m doing. Trust me anyway.

Collin Hansen
Amen. Last question, then what’s the last great book you’ve read?

Philip Yancey
The last great book I read was a book by Leon Kass, who’s who’s Jewish. And it’s a book on the book of Exodus. It’s a 700 page book on the book of Exodus almost line by line, exposition and just remarkable. I’m in a book club. I never would have picked it up. If, if it wasn’t required reading in this book club. And it’s it’s something like God’s chosen nation or something. I don’t know the title right offhand. But you could find it easily enough. Leon Kass ke S S. Tim Keller said of this man, i i wish i I wish this had been published when I was preaching through Exodus.

Collin Hansen
That’s true. Well, there we always love to do I make book recommendations and the authors I get to talk to you and then I get to ask the authors about books that they’re reading, and it’s always a fun, fun time there. Mike. My guest this week on gospel bound has been Philip Yancey. Check out his book where the light fell. A Memoir, as I said, a culmination of more than 50 years Francie as a Christian writer, and you’ll learn a lot of that his life and especially about the God who sustained him through it all. I Phillip, thanks for joining me.

Philip Yancey
It’s been my pleasure. Thank you. Good conversation caller.

Collin Hansen
Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of gospel bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter. Head over to tgc.org/gospel bound rate and review gospel bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time, remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we are bound in hope