Eden: I’m excited to get to talk to you today. I typically start our interviews by asking, what are a few things that bring you joy?
Josh Holler: Several things come to mind. One was a joy that I experienced the other night. This last Tuesday was my son’s last—he’s part of a hockey program called “Little Blues Learn to Play.” Saint Louis Blues is the name of the NHL (National Hockey League) team here. And I had one of those moments where I was in my dad’s shoes. My dad would come to all my wrestling practices growing up to the point where I’m like, “Why are you here? Practice is boring. This is stupid. You don’t have to be here, Dad. I don’t need your support. It’s fine. I know you love me.” And I realized how much joy I was having watching my son play. He’s new to hockey, so he’s falling all over the place. They’re like bowling balls into bowling pins—the kids are crashing everywhere. And I think that it’s a bit of a parable of the way the Father delights in his Son just because he says son. I’m going to relate this to a spiritual lesson. At the beginning of Christ’s ministry when he is baptized—this is the beginning; he hasn’t done anything yet—God says, “This is my Son with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). I was having one of those moments watching my son play, realizing that this is how the Father looks at his Son, and even to his spiritual children too. So that’s one of my greatest joys are my kids.
Eden: Oh, lovely. How many kids do you have? You have one son…
Josh Holler: I have five kids. My daughter, who’s ten, I had her, actually, while I was a senior at Wheaton—well, in between junior and senior year. She’s in the fifth grade this year. They just started school yesterday. My son Nathaniel is eight. Malachi will turn six in six days. Micah is three, and my son Daniel will turn three in November. So 3 to 10 years old, very tight, very close spread together.
Eden: So fun. That probably makes for a joyful household—a fun household.
Josh Holler: Yes. It’s very loud. I’m very tired. That’s right.
Eden: I can imagine. I’m one of five, so I can relate.
Is there a part of God’s Word that is especially precious to you?
Josh Holler: The Word is precious to me in general. And usually what tends to be most precious to me is what has gotten me out of or through a certain circumstance. We lived in Saint Louis from 2014 to 2018, and then we moved to Oklahoma, and then we just got back [to St. Louis] in 2021, and when we came back, we walked through—I had a friend that died of cancer. And Psalm 23—probably the most widely quoted psalm—but in particular one little verse of that, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil” (Psalm 23:4 KJV). It’s that word “through.” That the valley of the shadow of death isn’t a “to” place, which the Lord leads us to and then drops us off and that’s it, that’s the end of the story. But it’s a promise that he’ll guide us through that circumstance and that hardship. In this case of my friend, it literally was death, but death isn’t the end. There’s a glorious place that he is at now. And that’s something that I have been nourished by and I’ve clung to especially in the midst of suffering. Sometimes the end of suffering is the end of life. But the end of life isn’t the end of life. So that’s a part of God’s Word that I really treasure.
Eden: Thank you for sharing that. Psalm 23 is one of those that you can go back to at any time, and it never loses its power. Different parts jump out to you at different times. Recently I thought of the verse where it says, “You prepare a table before me in the presence of [my] enemies” (Psalm 23:5). And I had never thought about that verse until I was in a situation where I thought, it’s going to be really difficult to go and be present in this place where there has been strife. And yet I thought, that psalm!, that psalm talks about this, that we’ve known since we were young. Such a blessing.
I would love to talk a little about your book, Redeeming Warriors. I would love to recommend this book to anyone that has served in the military or not. I think it’s helpful to both audiences and I encourage them to read it. But for someone that hasn’t read your book, your book goes into great detail about the story and the message of the Bible. For someone that’s new to the Christian faith, why do you look to the Bible for hope as a veteran? And what does the Bible have to offer?
Josh Holler: Everybody has a story. And that story, until you come to faith in Christ, is incomplete. We may not know where we come from ultimately, or where things are going, or what meaning there is to life. The Bible is the grounding for answering those questions and it provides the answers that complete our story, because it is the greatest story. When I say story, I don’t mean story as in not real. It’s the story of life and creation and everything and where it’s going. I talk through the rubric of creation, fall, redemption, restoration or consummation.
When God grafts us into his family, he grafts us into this story that he’s been writing since before the foundations of the Earth (Ephesians 1:4-5). And it’s the story that can give meaning because it’s true. It validates, encourages, inspires, convicts. It’s the story that we need to submit ourselves to. And the reason I go to the Bible is because it’s God’s Word. It’s the only infallible rule of faith. It’s the only book that is without error. It’s inerrant, infallible, authoritative, breathed out by God and given to us and translated to us so that we can receive it and know God. That’s how he’s revealed himself to us is through his Word, principally so. That’s why I tell the story through the rubric of Scripture. Because Scripture’s our ultimate foundation.
Eden: Amen. I think one of the reasons that what you write is so powerful, too, is that it shows that the story of the Bible, is strong enough and true enough to carry us through the most difficult circumstances in life because it presents to us Jesus—a person that’s with us in those things. But I think your story is so powerful because your faith is very tested in the circumstances that you were in. Yet, you had true hope through all of it. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t less pain, but there was real hope.
You talk in your book also about how people in the military are often told to “suffer in silence.” Can you speak to how that contributes to the pain that many people in the military experience? And then also, if “suffer in silence” is not the right way to think about things, then how would you direct someone instead to deal with their pain?
Josh Holler: I can’t say for certain that that adage, “suffer in silence,” you’ll find in every corridor of the military or every branch. It certainly was a prominent theme. I was in the Marine Corps, in the infantry. Maybe that specific phrase was unique to my company. But the general tenor and theme is prominent: it’s really to bury your own burdens. Suck it up. Move on. There’s a guy, David Goggins, who’s really inspirational for a lot of his—very vulgar language, but—inspirational for a lot of guys because he basically says, “I was just being weak.” Well, there’s a place for that where you do need to get kicked in the butt and move on and get up and get moving. That serves a certain purpose. But it has been over applied and overextended to every area of life to make it that if you do suffer, that you’re weak, and to invalidate any kind of suffering that we have.
Where that has caused a great disservice is when much of our suffering needs to be done in community with others. It goes 100% against the grain of Scripture, which says to “weep with those who weep” and grieve with those who grieve (Romans 12:15). We’re supposed to suffer in community. In fact, that’s one of the things that, ironically, made a lot of the hard things in the military tolerable is the fact that I was suffering with others. When we even just named it. You’re like, “this sucks.” Yes, we have this camaraderie of grief and suffering together.
I think the biggest, detrimental aspect of that is how when somebody exits the service, they have this philosophy, this little ethos, “suffering the silence,” in the back of their mind filed away. They’re already isolated for a variety of circumstances coming out of the military. If they go to college, for example, they’re four, maybe five, maybe eight years older than others. They don’t want to live in the dorms. They’ve seen life; they’ve experienced things. They speak a different language. They’re already disconnected. Then when they experience hardship, they’re outside of community. That’s the worst, most dangerous, most vulnerable place to be that I think exposes one to suicide ideation, depression, isolation that leads to contemplating suicide (see Combatting Veteran Suicide). I think it’s a there’s a place for it, but ultimately it’s not an ethos that needs to be applied everywhere.
Eden: I did not go into some of your history. You joined the Marines right out of high school, and then could you tell us some of your journey from then up until what you’re doing right now?
Josh Holler: Yeah, sure. In 2006, I graduated high school. I joined the Marines out of high school, in part because I didn’t have the grades to go to college. I wanted to get out of my context. I wanted to experience something different than being in western Kansas, where I grew up. So I joined the Marine Corps, joined the infantry. I don’t know if I necessarily wanted the infantry. It’s the open, default option. That’s what I went into. But I wanted to experience something tough. I had been growing up doing sports and wrestling, and I thought, yeah, I could do this. I wanted to rise to that challenge. So I did that. And after you go through basic training in the School of Infantry (United States Marine Corps School of Infantry, S.O.I.), you go to the fleet (The Fleet Marine Force, F.M.F.). And I ended up with 1st Battalion 7th Marines in Twentynine Palms, California, which everybody says, that is the worst place to get stationed anywhere, in part because it’s so isolated. Like the closest thing is Las Vegas, 2.5 hours away, two hours to go to LA, an hour to Palm Springs. There’s not much, in which case there’s a lot of time training. It’s very tough. That’s where everybody does what’s called the “Mojave Viper” or CAX (Combined Arms Exercise). It’s a one-month preparation right before deployment. It’s all done in Twentynine Palms. Well, for us, that was where we trained all the time, which sucked. But that’s just how it was.
So let’s see, I deployed twice to Iraq with my unit, both to Al Anbar. The first time was north of a little tiny town called Dulab, semi-off the Euphrates River, close to Haditha Dam. And the second deployment in 2009, both seven months deployment, was just north of Fallujah. Both relatively quiet deployments. We got shot at a couple times. There were a lot of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) set in our first deployment. A guy got shot once on our second deployment. A couple people were killed in a sister company. But very much, by and large, very blessed to be protected and roll in a lot of these HVTs (High Value Targets), these insurgents. We were actually more proactive, sort of like serving search warrants or arrest warrants. That’s what we were going and doing for these guys. So I did that.
I came off active duty in 2010, and I went to college at Fort Hays State University in Kansas for a year and then I transferred to Wheaton College. My transfer to Wheaton College was in part because I wanted to wrestle. I got a chance to be under Jim Gruenwald. I’d remembered Coach Gruenwald from when I was a kid at a wrestling camp in Colorado Springs, and he was at the Olympic Training Center. And I’m like, he’s a two-time Olympian. This is going to be awesome. And it was. So I got to wrestle with him for two years. It was during that time at Wheaton College that the Lord was calling me to ministry, though I wouldn’t have said it back then. I had an increased appetite for the things the Lord, for apologetics, theology. I was doing an international relations program, but really my favorite classes were the Old Testament Survey and New Testament Survey, where I was more deeply impacted. I left there to go to seminary and Covenant (Covenant Theological Seminary) in 2014. We were here for four years, my wife and I, adding kids along the way. Then took a call to ministry down in Duncan, Oklahoma. We were down there for three years before we came back to a church that we had been a part of up here in Saint Louis. We are in a period of replanting the church, revitalization, and renewal—a really sweet season. And I’ve been here as the lead pastor for a year and four months, I think. Almost a year and a half but not quite. It’s going really well.
Eden: Wonderful. Is there a way that you feel like your military experience informs your life as a pastor now at all?
Josh Holler: That’s a good question. I think it makes me a better pastor in areas of grief and suffering, and certainly for hardships. Also, we’re in this weird moment right now in our culture where our young men, boys, are staying in the home longer after graduation, playing video games. And they need to step up and be men. Part of it is not just to be yelled at, “You need to be a man.” It’s the role of the father to father and disciple their sons into manhood. And I see there’s a lot of good metaphors and analogous things going on in the military that I think have influenced me. I want my men to have strong arms, but I want them to have strong hearts. I think the military served me very well in that purpose. It was a bittersweet time. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But I think it made me a better pastor, more empathetic, especially for those who are non-believers, who have resistance to the faith. The most gospel-saturated, gospel-centered conversations I have had in the last decade have all been with my military friends who don’t believe in the Lord, but they see that I’m a believer now. I don’t think I was a Christian back then. I may have been; I grew up in a Christian home. But they see a change and there’s an open door because we have a friendship and a relationship there. So, yeah, I think it’s made me a better pastor, a better Christian.
Eden: Wonderful. You talked a little bit about grief and how you feel a little more equipped to talk to people who are grieving. How would you say, if someone’s going through a really difficult time of grief—I remember there were a few pointers from your book that you give as to how to deal with grief well—could you speak to some of those?
Josh Holler: Yeah. Grief is an interesting animal. Everybody grieves. Grief drips differently, comes up at different times, different waves. C. S. Lewis’s book A Grief Observed was helpful for articulating the process of grief. Anything can trigger a memory or a moment or a feeling. If you’ve watched somebody die or held somebody’s hand as they’ve died—like my friend who died of cancer—I’m still dealing with that grief in ways that I didn’t know that I’m wounded underneath the surface. And that’s how grief often is. It can come up in a certain memory or trigger. Probably the biggest thing about grief that the church needs to be equipped about, or we need to be aware of, is that we need to be open to name that. That can’t be done unless we’re doing community and doing life together. There are so many people in the church that just under the surface, they’re suffering, they’re hurting. And you can’t see it by looking at people necessarily. And so if you’re doing life together, there’s a redemptive vulnerability to walk alongside somebody. Then you can even win the opportunity to have a conversation to know that somebody’s grieving.
Something that was helpful for me, and I think it’s helpful for others, is just to talk about it, to process the grief. And for the person that’s walking alongside somebody grieving, it’s to listen long. You’re not gushing your wisdom on them. When Job’s friends were at their best, is when their mouths were shut, and they sat with their friend in the ashes (Job 2:11-13). And I think that’s what Christians need to do a lot of time is just go, sit, and be with their friends. And there’s a ministry of presence that is tangible through being physically near somebody.
Eden: One of my last questions is about how to love veterans well. In your book [Redeeming Warriors], you talk briefly about how sometimes it’s difficult to hear, “Thank you for your service,” because you’re thinking eight thoughts at once. There’s a lot of emotions that go along with that. And that caused me to think about how a lot of people that are civilians may not even have any connections to people in the military. So the military language and their experience is very foreign, like a different culture, as you say. Are there ways that you think that civilians could do a better job at loving the veterans that they know?
Josh Holler: Yeah, I think the first thing is we shouldn’t outsource our relationships to veterans as though we are disqualified to know and be friends with vets. What I mean by that is that we have formed—this is true in so many other trends in our culture—we outsource and create ministries and non-profits for every affinity possible. So if there’s a veteran in our midst, we think we should have a veteran’s program at our church or here’s the Wounded Warrior Program. It can become so very niche. And while there are benefits to those kinds of things, the church isn’t meant to look like just one kind of affinity, or one kind of subculture, like the biker church, the cowboy church. There’s every subdivision. We’re meant to be together with each other. We need other people in our lives.
So the first thing is like, hey, you may have a different experience, but this is the person that God has brought you into relationship with in the pew. What I would suggest for approaching a veteran to get to know them. First of all, don’t jump in and say something like, “hey, did you see combat? Did you kill somebody?” You wouldn’t do that at any other area of life. If you met an ER doctor, you wouldn’t say, “hey, did you see anybody die last night?” Very possible. Why would you ask that? You wouldn’t do that. So where we start is very basic. It’s this, “Hey, my name is Josh. What’s your name?” Just baby steps. The next thing is learning their story and their story begins before they ever entered the military.
Something that every veteran struggles with or encounters, at least at some point in their life, is when they come home from being at boot camp or deployed or whatever, and they realize that something has changed in them, that they’ve crossed this line, that they’re not going to go back, where I’m different now than I was before. I’m going to relate to people differently than I ever did before. And that experience is, I don’t have a way to actually quantify this, I would guess 98% of the time veterans have not processed that with somebody else before. That would be something that could be so profitable is to start with the grain of the story. “Where did you grow up?” “Where did you go to high school?” “What kind of sports did you do?” And then move gently into the story of, “Why did you join the military?” “What was it like the first time you came home from boot camp?” “What was that like for you?” “Did your friendships change?” And that’s such a gentler, softer, easier on ramp into getting to know somebody’s story. If we jump right into, “Do you have PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)?” These walls go up. First of all, it’s just weird. It’s improper. It’s obtuse to do something like that. But you need to learn the language and their subculture with them. We go back to the beginning of the story and treat them like they’re another person, because they are another person. Most of the guys that I deployed with are just normal people. Their stories are different. That’s certainly true. But you treat them like a normal person and get to know them. That would be extremely helpful, I think.
Eden: I know that you mentioned A Grief Observed as being an influential book in your life. Typically, I like to ask if there are any resources that have really been transformative in your walk with the Lord. Are there any books that you would say have been really instrumental in your life?
Josh Holler: Yeah, similar to the question about a favorite Scripture or a more influential Scripture, this one’s a hard one to answer as well, because usually it’s the book that I’m reading. But one of my more enduring favorites is The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. And it was a favorite of [Charles] Spurgeon’s. He read it over 100 times in his life. This will be my second time through. Then Derrick Thomas has a wonderful teaching on it at Ligonier Ministry (The Pilgrim’s Progress: A Guided Tour Teaching Series). I have found Bunyan’s lessons on life so profitable for the soul because he’s able to put a finger upon the different challenges of temptations of sin, your assurance being assaulted, the different battles we are faced with, the different reliefs and moments of comfort that the Lord brings at times. Right now I’m going through The Pilgrim’s Progress again, and that’s an enduring favorite of mine, for sure.
Eden: Awesome. Yes, The Pilgrim’s Progress is a treasure for sure.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for listening to our podcast today. If you enjoyed our conversation, I would encourage you to like or subscribe to our podcast so that you can hear the next conversation. And if something that you heard today spoke to your heart or got you thinking, I would encourage you to not let the day go by without talking to God about what’s on your mind. We believe that he loves you and that he’s pursuing you today out of that love.