Eden: Well, thank you so much for being willing to come on the call. I like to begin our interviews getting to know you a little bit, helping our audience learn a little bit about you. I’d love to start with hearing what are a couple of things that bring you joy?
Tim Challies: What brings me joy? My daughters bring me joy. Michaela and Abby are both great sources of joy to my life, not to mention my wife, Aileen. People are probably the most joyful things we get to encounter in life. And then my local church as well. I’ve really been reflecting lately on the beauty—the necessity—of the local church. I’m so thankful that the Lord allows us to go through the Christian life together rather than alone. I don’t think we could do it on our own. There’s such joy and love to be found in the context of the church.
Eden: Yes. If you were to spend an afternoon with your daughters, what do you guys enjoy doing together?
Tim Challies: Well, we just love to explore. We like to go to new places and explore, see what there is to see, find new things, new experiences, new foods, new locations, all that is great fun.
Eden: Awesome. Are you guys hikers? Are you more road trip?
Tim Challies: Yeah, we like to just go. So, spend lots of time driving if we need to but see lots of things. I like to go fast anyways, not linger in one place but go from place to place. Keep on the move.
Eden: That’s very cool. I’m sure you’ve made tons of cool memories at all those new places.
Tim Challies: We have. We’ve done lots of neat things together and hopefully lots more to go.
Eden: Very cool.
So you talked about how your church brings you joy. Are you involved right now at your church? What is your life ministry right now? What does the Lord have you doing these days?
Tim Challies: Yeah, I’m involved in my church. I’m an elder there. I love serving in that way. I was on staff for about five years, as one of the full-time pastors. I’ve since rotated off so I can focus on my core vocation. I just couldn’t keep doing both—the core vocation being writing. So I blog first (Challies.com). That’s my main thing in life and then write books and maybe speak at conferences from time to time as I’m able. But a writer is who I am, what I do vocationally.
Eden: Awesome. When about in life did you sense that writing would be your life vocation?
Tim Challies: I always loved writing. Even as a kid, I did a lot of it and all the way through my education, I did a lot of writing. So it was always a joy. It wasn’t until I’d been married for a few years and found myself in a church where I wasn’t quite sure what we were hearing—if it was true, or if it was useful or not. And it was in that context—probably when I was about my mid 20s—that I started writing my way through some of those questions. That was around the time that lots of people were having similar questions about a certain model of church, meanwhile, examining Christian doctrine, the history of Christian doctrine, certain aspects of theology, and so I was thinking those things through at the same time. Along the way, people started reading some of my stuff because they were having the same questions. And even if they didn’t fully agree with the answers, at least there was something to go off and to agree or disagree with.
Eden: Neat. Is that how your blog developed? Did you start posting those personal reflections online and noticing that people would read?
Tim Challies: Yeah, that was exactly it. And blogs back then, it was a new thing. People still were excited about them. Everybody was trying it. Everybody was doing it. It was a new form of media, something fun to try. And I started it for fun, just to see if I would enjoy it and if there would be any benefit to doing it. Along the way, I developed a real passion for it and really came to enjoy that style of writing. I’ve been doing it daily ever since.
Eden: Very neat. You have hundreds of articles on your site. You’ve written a number of books. Do you have a favorite piece of writing or something that you cling to as, “Man, I’m really proud of this work and thankful that I had the time to do it.”
Tim Challies: Yeah, I think the book called Seasons of Sorrow, I think that’s the one that most captures what I want to be as a writer. It came out of a real place of difficulty and sorrow, and I think was a real expression of my heart in a way. I’ve been trying to express myself all these years, but the context of that book gave me a bit of an outlet where I could finally write in the way I’ve wanted to write for all this time. I’m hoping that reflects me as a writer more than anything I’ve done.
I would love to hear more about that, to hear about your book. Could you tell us briefly what led you to write that?
Tim Challies: Yeah. The book is called Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God. In November 2020, my son (Nick)—he was a seminary student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, newly engaged—he very suddenly collapsed and died of an undiagnosed heart condition. That devastated my family, of course. It was just extremely, extremely painful and difficult. And in the aftermath of that, really as soon as it happened, I found myself needing to write in order to process it, in order to try to understand what had happened and what was God’s involvement in it, and how was God calling me to respond? I didn’t know what to do but to write. Writing is how I think. I have to think through my keyboard in that sense. So I started writing and over the year that followed, I wrote a long series of reflections. Again, just trying to wrap my mind around what had happened and that really led to the book. The book is really comprised of those reflections. So it follows me real time from that first night, having just received the news, all the way till the one-year anniversary of Nick’s death.
Eden: Wow. I really admire your courage to share what you wrote as well, because I imagine that that’s a really difficult thing to do. And yet, like you mentioned about the church, one of the blessings of knowing Jesus is that we walk with other people that have suffered. Your act of writing that is a tremendous gift to the church, and I know will be.
Tim Challies: I hope so. And one thing you notice when you’ve gone through a loss like this is many others have as well. The loss of a child is still relatively rare at this stage of history. But you don’t have to go too far back in history to find when it was really common, really prevalent, and even today, more so than we would think. We’ve been in touch with quite a number of parents who have endured that same loss. And then many other people who are enduring losses of their own—all sorts of sorrows and losses. We don’t escape this life unscathed. So I’m hopeful there’s a message there for all of us, whether it’s death we’re grappling with—the death of a child, death of a spouse, death of a parent—or just the general sorrows that life brings.
Eden: You mentioned that initially, and I read somewhat on your blog that, of course, that’s a really disorienting experience. Dr. Mark Talbot, in his book on suffering (When the Stars Disappear), he writes about how a cataclysmic amount of sorrow typically makes us look at the future as though there’s no hope or that life will never be the same. And yet also that God’s Word helps to reorient us in our suffering. You mentioned that writing was an outlet for you, and something that really helped you deal with the pain in the grieving process as you brought your grief to the Lord. And as you wrote, were there other things that you learned through that experience of how we should deal with suffering, or what’s a healthy way to deal with sorrow when it becomes disorienting?
Tim Challies: I think in our sorrow we have to choose whether we’re going to take God at his word or not. And when our hearts are broken, it’s natural, I think, for us to have to think through, “Do I really believe this stuff? Am I really going to enact the faith that I claim to have in this moment? Is my faith good enough for everything else except for this?” And that’s where we do see a lot of people who, in their deepest sorrow, they’re made a whole lot better by it, or they’re made a whole lot worse by it. They run toward the Lord and say, “I’m placing myself in your hands.” Or they run straight away and say, “Hey, I didn’t sign up for this. As long as God’s giving me what I want anyways, then I’m good with this whole Jesus thing. But as soon as he’s taking away or taking something I didn’t agree to, then I’m out of here.” I think in those moments we really have to choose, are we going to believe this and are we going to trust that God really is good even when it’s so hard to see any good in a situation?
Eden: As you look at what you wrote, was it more along the lines of reaffirming that truth to yourself through writing and exercising that faith? Or was it more asking the Lord to reestablish that faith? Or what would you say? How would you describe your reflections?
Tim Challies: All of the above, I would say when we’re initially blindsided by grief, it is very disorienting in the sense that you enter into a state of shock or something, where for a time you just don’t have clarity of mind. And over the course of even a year, though, you really do gain more clarity. And so the questions you’re asking in the early days are quite different from the ones you’re asking a year on, hopefully. And you do see that sense of progress. And by the end of the year, hopefully you’re seeing quite a bit of light in the horizon, if not at the end of the tunnel. You’re really starting to emerge from that darkness and starting to feel more confident again in life and so on. But I think people will trace that progress over the course of the book.
Eden: You mention in it that it’s grappling with the sorrow but also experiencing God’s comfort in how he has come to your aid in your grief. So I would love to hear, practically speaking, how has God run to bring you comfort? And what has that looked like for you and your wife and your daughters?
Tim Challies: Yeah, God certainly does bring us comfort in our time of need, and he promises he’ll be there for us. He makes many promises in Scripture that he’s not going to abandon us or forsake us in our trials (Hebrews 13:5). The way he reaches to us—you know, we might want the voice from the skies or something that says, “It’s all going to be okay,” or “Here’s why I did it,” and God isn’t in the habit of doing that for us. But he does send his people. He says people are his body—Christ’s body here on earth (1 Corinthians 12:27). So people come alongside us, and they speak truth to us. And I think we’re right to understand that as God ministering truth to us through his people or people come alongside and hug us and we can take that as God reaching out his arms to hug us (2 Corinthians 1:3-4). And so I think a lot of the comfort we get comes from God, just mediated by people who can carry out his acts of service—which is a challenge for all of us when somebody is grieving to represent God to those people, to bring his Word, to bring his courage, to bring his comfort as best we can.
We had some really interesting situations; some we might label coincidences or something where God just very clearly and powerfully met us in our grief and comforted us. So God was very kind to us. And one of the realities of being a Christian is that you should never be without joy. And so even as you’re deep in sorrow, there is still joy as we miss our son. But our son is in heaven, and that’s way better for him. And so being able to have that comfort that, “No, God is good. We’re proud of our son. We love him. He’s gone where we long to be,” etc. There truly is joy as well. The thing is we never have to remind ourselves to feel our sorrows, but we do have to remind ourselves to feel our joys. Pushing ourselves to embrace the joys in the situation and see that good in it as well.
Eden: I love what you just said there. That is very true. We don’t have to try to be sad. But joy does not come quite as naturally to us. That’s why we need the Spirit in our heart (Galatians 5:22).
Tim Challies: Right. And that’s why we have to recall those truths to mind. We have to keep bringing to mind what’s true and allowing the truth to shape our emotions, not the other way around. And a lot of people in their grief allow their emotions to run rampant and then modify what they previously said to be true. What we need to do in our grief is say, “I know this is true. I know God is good. So therefore, God hasn’t been bad at all in this situation. There’s no evil in God. He’s done nothing wrong (Deuteronomy 32:4). This is his right. And so I’m going to import all of that and modify my emotions by what I know to be true.” That becomes real discipline in times of great grief and sorrow, but a discipline that really does bring comfort and help.
Eden: I also enjoyed what you had to say about the church and how they are a means of God’s comfort, and that does take a level of humility to express our griefs to others and let them be that means of God’s comfort, because often in grief, it’s easy to isolate and feel like you’re burdening someone else, or other people have sorrows, too. But we encounter a real blessing when we are willing to share our sorrows, because we will find the comfort of the Lord in other people.
Tim Challies: Yeah. No, very much so. And I think it is pride often that keeps us—we don’t want to annoy people. We don’t want to seem needy. We don’t want to seem whiny. And so we don’t share with others what’s really going on in our hearts, and therefore we deny them the opportunity to bless us, to minister to us. And but if we open up, then that gives an opportunity for God to speak through those people or to bring his comfort through those people. And I think that becomes a real responsibility on us in our sorrows.
Eden: Yeah, absolutely.
Typically I like to ask what is a book, other than the Bible, that has deeply transformed your life that you would recommend to someone? I know there must be many. You write many book reviews that are excellent. But maybe to a newer believer, someone that just came to know the Lord.
Tim Challies: I would always recommend The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul. I think there’s a great temptation at the heart of humanity to define God through ourselves. So to see God as just like us but just a little bit more so. And the beauty of a book like The Holiness of God is Sproul really defines God through Scripture as God reveals himself. And then we see God is other. God is not just a big, big man. He is of an entirely different order. And Sproul shows us that by showing us God in his holiness, this is transcendent holiness. So I always recommend that book to new believers.
And then The Discipline of Grace by Jerry Bridges has played a huge role in my life, emphasizing the centrality of the gospel in the Christian life. People talk quite a lot now about gospel-centered or gospel hyphenated this and that, and that’s fine. But I think Bridges was one of the very first to be speaking about that and about preaching the gospel to yourself day by day and just really building your life upon the good news of the gospel. He was really emphasizing Christians need the gospel as much as unbelievers. We need those truths to shape not just our salvation, but our day to day sanctification, our existence. And so I really recommend that book to people as well. It’s one that you read once, and then you’re probably going to want to read it a few more times over the course of your life just to refresh.
Eden: It’s interesting that I think there have been at least three interviews where someone mentions a Jerry Bridges book and I think he was a gifted man.
Tim Challies: He was.
Eden: He wrote some great things.
Tim Challies: Yeah, he did. A dear, sweet man who wrote some good books and left behind a faithful legacy. And who could ask for more than that?
Eden: Absolutely. Well, are there any projects on the horizon that you’re excited about after this book releases, or is that still something you’re thinking through?
Tim Challies: I’m working on a graphic novel for the life of Eric Liddell (Eric’s Greatest Race: The Inspiring True Story of Eric Liddell—Athlete, Missionary, Prisoner), which I’m looking forward to. It’s an entirely different medium for me, something I’ve never done before. So I’m working with an artist to do that and I’m excited to see what will become of it. That’s about it. Just starting to ponder the next book or the next books and see what comes to mind.
Eden: Okay. Very cool.
Thank you so much for taking the time to share a little about your life and the deep work that God has done in you. I’m so sure that this book (Seasons of Sorrow) will be a huge blessing to the church and to anyone that reads it.
Tim Challies: Thank you.
Eden: 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.