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Embracing Our Seasons of Sorrow with Tim Challies
375 Plays11 months ago
In this episode of Straight to the Heart, our host Rush Witt, enjoys a conversation with pastor, author, and blogger, Tim Challies. They talk about Tim’s prolific work, his family, and the death of his son Nick, which Tim discusses in his book, Seasons of Sorrow. Tim’s faith and hope in God shine as a comfort and example to all of us.
TIM CHALLIES ONLINE
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MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God
Someone I Know Is Grieving by Edward T. Welch
A Small Book for the Hurting Heart by Paul Tautges
Learn more about the podcast here.
Timestamps:
1:35 - Intro
3:10 - Worship Around the World
7:30 - Tim Challies and Church Life
9:20 - Trusting God in The Death of Nick Challies
22:20 - How Seasons of Sorrow Helped Tim Challies Grieve and Hope in Christ
29:25 - How the Challies Family Stays Strong In Hope
33:00 - Tim Challies' Broader Life and Interests
37:55 - Farewell
Recommended
Transcript
Grace in Suffering
00:00:00
Speaker
And of course, all the grace that no, God gives us grace moment by moment and day by day. So sort of want to encourage people by if you are called to suffer, God will give you the grace to endure that suffering in that moment, but you shouldn't expect really to have it before them.
Podcast Introduction
00:00:18
Speaker
I'm Rush Witt, and you're listening to Straight to the Heart, a podcast from New Growth Press. Each episode includes thought provoking conversations with leading Christian writers and thinkers. We hear who they are,
00:00:30
Speaker
what they believe, how they approach their work in ministry, and the moments and people who have changed their lives. In Straight to the Heart, we go beyond the books to connect with the remarkable people behind them. We're well into our second season, so thank you for listening to, sharing, and subscribing to Straight to the
Conversation with Tim Challies
00:00:49
Speaker
Heart.
00:00:49
Speaker
Today, I enjoyed a conversation with pastor, author, and blogger Tim Chalise. Well, let's be honest. Tim is not just a blogger. For many years, he's been the blogger at chalise.com, where he's blogged for nearly 10,000 consecutive days. We talk about Tim's prolific work, his family, and the death of his son, Nick, in 2020, which Tim discusses in his book, Seasons of Sorrow.
00:01:17
Speaker
Tim's faith and hope in God shines as a comfort and example to all of us in this week's episode.
Health Challenges Discussion
00:01:24
Speaker
This is Straight to the Heart. So, how are you feeling? Are you feeling good? I know in the past when we've interacted some, you were going through some issues with your hands and joints and things.
00:01:45
Speaker
How have you been feeling more recently? Yeah, uh, really the, the pans thing is just not getting any better. It's just brutal, but I'm sorry, seems like, uh, you know, prayed about it, uh, left it with the Lord doesn't seem to be getting fixed. So it seems like something he just wants me to live with for the time being. So I'm more now just pray that we'll be able to type for a few hours and
00:02:10
Speaker
you know, do that for a day rather than having it go away. And he seems to be able to do that. So it's been a weird one though. Yeah, it sounds that way. Is it, uh, is it that kind of thing where you can get so much kind of out of your hands and then it just becomes too painful? What, what are the symptoms like? Yeah, that sort of thing. And you know, I could go on heavy duty drugs to mitigate the pain, but then I won't have a mind to be able to write anyway. So, so it's fine. I, you know, is what it is.
00:02:40
Speaker
So just, you know, kind of press on. It does, you know, limit what I could write, but then my mind does as well and other things that life do. So, you know, I won't ever have the output of some people that that's OK. Yeah, and I'm sure, you know, I and many, many other people continue praying for you and maybe something will change in the future. But your perspective on it is encouraging and good reminder to me in
00:03:06
Speaker
in the things that I go through. And I was thinking today about our conversation and, uh, remind you, you saw some friends of mine in Thailand recently.
Global Travels and Worship
00:03:16
Speaker
How, how was that trip? It was good. That was, so I was between locations. We filmed an episode of our documentary in Australia and one in South Korea, and I had nothing to do for a couple of days. So I thought, well, where could I go just to spend some time, something where somebody would fly it anyways, it was no more expensive to stop halfway.
00:03:36
Speaker
And so, uh, but no, let's go to Thailand and know a couple of people there. Yeah. And you're traveling again soon. You, you are doing a lot of, a lot of traveling and I actually, that's been a historic for you, right? Because I remember watching, uh, some of your church history videos and, uh, what's happening with your travel now. So you've, you've going around, you're working on the documentary. I'd love to hear more about that.
00:04:00
Speaker
Yeah, the documentary is called Worship Around the World. The idea is we're going to 12 different countries and each one of them we're worshipping with a church that's true to the gospel based on scripture, but also embedded in its own culture. And so what we're looking for is how is the church the same and different based on cultural matters. And so we went to Cambodia and went to a
00:04:27
Speaker
tiny little rural church. I mean, a village with no electricity, no running water. The gospel is relatively new there. The small language groups, they have to develop all their own hymns and everything else. So how are they doing? What does that look like? And then South Korea, where the gospel has been there for just over 100 years, really in force. And how do they worship in ways that are different from what we'd expect? And
00:04:52
Speaker
Uh, yeah, just lots of, lots of things like that. So it's been a really interesting journey. We've got seven out of 12 done. Next week we had to Zambia and then Morocco. So that'll be two more or North Africa and publicly heading to Zambia, North Africa. And, uh, yeah, then we'll be in the home stretch and just have three left.
00:05:12
Speaker
Wow, that's really amazing. Are you the kind of person who travels and likes to keep track, like pins on a map and of all the places that you've been, or you have kind of a bucket list of places you'd really love to see? And if so, like how far into that are you? Because you've been traveling a lot, so going to be checking some off.
00:05:32
Speaker
Yeah, I don't have a list of places I would like to go really. I do have a list of all the places I've been and all the places where I've eaten at McDonald's. So that's up to 37. Wow. Yeah. And I should be adding three in the next couple of weeks. So, you know, it'll be a nice round number of 40.
00:05:54
Speaker
Yeah. Other than that, what I tend to track more is airline miles and stuff, you know, just travel gets so much easier as you gain status with airlines. So why not carefully track that and climb the ladder there and then suddenly find yourself flying in the front, the pointy part of the plane instead of the wide part of the plane, which is always the most common part. It matters.
00:06:15
Speaker
Those are great opportunities to see the world. Not everybody has those opportunities. When you are older and telling kids and grandkids stories of travels, do you have maybe one trip that just really stands out in your mind of it was just particularly sweet to you or meaningful or clarified something in your life?
00:06:40
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. I've benefited so much by being around other Christians. And what I really try to do is go and listen and learn more than to go and impose my cultural presuppositions on other churches. And I think there's been a lot of benefit in that because our first instinct can be, oh, that's wrong. And it might be. I don't want to be all condescending.
00:07:04
Speaker
And they might be wrong, but more often you you listen and you learn you may start to think oh, that's why they do it So now I know what they're talking about now I don't want it to be concerned that maybe they've you know jettisoned some good theology that sort of thing so and yeah going to different Countries that you know I'm going to churches where they truly are serving the Lord It's yeah, it turns some things topsy-turvy in really helpful ways.
00:07:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, that's very interesting. Tell me about your church.
Multicultural Church Challenges
00:07:32
Speaker
What's your church like? Kind of the church culture, your role? Yeah, Toronto is an endlessly fascinating city. So Canada is bringing in a lot of immigrants now. So about half a million immigrants per year in a country of about 40 million people. So in terms of
00:07:32
Speaker
I
00:07:52
Speaker
the quantity measured against the population. It's a huge amount that are coming in and it's almost entirely white collar kind of immigration. So it's businesses and you know really trying to grow Canada's white collar.
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah, sector. And so a lot of those people are immigrating in from India as the main one, of course, lots of people from the Philippines, lots of people from the Middle East, etc. And a lot are coming in with their faith or they're coming in and getting saved. And so anywhere in Canada, especially in the big cities, you're now more likely to meet somebody who was either they or their parents immigrated to Canada. And in our church, that would certainly be reflected. And so it's massively multicultural and
00:08:38
Speaker
About 200 members of the church, so not a huge church. Still a good size one. We don't have our own building, can't afford our own building. Real estate in Toronto is astronomically expensive. More and more we're finding people can't even live in the city, so families tend to move on, move out, go out to the country or go to a different province where things are cheaper. And that's an issue we're running into as a church and trying to reason our way or work our way around that. How do we keep people in the city?
00:09:05
Speaker
But yeah, the church is about 25 years old. The Lord's blessed us in so many ways and churches, I think, very unified. And yeah, God's just doing doing a lot of good through that church, I think.
00:09:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's really great.
Family's Journey After Loss
00:09:19
Speaker
Tim, I, many people, of course, were really sad and sorry to hear about the death of your son, Nick. I think we're coming up on about three years. And I wanted to just to ask how your family is doing now, um, three years later. And, and you know, as you reflect on that, I wonder what has helped your family through such a difficult time. Yeah, thank you. Um, we, we have two children at boys now.
00:09:47
Speaker
My daughter is there still in her senior year. She's married and living in the married housing on campus. And then my youngest daughter is a freshman at boys. So we still have strong connections to the school and are so thankful for it. It's been such a tremendous blessing for our children. Yeah, so it's been almost three years and I think my family is doing well by God's grace. We have obviously the early days were almost unbearably
00:10:17
Speaker
painful and just discombobulating and just learning to carry such a heavy grief. But I think we all saw God's hand in it and we, I think as a family and as individuals, just chose to really bow the knee to God in it, to submit to His will and to worship Him through it, to just look for evidences of His kindness and His grace through it and to receive those as God's love and God's care for us.
00:10:46
Speaker
And I think one of the important disciplines was to just really submit our emotions to truth. Our temptation is always to do the other way, to say, I'm feeling this, therefore, this must be true about God. But again, I think just all of us very carefully thought, no, we're going to believe what's true about God and then submit our emotions, submit our feelings to that. So three years on, of course we miss Nick, of course we
00:11:16
Speaker
find ourselves sometimes just longing for simpler or more innocent days before we knew that such a great grief could come upon us. But I think we all have our sights set on heaven in different ways and we're attempting to just really live well here while also longing to be with Christ and to be with Nick.
00:11:37
Speaker
Wow. Well, thanks for sharing that with me. And on this this time that we have together, I really appreciate it. I know that, you know, we all know that living in the world in which we live, which is sometimes seems full of sorrow that no matter what podcast it is or what conversation or who we're interacting with, we are around people who are who are going through serious grief and difficulty. And and so I wonder
00:12:07
Speaker
In those, you said earlier that in the, obviously the early season then of that grief is almost unbearable. What were some of the things that carried you as a dad through that? And if you look back, I mean, I was really just personally encouraged and helped, I think, in what, in my memory, were the early days then.
00:12:35
Speaker
three years ago that you were expressing some of your thoughts and grief in writing and on your blog. And I just I remember reading some of those things and just being just so impacted and taking away such an example that I felt was helpful to me of how to handle something heavy. And so I just wonder what kind of things as you look back were really instrumental for you personally.
Finding Solace in Books
00:13:04
Speaker
So I think one of the big things I found in that time was friends. I found friends in the pages of books. And there were friends who guided me, friends from the 1800s largely, who really guided me through those days. And that was an era where the death of a child was more common, more known. Every pastor was helping church members through that or helping their own families through that.
00:13:29
Speaker
There were people there who really served as steady guides in terms of what you might be feeling and how to process that. But then also helping me understand what to do with my grief and really calling me, calling
00:13:48
Speaker
anyone who grieves to accept it as God's will, accept it as God's providence, and then to use that in some way to bless others. So that wasn't what led to writing a book. I mean, I didn't start thinking right away, I need to write a book about this. What I started thinking about was just how can I express this in ways that are true, but may be helpful to others.
00:14:14
Speaker
And really, all I was doing in that time was communicating other people's thoughts, but just process through my own grief and my own interpretation. Beyond that, of course, there were people in our local church who were so helpful, people in our neighborhood who were so helpful, who cared for our needs, administered to us. But for all that, this was still relatively early COVID and a lot of lockdowns and other things. We had traveled, and so we were
00:14:45
Speaker
and living in a neighborhood with lots of spies and lots of people who would out us if anyone transgressed the rules. So we were really, yeah, we had to be, we were on our own an awful lot more than we ever would have thought possible. My family's stuck on, they all live in America, so they're stuck on the other side of the border, et cetera. So that's why books were maybe more important than they would have been if it had been a time of more normalcy back then.
00:15:05
Speaker
Stuck in her home for weeks at a time and so
00:15:17
Speaker
In this episode, Tim Chalise and I have been discussing his book Seasons of Sorrow, The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God. On November 3, 2020, the Chalise family received the shocking news that their son Nick had died. A 22-year-old student, he had been participating in a school activity with his fiancée, sister, and friends when he fell unconscious and collapsed to the ground.
00:15:42
Speaker
Neither students nor a passing doctor nor paramedics were able to revive him. His parents received the news at their home in Toronto and immediately departed for Louisville to be together as a family. While on the plane, Tim began to process his loss through writing, just as we have been discussing today. In Seasons of Sorrow, Tim shares real-time reflections from the first year of grief.
00:16:07
Speaker
Introducing readers to what he describes as the ministry of sorrow. Seasons of sorrow will benefit both those who are working through sorrow or those who are comforting others.
00:16:17
Speaker
I want to really encourage you to consider this book so that you can see how God is sovereign over loss and that he is good in loss and to understand how it is possible to love God more after loss than you even loved him before. Tim Chalice helps us with all of this through his book, Seasons of Sorrow, the Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God, available now.
00:16:45
Speaker
Did you know where those friends and books were when you went to read? Did you have a time where you knew or wanted to find those friends and you knew where to find them already because you have such a breadth of reading experience or were there new things recommended to you or was it more of a hunt trying to find truth that was particularly helpful to you? How did you find those friends?
00:17:14
Speaker
Yeah, a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. So I already had made friends with J.R. Miller, who was a late 1800s author. He was a devotional writer, largely wrote for periodicals and so relatively short form writing. His books are really just collections of his essays on various topics.
00:17:38
Speaker
I had already read a lot of his material, so I knew to go looking there. Same with Theodore Kyler. He had been super important to me already. And then they sort of led me to others. That said, for at least one person I wrote to a person I knew had deep knowledge of, of all things, Presbyterian writers in the late 1800s, which is what both of those men were. So I thought, well, maybe there's more of them. And he led me to a couple of others.
00:18:06
Speaker
who are super helpful as well. So yeah, it was a bit of knowledge I already had and then a little bit of asking around.
00:18:16
Speaker
I like that metaphor, I suppose it's a metaphor or analogy for friends and books, those voices that have spoken into your life. And just in general, in your life, do you have one best friend in terms of voices in books that you've read or figures from the past? And I wonder why that friend is your best friend.
00:18:40
Speaker
J.R. Miller's had probably more impact on me than anyone in terms of how I think about life and how I interpret circumstances. So J.R. and James Russell Miller, pastor in America in the late 1800s and the very early 1900s, and again, a lot of devotional writing, by which I mean just writing that's really to the heart and really meant to
00:19:03
Speaker
He wasn't a theological writer as much as he was just helping you live the Christian life, helping you live for God's glory and the circumstances of your life. And so I think he's made a deeper impact on me than just about anyone. Another one who's been really important maybe over the last couple of years is DeWitt Talmadge. He was also a Presbyterian preacher in the US in that era and really, really well known in his day, but almost entirely forgotten in our own day.
00:19:33
Speaker
reading my way through his 500 best sermons and just has been such a tremendous blessing and challenge to me. So yeah, but J.R. Miller, when I'm in heaven, when I can start meeting the people who have been so important to me and less such an influence on my life, he's going to be pretty close to the top there. People all want to
00:19:56
Speaker
get a coffee with if that's something we do in heaven. Amazing. Yeah, I hope so. Just thank him and just hear from him. If I wanted to get familiar with J.R. Miller, which I'm not very, I know the name, what would you recommend would be a good starting place for me in terms of his writing?
00:20:12
Speaker
Yeah, since his writing was largely article-based, you can go just about anywhere and you can just Google it, J.R. Miller, and that's what you're going to find is his articles. So I would just start there. That way there's no cost of entry. You could go to Amazon or something and find a Kindle version, most of which are very badly done, kind of cheap knockoff stuff, as so many classic Kindle works are.
00:20:36
Speaker
But yeah, just Google it. You'll find some of his material and just start reading and see if he resonates with you as he did with me.
00:20:44
Speaker
To echo something I was getting at earlier in terms of your influence on so many of us and your continued influence into the future, you are not to overwork that metaphor, but you are one of those voices. You're one of those friends that people have come to respect your
00:21:07
Speaker
your input in writing and in other ways. And certainly your voice in Seasons of Sorrow I'm sure is that kind of voice. And by the way, I really am struck by that picture of friends in books. And I find that to be such an interesting and helpful way to look at actually the work of writing books.
00:21:31
Speaker
If we were to think more carefully of ourselves in that way, I've written some. I don't know that I've thought that way. I've thought more like a counselor, which of course is friends or counselors, but more like a counselor and how I might counsel someone. But I'm going to need to think more carefully about how I could be a good friend on paper.
00:21:55
Speaker
I've wanted to ask you in terms of writing Seasons of Sorrow, how that process worked for you and how it was an encouragement to you in a dark time. What was that like, kind of working through that and those thoughts as you said on paper that others could benefit from?
Writing as Grief Processing
00:22:21
Speaker
Yeah, Seasons of Sorrow didn't begin as a book. It began as just me working through what was going on and then just putting it out on the blog or just putting it on my computer. The way I work through things is to write about them. I'm not very good at just sitting and thinking. I need to sit, think, write. There's a kind of trio, triad, triad there.
00:22:48
Speaker
That's how i think is by writing things out of the brain capacity to think and remember i just think and forget so i think i write and that's how we're doing so that's what i was doing in the early days of that grief and it wasn't until some months after when i've been writing a fair bet and just sort of.
00:23:08
Speaker
putting those things out there that I thought well maybe I could just compile this into a book. The other thing was I just thought I can only write about this so much on the blog. I can't make my entire blog about processing this loss. You know there's other things I want to talk about not everybody wants to read all of that and but I had so much more I wanted to write about what to say so it was going to become of all that
00:23:32
Speaker
writing, well eventually I thought I'll just put it in a book or at least consider putting it in a book and that way I still have a goal for writing it. So it really was just my meditation, my time with the Lord, my time of thinking things through, my time with processing grief. I'm an external processor but not verbally. I do it through the written word.
00:23:53
Speaker
In my experience, limited experience with you, you've always been responsive. There have been a couple of times that I've emailed you and even way back, but probably about something about the blog and you've always been really responsive and reachable.
00:24:09
Speaker
And I wonder what kind of response you have gotten from those who have read Seasons of Sorrow. Do you have people who reach out to you after reading it and share kind of the grief that you have helped them through or what was particularly impactful to them?
Reader Feedback and God's Sovereignty
00:24:27
Speaker
I've had a lot of feedback from it, which has been really encouraging, and I did do my best to make public
00:24:33
Speaker
especially if you've endured the loss of a child, please do reach out to me about to be available to you for that. And that's led to lots of phone calls and lots of just interaction and engagement with people specifically who have lost the child. And then more general interaction and feedback from people who have just experienced other sorrows or other losses. So I think people have found what I wrote just identifiable. I think I've often been describing something that's a common experience
00:25:04
Speaker
But not everyone is a writer or a processor like that. So not everybody can articulate it. And I think I've practiced articulating the inner man a fair bit. And so I think that's been helpful to people. They've been able to say, yeah, I can relate to that. And that helps me as I process my own grief or something like the manifesto I included in that, just a manifesto of suffering.
00:25:27
Speaker
I think other people have really grabbed hold of that and I put it out there so people could copy and paste it and change it and insert their own names and their own particulars and make it their own. I think that's helped people as well, especially people who, there are two negative reviews. I just looked earlier. I don't usually look at the feedback on my books or reviews of my book, but on Amazon, there's two negative reviews and both of them are from people who are fine with the book, but they hate Calvinism. They hate that I'm,
00:25:55
Speaker
reformed or Calvinistic in my understanding of God's sovereignty. But for people who share that conviction, I think they found it very helpful too, in terms of saying, I'm convinced God was involved in this. I'm convinced this was God's will, and I'm convinced that all things are working for good. And that doesn't mean we need to like it, if you will, or it doesn't mean we need to rejoice at the event itself, but it means we can
00:26:23
Speaker
see God's hand in it and we must submit to God in it and then look for the meaning God has for it or what God calls us to in it. If you're finding this episode helpful, and I'm sure you are, two more book recommendations. First, someone I know is grieving, and second, a small book for the hurting heart. When someone is grieving, it can be hard to know what to say or do. We want to be helpful, not hurtful, but it's easy to go wrong.
00:26:52
Speaker
The good news is that we can learn to approach those who are grieving with the same compassion that Jesus shows us when we're grieving. It starts with humility and listening well and expands into practical support as the Spirit leads us. In Someone I Know Is Grieving, Edward T. Welch leans on his many years of counseling grieving people to help readers learn from their compassionate Savior how to respond to people's sadness in hard times without advice or trying to fix it.
00:27:22
Speaker
but to instead hear their story, learn from others' experiences, and depend on the Spirit for wisdom for what to say and do. And the second book is a small book for the hurting heart by Paul Talches. Grief may threaten to overtake us or destroy our joy. And in this powerful devotional book, men and women will see Jesus, the man of sorrows, who is well acquainted with grief and sadness.
00:27:48
Speaker
Author and pastor Paul Touches offers our comforting high priest, sharing how the Holy Spirit ministers to our hurting heart through the healing balm of God's word graciously applied to life's wounds. By biblically and transparently addressing the heart and faith struggles in the midst of this grief, a small book for the hurting heart delves deeply but gently into the issues of the heart.
00:28:15
Speaker
presenting encouragement and comfort in the character of God revealed in his word. This small but transformative devotional cultivates anchors of hope, redirecting men and women to the trustworthiness of God who is always for us in Christ. He walks with readers through their grief
00:28:34
Speaker
to see the one who nourishes our faith and heals our soul. You can find someone I know is grieving and a small book for the hurting heart by visiting NewGrowthPress.com. That's very helpful to hear the way that it's encouraged others and
00:28:56
Speaker
how they've expressed that to you. Are there things that your family's doing moving forward that are helping you to remain encouraged and hopeful in remembering Nick and looking forward to seeing him again?
00:29:11
Speaker
And in the ongoing process of grieving now, are there certain things that your family is doing that have been helpful that would be helpful to others who go through something like this? The most helpful thing of all is that they're all staying true to the Lord, that my wife, my two daughters, Nick's fiance, they all love the Lord more now than they did before. I think they would all
00:29:41
Speaker
agree with that. I certainly see that in their lives that by submitting to God in their sorrow and by really forcing themselves to look straight in the face of God as He reveals Himself in the Word through the sorrow, it spurred on their love for Him and their love for His people and their desire to serve God by serving His people. So the greatest encouragement to me is their faith. And I think if you talk to especially Aileen before, I don't
00:30:11
Speaker
I don't know if she would have believed that she could endure this loss with her faith, not only intact, but increased. I just don't think she would have believed it about herself. This was her greatest fear being realized, the things she least thought she could endure. Here it was. And she endured it by God's grace and God's strength. And so that's just a huge, huge encouragement and blessing to me. And then same for my girls.
00:30:40
Speaker
Yeah, really huge and huge encouragement to anyone who hears that there is hope and there are surprises in that sense of encouragement and grace from God that His grace is surprising at times.
00:31:00
Speaker
to be accurate. I'd have to say it's surprising all the time because I find in my life that that's my great underestimation. I've said a few times to our church, just a reminder that no matter who you are, where you are, what you're doing, you are underestimating Him. We just don't have the capacity to
00:31:20
Speaker
to truly estimate him and his grace and mercy and his help. And so that's a wonderful picture. Yeah. And you know, when we project into the future, we're only operating with the grace we have in that
Present Grace Emphasis
00:31:39
Speaker
moment. You know, God doesn't give us grace to endure tomorrow's sorrows. He gives us grace to endure today's sorrows. So as we look into the future, you might say, I don't see how I could ever be
00:31:50
Speaker
survive that kind of trial. But God hasn't given you the grace for that trial. You don't get to just fabricate things in your mind and of course have the grace. No, God gives us grace moment by moment and day by day. So that's what I'd want to encourage people by. If you are called to suffer, God will give you the grace to endure that suffering in that moment, but you shouldn't expect really to have it before then. Yeah, a lot of wisdom.
00:32:17
Speaker
there in just those few words. If it's not too jarring or out of place, maybe I could transition to some lighter questions that I'm interested to ask you. So with everything that goes on in Tim Chally's life,
00:32:34
Speaker
Do you have time for sort of interest like hobbies and things that fall outside of the normal kind of reading, writing, pastoring, traveling? Do you have certain interests that you follow up on sports teams or do you have other things like that in your life that you delight in?
Hobbies and Interests
00:32:59
Speaker
I do have hobbies. My main hobby would be photography, especially landscape photography. So that is an interest Eileen and I developed together as much as anything, just there's something we wanted to do something together to find a hobby we would both enjoy equally. And that could really become part of our lives. And so landscape photography is the one and we've really learned to love it.
00:33:23
Speaker
And, you know, part of the joy of my travel, I get to travel a lot of places to speak or to film documentaries. That also gives me the opportunity to take photographs in interesting places. Beyond that, I like to follow the Toronto Blue Jays. I like to follow the Buffalo Bills. I, you know, yeah, I have hobbies, but not a ton of them, you know, with life being what it is, I don't have a lot of margin for those sorts of things or even a lot of interest in further hobbies, at least for the time being.
00:33:52
Speaker
That's very interesting and really interesting about photography. And did you have an interest in that or did you just, you were looking for something and that made sense? Why photography, not something else? I did not have any interest in photography until I started traveling. And as I started traveling, I had the opportunity. I took one trip to Switzerland and I'm out in the Alps. I got to start taking photos. And I took photos and I thought, man, these are awful. There's got to be a
00:34:21
Speaker
better way of taking photos. So that sort of sent me down that rabbit hole of, Oh, what do I need? Or how could I take better photos? And then Elaine got interested and we just sort of made the decision. All right. If we're going to put money or time into a hobby, why don't we put it into this hobby? And so I think we made a decision to do it together, to enjoy it together. And then just to start focusing on that as our hobby, you can't, we don't have enough money to put it into everything, to do everything.
00:34:47
Speaker
et cetera, but we can do one. And so photography is the one where we can just enjoy ourselves a little bit that way. Yeah, that's very cool. And what a great way to carry your hobby on into the future with you, the memories of places that you've been and beautiful sights that you've noticed and captured. That's really cool. And one of the things we want to do through photography is showcase the glory of God.
00:35:15
Speaker
you're unlikely to see a lot of photographs of landscapes with me standing in front of them, which is so often what you do with photography, right? I'm the most interesting subject in this photo. The landscape is just a prop to show me, to make me look better. And you know, there's fine, that's a good rule for photography, but we just like to display God's glory and creation. And that really excites us. We really appreciate and enjoy that. And so that's what we're trying to do with it, not to be holier than now or anything. That's just part of the joy of it.
00:35:44
Speaker
Look what God did. Just look at this sunset. There will never be another sunset like this one. I've got this photograph of it. I can just pull it up on my computer at any time, just rejoice in what God did at that moment in that place uniquely.
00:35:58
Speaker
It's amazing. It really is. What did the next 10 to 15 years look like for you?
Future Outlook
00:36:06
Speaker
I wonder how you think about that in light of family and ministry and writing and the Buffalo Bills and photography and all of that. How far do you look out and what do you see and pray for and hope for in these next years of your life, Lord willing?
00:36:27
Speaker
I do not set a lot of long-term goals. I think even just through the whole situation with Nick, I kind of just realized that I don't know that there's a lot of purpose in that. And even from a business slash ministry slash whatever perspective, I don't find a lot of value in that for my purposes, for my particular life.
00:36:50
Speaker
I'm glad to look ahead a little bit, but really, I just want to keep doing what I'm doing. I want to keep up with the blog that has been and is my main thing. I want to keep serving people through there. I've always wanted it to be as free as possible for as many people as possible. So I'm hoping that continues with sponsors and patrons and all of that. I can just keep putting out content. I want to write books as I'm able, just as God gives me topics or gives me interest.
00:37:19
Speaker
15 years from now, I'll be just closing in on becoming a senior citizen. So that'll be a switch, a different form of life.
00:37:28
Speaker
I don't want to keep going any longer in public ministry than the Lord wants for me. I think there's a lot of people who linger and linger and linger and maybe I'll do the same because I really feel that that's what God's got for me. But I also want to be willing and able to step out when the time comes and just leave that to younger people and just focus entirely on my local church or family or whatever local interest God gives me.
00:37:55
Speaker
You know, Tim, it's been really a delight, honestly. I'm really grateful for our time and what you're doing and many blessings on you and your family and your health and everything that you're working on in these coming weeks, months, and, Lord willing, years and years. Thank you. Really appreciate it.
00:38:17
Speaker
You've been listening to Straight to the Heart, a podcast from New Growth Press. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode like next week's when I sit down with author Sally Michael about helping children love the Bible. You can look for that episode in one week and I'll look forward to seeing you there.