Emily Graves spoke with Philip Yancy about his new book, suffering and his own near death experience

Philip Yancey

In his classic book Where Is God When It Hurts, Philip Yancey gave us permission to doubt, reasons not to abandon faith and practical ways to reach out to hurting people. And now, 30 years after writing his first book, Yancey revisits our cry of "Why, God?" in three places stunned into silence by the calamities that have devastated them: Japan, Sarajevo and Connecticut. And Yancey, once again, leads us to find faith when it is most severely put to the test.

Emily Graves spoke with the award-winning author about those trips, his own near-death experience and who God is and isn't in suffering.

Emily: Why did you decide to write a book about this topic?

Philip: It came about after I reviewed the year 2012. As I looked back on the year I had been to three places of great suffering. One was in Japan for the first anniversary of the tsunami, then that fall I visited Croatia and we took a side trip over to Sarajevo where I heard stories of human brutality: so first a natural disaster, 20,000 people died; and then a war crime where 10,000 people died. Then in December 2012 I went to Newtown, Connecticut and spoke to folks there who were reeling from the crime where a young man went into an elementary school and massacred 20 six and seven-year-old children.

As I looked back on that year, I had questions that never go away. I've spent a lot of my writing career exploring those things. The very first book I wrote a long time ago is Where Is God When It Hurts? and I had been asked to speak on that topic in each of those three places, so I sat down and made a list of the things I'd learnt since I wrote that book: things that could help, that could give some understanding. When I have a question I tend to write a book about it.

Emily: Do you think God has any control over natural disasters?

Philip: I would have to say that I don't perceive God as micro-managing weather systems. Obviously things that we're doing in the industrial age are having their own effect and God seems to prefer working through people like us. If we're doing something stupid, like in the United States distributing too many guns around, or putting too much carbon into the atmosphere, we tend to pay the consequences.

Emily: You have met some of the victims from the tsunami in Japan in 2011. Did it challenge your perception of the God that you know?

Philip: Well of course it did challenge, because you do wonder, when you see that kind of devastation and loss of life, couldn't God have prevented this? On the other hand what I see in the Bible is not so much an answer to the question of why these things happen, because mostly the Bible avoids those questions: it seems to be more about what our response is. In Japan I saw our response. The Christian community particularly, from around the world, flooded in. They were building houses - this is a year later and they were still building houses - providing shelter and distributing food. There's an American television personality called Fred Rogers who died a few years ago and he had a children's programme on daily television and he said that when he was young and some terrible thing would happen, he'd get upset and his mother would say: "Fred, when something bad happens, look for the helpers". That's what I saw in Japan. I saw people who were responding in the name of God to people halfway across the world, because that's part of what we do as Christians, we want to be looking out for the most vulnerable; we want to look out for the suffering and bring them comfort.

Emily: Tsunamis and earthquakes are sometimes classified as acts of God. What is your perception on putting it down to God in that way?

Philip: Yes, that's a very unfortunate phrase used by insurance. Often they'll use it just because they don't want to pay and they can't hold anybody else liable: "Let's credit it to God and nobody can sue us". I guess in an overall way I would say God created a planet that is in process: it's clearly not the planet that was intended and we Christians believe that it's not the planet that God will restore some day. God isn't pleased with a lot of things that are happening on this Earth. Jesus taught us to pray that in the Lord's Prayer: "Our Father - that your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven." Well clearly that's not happening: there are a lot of things going on here that are not God's will being done on Earth as it is in Heaven. So, I would not feel comfortable using that phrase myself, "acts of God", about these kinds of disasters that occur.

When Jesus was on Earth and disasters occurred and people would ask him about it, he never said it's because you did this or because that person did something wrong; in fact he would contradict that belief and say, no that's not what happened. A tower just happened to fall down, a terrorist act happened - the real question is what is your life like: are you ready in case something like that happens to you?

Emily: Does all of this go back to Adam and Eve at the very beginning then?

Philip: Adam and Eve certainly made some bad choices didn't they! We've been living with those consequences. What did Adam and Eve do wrong? What they did was distrust God - they thought: Well, maybe God is trying to keep something from us, so let's just do what we think is right instead of what God has told us.