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

In the question of suffering, the book of Job is the one book in the Bible that deals with that most directly. These terrible things happened to Job and all of his friends had these neat theological theories; they called them "acts of God": Job - God is doing this because of the things that you've done. When God appeared at the end of the book - it's actually the longest single speech by God in the whole Bible - and yet he didn't answer Job's questions about why these things happen. He basically said: Job you couldn't possibly understand, that's not your job; your job is not to run the universe, that's my job; your job is simply to trust me even when things look like I don't care. For those of us who go through suffering we are sometimes tempted to distrust God and to get angry at him. That's ok, but at the end of the day, what we are also asked to do is to trust God, that somehow in all the bad things that happen, God can work good, even in us.

Emily: In all of this how do we find hope?

Philip: We find hope by finding a community of support that can be with us when we go through hard times. There are various surveys that people do on recovery from illness and what happens in grief and things like that and all those surveys show that if you're surrounded by a community of support, you will recover and heal better: you've got people around you who will take away some of that anxiety and stress that you feel: who will cook meals, look after your children and pets. One thing we can do is connect with the community and build a community of support. When the disaster happens it's almost too late; you need to have already done the hard work of building that community of support. I think that the time to think about these questions is not when you're in the middle of it, it's when you're relatively healthy, when things are going well: that's the time when it's good to reflect on what kind of God we serve and how the universe works and some of those big questions, not when you're in the middle of it.

Emily: Could you tell us about some of the people that you met in your recent trips?

Philip: Yes, I remember clearly this one woman in Japan. Now recall this is one year later, so they've been living with reality for 12 months and this woman came up to me; most Japanese are rather restrained, you don't get a lot of emotion from them, they're kind of hard-to-read, but not this woman: she was right in my face, she had these piercing eyes just wide with alarm. She grabbed my hand, which is a very un-Japanese gesture and she told me her story of how she was swept away by the tsunami and she ended up in a pile of garbage. She was there for two days and couldn't get out: she was trapped in the rubble around her. Finally somebody stumbled across her, heard her cry and reached out and pulled her out and that's why she was grabbing my arm: "They grabbed my arm like this and pulled me out." She said, "Don't forget us. People had forgotten me for two days and now they're talking about even rebuilding my town: don't forget us".

I recalled a principle I had learnt from a British physician with whom I wrote several books, Dr Paul Brand. He said a healthy body is not a body that feels no pain - he dealt with leprosy patients, so they don't feel pain and they actually destroy their bodies because they don't. He said a healthy body is a body that feels the pain of the weakest part and that's my challenge to the world and particularly to the Church. It's easy to get some sort of compassion fatigue, so that: "We've had earthquakes here and tsunamis there, lately a typhoon in the Philippines: I just can't deal with all this." But if we cut it off, we amputate parts of the body; a healthy body feels the pain of the weakest part and responds to it.

Emily: Another area that you discussed in your book is terrorist attacks and mass shootings. A question that I regularly hear pop up, particularly from young people in light of things like 9/11 and also the Boston marathon bombing was: Does God try to warn us about these happenings and, if not, why doesn't he?

Philip: There's a question only God can answer, isn't it? Clearly God does not operate this world by stepping in and preventing every act of evil. You could ask that question about Hitler: why didn't God stop Hitler? Why did that assassination plot fail, or the Norwegian shooter, or your Dunblane, Scotland, situation a few years back? God populates this planet with free people and when people are free and evil is at work then those terrible things happen. I don't think you can blame it upon God and God has chosen not to run the planet by a constant set of interventions.

Emily: In the book you quote CS Lewis from his book The Problem of Pain and the quote says, "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscious, but shouts in our pain: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world." With this in mind, could God be trying to tell us something through these events?

Philip: Yes, I love CS Lewis and I know just recently in your country he was honoured with a place in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. CS Lewis wrote two books about pain: one is the one you mention, The Problem of Pain, which is a philosophical-type book and the other was the more wrenching personal book A Grief Observed, which he wrote anonymously after his wife died of excruciating bone cancer.

CS Lewis was healthy and in his prime when he wrote the one book and you read that book and you think he's solved the problem of pain, but when it's your wife who's dying in front of you and there's nothing you can do, it's a whole different story and he expresses that in A Grief Observed.

There is one tiny quibble that I have with C S Lewis (and I always tremble before questioning anything he says) but that phrase, "the megaphone of God", to me can be misinterpreted. It sounds like a football coach on the sidelines yelling at somebody, trying to get their attention and I do not see God as using pain in that way: "This person needs my attention so I'm going to zap them: I'm going to give their child leukaemia". I just don't see that at all. I would prefer an image like the hearing aid. When pain happens, when terrible things happen, it gives us the chance to turn up the hearing aid and to reflect on things that we might not normally reflect on.

That happened to me. A few years ago I had an auto accident; I had a broken neck and was lying there for eight hours strapped to a backboard as the doctors were deciding whether I would continue living, because they were concerned that one of the bone fragments had pierced an artery. I learnt more in that eight hours than probably the last 50 years. I realised at that moment that some of the things that I spent so much time worrying about: How many books have I sold? How much do I have tucked away for retirement? You know, these kinds of questions, those are irrelevant when you're lying there maybe an hour from death. I could only think of three things worth worrying about: one is who do I love: who am I going to miss? What have I done with my life? And am I ready for whatever is next? Now those are three things I should be living in consciousness of all the time, but we get distracted by the daily routine and we forget those ultimate things. Pain works as a megaphone as CS Lewis would say, or I would say it gives us a chance to turn up the hearing aid and to listen carefully to some of the most important things in life.

Emily: So what is God up to in a world of such tragedy and pain?