 is going to turn tide changing power of hope. Welcome to Hope Today. I'm Amy Schaefer. I'm here with Corey and Sydney. This is an amazing day with an incredible topic. Yes it is. You know how do hardship and hope go hand-in-hand? Well coming up in a moment on Hope Today, Benjamin Wendell will explain how real hope only comes from chaos and challenges. It's gonna help you shift your perspective that your greatest moments begin at your deepest point of pain. You know Corey I am so excited about this conversation because I think it is time a lot of us are going through hardships, we're facing certain things, we want to get out of it but this is a way that we navigate through life storms and Benjamin is going to give us a really good blueprint of how we walk through life and look at it in a different way. You know I really love that word Sydney navigation right? Navigating through some very tough terrain in the waters and you know we always say you know where is the light at the end of the tunnel? Well many times we have to go through the process with God and that bonding experience that we have with God in the darkness in the midst of that so being able to do this and talk about these things is very important and Pastor Benjamin has some great insight on these dark spaces and how to experience God through that so I am excited about this conversation. You know I am not a huge fan of pain and suffering and troubles and trials and tribulations. It's not my favorite thing but here's what I know. It happens and life happens and guys you know we're getting ready for my son to graduate high school and you know right now he's under that mama bear he's in he's in the cave he's under the wing of my shelter and I know that he's going to go into the world and he's going to make a difference but he's going to face suffering he's gonna face hard times he's gonna run into problems and I just know because of who God is that God is faithful and that no matter what he goes through that he can come through it and he can win. Sydney yay though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil and I do know that victory is our ultimate finish line we will finish strong we will win and we can do that because of hope. I just appreciate your transparency Amy about like not liking to talk about pain and I think it's an uncomfortable subject for a lot of us but I think it's important that we dive into it and this conversation that we're gonna have with Benjamin is going to shift our paradigm of how we think about it and what real hope looks like you know Benjamin Whittle is an innovative and empathetic author and speaker and as a pastor for more than 20 years he's walked many people through dark shadows and valleys of the human experience in his book Good Catastrophe he provides a blueprint for people to weather their way through the storms of life. Pastor Benjamin we are so grateful to have you with us. Hey guys it's a real joy to be having this talk with you. So Benjamin before we dive into what it means to be a good catastrophe can you tell us a little bit about yourself and where you're from. Well you will tell from the accent that I ain't from around here so I'm from Australia now in the US and yes I've pasted for over 20 years and you get to walk with people through a lot of lived experience. I've also been married for 20 years and I have three awesome sons so my hands are full you know what I mean. Definitely you're like a busy husband busy dad but you know one thing I just love is like your passion and your heart when you were writing through this and I have to say this is one of my favorite books that I've ever read you know being on part of this program and so can you talk to us about good catastrophe because where it comes from because sounds like an oxymoron it doesn't seem like they should coexist as the same phrase. Well I think that many of us live out that oxymoron in the way we approach life and challenges but that's being challenged by a unique cultural moment. I know for my life I don't think I've ever lived through a season that's had as much cultural upheaval or complexity. In fact the CDC recently did a survey and they found that 57% of teenage girls in the United States feel persistently sad or hopeless not just occasionally not just every now and then and that's just a pluck one number out but I'm sure for each of you and every listener that's not just a number if we did a quick hope audit many people would say it's been a while since I've let the light in or felt optimism or really dreamed of a better tomorrow somewhat even say it's been a while literally since I laughed and just had the ability to smile at life so there is a desperate need for the kind of transcendence that hope brings to us in a modern and complex world. You know one thing I love that you just said about letting the light in because a lot of people there are a lot of darkness that they're walking through and sometimes it feels like in life that we can pray all we want we feel like we get like hands laid on us all stuff and sometimes it just doesn't let up so what would you say you know when it comes to this idea of like what real hope is in the midst of that what does that truly look like? Yeah I mean for me this idea this concept of a good catastrophe actually comes from the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien the book looks at Job but I had to go back I could not find an English word that even described that good can come from bad but Tolkien coined this term you catastrophe EU catastrophe meaning good catastrophe and his philosophy was when he was writing books like Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit that when the main character reached a point where all seemed lost everything went dark there was no way out there would be a sudden turn towards joy I think in our world we often put these experiences in completely different categories we're either going through challenges or we're experiencing joy and fulfillment and light I'm trying to present that hardship and hope work together in our life and they do something for us that a problem free life never good so take us a little deeper into that because I think a lot of people it's hard to say okay I'm going through a hardship and then there's hope and it's almost like they're separate so what does that look like the mending and the blending of the two when it comes into our lives well I write about this little concept called the bicycle and if you think about riding a bicycle you know which I'm doing that a little bit right now in Southern California you you are always riding on both wheels both wheels are turning and if you think of one wheel as being the divine wheel goodness joy laughter fulfillment and the other wheel being hardship challenge pain suffering I used to think that if I could just only have the good things then I would be happy and have hope what I've discovered is you're always riding on both wheels every day of your life you won't have a single day that's so good that you won't have any bad and chances are it's not like you'll ever have a day that's so bad that there's no good the lived human experience is always and constantly riding on both wheels and here's the kicker it's not just that we experience challenge at the same time as what we experience good things but that there is a symbiotic relationship between our challenges and our growth and God uses the challenges God uses the pain to bring about our greatest flourishing and our greatest growth it's so true that it's like it's hand in hand that no matter what we're going through the challenges God uses it all and one thing I love that you bring up is this whole story of the book of Job and you give it a like the way you wrote about it of just explaining I mean a lot of us have read the story of a Job we know what's happening but to really take a good look at what he was experiencing as he lost all his children lost his livelihood and then the book also permeates from this place of understanding from out of that pain and brokenness there's a concept that you bring up that's based on the book of Job and it's the scent of water can you talk to us about that I I have come to just be fascinated by this old story Job and what it represents like the obvious is it represents a man who suffered but actually it speaks to us at a more fundamental level of how God interacts with the human experience and Job was incredibly successful he had 10 children and in a single day a perfect storm trespasses into this man's life it arrives unannounced it doesn't send a calendar invite and it brings with it devastation sufficient to say the man basically loses everything including the death of his 10 children and the storyline of this man ends up with Job and it's as if his world went silent there's no more little footsteps in the home there's no more laughter and he has to figure out how do I rebuild who I am and how do I create a new future when I've lost everything and Job makes this dramatic claim he says this it's it's a metaphor he paints his life as a tree that's been just brutally cut down to a stump in the ground now I'm not sure about you guys but I like taking photos of trees I never walk past and take a photo of a dead stump in the ground but Job makes this claim he says at just the scent of water even a stump that for all intents and purposes looks dead in the ground can live again thrive again but again and grow again he wasn't just talking about trees he was making a claim about the human experience when it encounters the dynamic of hope just even at the scent of water that's where we have hope and Benjamin just want to ask you you know you're really touched and triggered by the book of Job can you just share with us the moment in your life where you felt like all hope was lost but you encountered that scent of water the scent of the Holy Spirit the scent of God being with you in the midst of a hard time well I'll tell you this Sydney it's certainly a lot easier writing about it than living it and I wrote this book Good Catastrophe and in the last 12 months I'm like God where's the good it feels like I'm only experiencing catastrophe I lost my older brother to a devastating cancer journey he was just 18 months older than me I lost two grandparents this is all just in the in recent months I went through the biggest life transition I've been through and it felt like I fell into a dark hole and just couldn't figure a way out so what do we do when it feels like circumstances conspire against us if our hope is linked to outcomes it's always going to be a fragile version of hope I had to learn again this concept of the scent of water that I don't need an ocean I don't need a bucket I don't even need a single drop of water all I need is the scent the smallest intervention of God in my life to bring about a dramatic turn and I've had to rest on that I've had to embrace that and I've seen how hope can reach us even when we feel unreachable thank you for just sharing that transparency of loss because I know you talk about it in your book especially with your brother so sorry about your brother and your grandparents as well and I know something that is really deep on your heart is this whole concept of the broken piano can you tell us about that story and how it applies to our lives well the year is 1975 you guys are gonna love this little story I mean it's something that's just so fascinating to me Keith Jarrett is driving from Switzerland to the Cologne Opera House in Germany he arrives late he has back pain and he has requested a specific piano he's a musician the Bosendorfer 290 Imperial Concert Grand but to his surprise when he gets there the staff put out the wrong piano instead of the Bosendorfer 290 it's a small undersized piano some of the keys and get stuck the pedals don't work properly and to make matters worse the piano was terribly out of tune he has a decision to make he courageously steps out in front of 1400 people and decides to play on this broken piano while the Cologne Concert has gone on to sell more than four million albums it's the best-selling instrumental album of all time now one would presume the best-selling instrumental album is recorded in the best studio with the best microphones and yet it's this unusual midnight concert in Cologne on an undersized broken piano and here's the message for all of us none of us get the Bosendorfer 290 Imperial Concert Grand in the concert of life we all have a broken piano but god brings the most beautiful masterpieces out of broken pianos and for every person that feels like my piano was broken feels like my whole life all i got was a flawed instrument i want people to know this you still have a song to sing and the most beautiful masterpieces come out of flawed instruments i love that so much of just being i can just see all of us are like broken pianos or these broken instruments but we make such a beautiful and unique melody based out of the pain and the traumas that we've walked through and i like a quote that i want to share with our audience that you have in the book it really struck out to me you said this if i view my pain from a materialistic comfortable vantage point it will appear disastrous but when i see it through an internal filter it will give me a wide enough perspective to include the multiple layers of human experience can you just speak into the heart of somebody that is going through just utmost tragedy is trying to figure out this playing this dance of trying to find hope in the midst of hard times can you just take a moment and to minister and to speak to the heart of someone watching out there when we're sitting in moments of great challenge and adversity i think it's so important that we take that one step back and we actually look at the vantage point in which we're approaching life from this is a part of the gift that adversity brings into our life and i'm convinced that in today's world we need to fundamentally reframe the way we see our troubles and here's what i want people to see that with hope the storyline of our life always curves toward a redemptive purpose the life if your faith is following Jesus that life is not a promise that you will live a problem free life we do not see that in the characters in scripture we do not see that in the life of Jesus we do not see that in the life of the apostle paul and the disciples so what the christian faith provides us is not immunity from pain or perfect circumstances it gives us a world view through an eternal ultimate hope that gives a lens or a perspective through which we can see every challenge or problem and instead of just experiencing the pain of what a circumstance brings i can begin to see that god goes to work in the midst of my challenges and some of my most game-changing lessons and growth will come out of storms not just good times but through navigating through trauma anxiety depression and lust god is at work there if not the most out of anywhere in life he's at work in our challenges to bring about our deepest growth wow i love that viewpoint about having an eternal mindset and view as you're going through pain and trouble and suffering what do you mean by the phrase that hope needs human skin well thank you for the for the question amy i've been asking myself this question is there a link between hope and friendship and i have come to believe because i thought this for many years that hope is like a personal virtue or feeling that just happens in my heart i've started to now see hope as a communal experience that hope comes to us in the form of friendship and where this originates from is the life of joe because infamously he has these three friends that walk into his life at his low point and give him bad advice but what people miss because these guys have become almost villainous in this narrative they miss this moment it's so beautiful joe has lost everything three friends leave their families their businesses they're not going on a vacation they're not going on a cruise ship they're coming to pain joe is on the ground covered in dirt and through tear stained cheeks he looks up at the horizon and he sees the outline of three people their friends they walk into his pain and sit with him for seven days and seven nights and they may have gone on to give some poor advice but the beauty in that moment i don't think that loneliness and hope are compatible we we need to let the light in by letting people in and the primary tool that god uses as the delivery mechanism of hope is other human beings so if you're going through challenges we've got to get outside of our homes we've got to put our devices down we have to re-engage in people and understand hope comes through human skin it's a relational experience not just an emotional virtue this is amazing topic and i want to go into that a little bit more when you talk about joe's friends but i want to go back a little bit when he was experiencing the grief of his children there was also the grief of the loss of bond that he had with his wife who we know in scripture says you know curse god and die i feel that certain circumstances bring out characteristics of someone you may love that you never thought was going to happen until that was introduced how do you feel like joe interpreted the grief of losing that covenant with his wife not necessarily their marriage but they're bond with god through her grief processing her grief and then processing his own that level of loneliness in that moment i know that was a lot but how do you feel yeah yeah go ahead and share it's it's it's a great question cori and and you know i think when we go through adversity um you know cori in our life or or loss or or even just major change you know what's really interesting it's interesting the way that people around us respond and that can be more difficult than the actual loss is the uh disappointment that people weren't there for us when we needed them the most and i know what that feels like and i think that's where we've got to got to reimagine hope and what it means to build lives that are highly connected relationally i mean you look at my generation millennials one out of every four millennials say they don't have a single friend uh to turn to when they go through a storm gen z 79 percent say they're lonely these are staggering numbers and so for joe it was you know he went through so much complexity but three friends came and sat with him and maybe we get to be that person for somebody else we get to be the hope with human skin that walks into somebody's life i put it this way pain needs to be diffused through our friendships to come out the other side as hope it means we have to let people in to those places of our life that are not comfortable the places of pain and when people disappoint when people don't call when i mean i've again i've gone through this it's so difficult the best i can say is this we all get to make a choice to be that for somebody else and if we ultimately believe in the principle of sowing and reaping if we give our lives away as hope ambassadors i believe we're creating a net of hope that exists when we go through our own falls and we go through our own trials i just want to like snap right now on that point and say say luck as the three of us gory abe and i we were all like what you just said about when we have our pain and like able to diffuse it through friendships and other people y'all just need to sit on that i feel like well we can close the show and sit there i'll just say thank you so much that's your benjamin so much for just your wisdom and your insight and what you poured out today it is so rich and we're just so thankful for who you are in the kingdom of god and who you are that you are a gift truly a gift to the world his book is called good catastrophe the tied turning power of hope i highly highly recommend this book thank you so much pastor benjamin hey thank you i really appreciate it guys being a great conversation wow wow what can we say about this i mean we we say these cliche things like you know your test will become your testimony god will take you know the ashes and make something beautiful but they're not just cliches it is really true that no one is perfect no one has a perfect life no one has a life that all things are going perfect in every area at all times that's just not reality if you think about jesus as he was talking about friends jesus is about to suffer the most brutal execution ever known to man he's about to be crucified beaten and whipped and he is praying it out and he needs he needs help he needs some friends now he calls on some disciples now they might have fallen asleep but jesus the son of god needed men to be with him to suffer with him to pray with him how much more you know quarry do we need people that will put hope on and help us in times of great need and you know we touched on this a little bit today we touched on this scripture but just so that you can marinate on this throughout your day and throughout your week we're going to read jobe 14 7 through 9 and it says this for there is hope for a tree if it be cut down that it will sprout again and that its shoots will not cease though its root grows old in the earth and its stump die in the soil yet at the scent of water it will bud and put out branches like a young plant that word there the scent of water he said that today not even a drop but the scent of water and i know that sometimes in the midst of depression and agonizing pain and you might be going through grief or you might be going through a divorce or you might be an economic place where you don't know how things are going to get paid or whatever the scent of god's presence that would descend in gives you hope gives you clarity gives you peace that surpasses all understanding and that hope and you might feel like that tree that's cut down all the way to the stump says and there's no branches in my life there's no growth there's no fruit in my life but the scent of god's presence is going to begin to permeate into your life in a way and you will begin to grow again through this amy sydney you can just sit on the scent of water piece like something that benjamin actually wrote in his book and i've been on this i'm a plant mom i love plants and there's actually a study that says plants when they hear water they hear the water that's how the roots start growing towards the water so it's amazing that what we see in the natural is mimicked it's in the the spiritual that maybe today just like what kori was saying and aim is saying that you need the scent of the presence of god the scent of the spirit just take a moment if you need to sit somewhere if you need to go outside and walk but i only tell you when you get that scent of water it's so amazing what god begins to do what god begins to show you and reveal you you know something i just want to share that god spoke to me in this season as i think even the scent of water the water of the word it's the wisdom of god god told me his wisdom is your way out in this season don't look to the ways of the world but look to his wisdom because the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom and we just thank you so much for today joining us for this really special conversation and we pray and we hope that you get the scent of his water in his presence today have a good one