Howard Storm Near-Death Experience (Full Interview -- February 2019)

all right well i want i want to begin with some background because that's an important part of the story um i was born in 46 my father was in the navy during world war ii when he came back my mother said that he was a complete stranger to him because the four years in overseas in the navy had changed him into a totally different person someone she actually didn't like very much he wanted to run the house shipshape you know basically he gave orders and expected them to be followed um so it's not a very happy home because it was raised in the late 40s 50s most people would take their kids to church a lot of times drop them off and go somewhere else but anyways we we were taking a church and it was a very nice experience because we went to sunday school they had a big that's when the churches were bursting at the seams and the women who taught sunday school they were all women um were really very loving kind people and we did lots of arts and crafts and sang songs and heard bible stories and we had our little children's church which was sweet and it was a thoroughly pleasant experience and i am as a child um just believed the whole thing like a child would you know and prayed to jesus there was no religion in our household like zero um so that was my exposure to the church the faith and jesus is what i got at sunday school and when i was 12 years old um i asked my parents if i'd been baptized and they said no and said well i want to get baptized so i talked to the pastor and at the age of 12 i was baptized which i think is important uh part of the story because um and when i had a i'm for a child i had a strong faith and two um jesus doesn't like to lose baptized people ever yeah and so um when i was like 15 years old i was i left i stopped going to church because it was boring um my sister's older sisters had stopped going my parents didn't go so we just walked away from it and i as a person who wanted to be an artist there wasn't much for me in high school to keep me interested and so anyways i started reading besides going to private um art lessons i also got very interested in philosophy which of course it was none of that in high school either so i i heard the name plato so i read plato and then i read aristotle and then worked my way up um to people like emanuel kant and then discovered existentialism first was albert camus then trump hulsart and then made um a sincere attempt to read martin heidegger yeah i'm interested in this part because it was as far as i understand existentialism nietzsche camus all these guys that really pulled you away right yeah i i neglected i negotiate nietzsche was a really big influence on me i skipped him because um i despise him now but anyways you know um it was it was in the air god is dead it was definitely you know time magazine did a cover in the early 60s got us dead from harp divinity school yeah i uh met that guy uh oh i forget his name but he's still around he's still coming to the philosophy conferences but the guy that so at the age of 17 i went to college and my first semester i took philosophy 101 with professor dickens and he was a atheist existentialist and we used to go into town me and professor dickens and a couple of students and stay until two o'clock in the morning smoking unfiltered camel cigarettes and drinking pictures of beer and talking about basically very very cynical sarcastic about society you know that religion was the opiate of the people it was you know it was all a big fantasy for those that were too weak to deal with the reality that life is meaningless you know um and then you die and the whole point of life is a lot of suffering and you seek pleasure wherever you can find it and try not to get arrested no because that would that would diminish your pleasure you know i mean really that was it like you know amoral with the exception of you know don't get caught right right and um live for your own gratification so i went to san francisco with my young wife who got married when we were 18 shotgun wedding and we went to san francisco in 66 because i wanted to study at the san francisco institute and coincidentally i heard that there was stuff happening in san francisco in 66 the h word had not been invented yet that came out a little after we got there the word hippie when we went out there was still beatniks but anyways and it was like wow this is great i mean it's like the the only time in my life in terms of society where i was in the right time and the right place you know i mean because we would say this is where it's at and we literally believed the people that i hung out with it's completely unrealistic fantasy but we really believed that we were going to create a world of peace and love and everybody was getting along and and there would no longer be problems and everybody would just share everything and love each other and you know um one of the things that just an aside one of the things that destroyed all that was um drugs it started you know it went from recreational drugs to very heavy and dangerous drugs like pcp and stuff like that which i knew dozens if not hundreds of people that came out to san francisco one and within months we called them brain fried wow people that could couldn't make a coherent sentence couldn't obviously couldn't hold a job couldn't go to school and couldn't maintain sorry couldn't maintain any so any hygiene or anything yeah i'll quiet my phone it was it was really sad to see beautiful young people and then meet them a few months later and they're like gone you know hopefully gone um i'd like to think that many of them eventually recovered but the drug the drugs were toxic the whole the whole tippy thing was over by 68. wow it was just people in the midwest didn't know that so they tried to keep it going but no it was in san francisco it was done it lasted lasted two short years basically wow and also people got wind of the um naivete of the young people in san francisco so you had um predators move into the scene and take it over and like horrible things started to happen but anyways so i um got my degree from san francisco institute went to university california berkeley um this was time the time of the vietnam war and most especially the u.s invasion of cambodia when we shut down the university for three months um you were there at berkeley at that time wow yeah yeah it was very very heady interesting time um ultimately what i was looking for was a college teaching job teaching art because you know you can't make a living as an artist i mean nobody does um i mean your odds of becoming a movie star greater than actually making a live liquids painting sculpting so uh you know i i became i want to get my mfa which is the terminal degree in art i got an m.a and then you apply for the mfa program and i um managed to get a job in kentucky at us at a brand new university that was going to start an art program building our program so i came to kentucky in 72 totally fixated on myself my career um i had some interest in my family but that was secondary because the the myth is in our society that if you want to do accomplish something really big you have to be a megalomaniac you know completely obsessed with your your writing your music your art your acting whatever and everything else um suffers neglect because you know you got to keep your focus on what's important so that's who i was i pretended to be uh nice to my students sometimes i wasn't feeling it at all but kept up the act most of the time and of course um a number of students liked me because i was some you know i had no rules no boundaries no you know from my experience in san francisco it's like you know do your thing you know kind of teacher you know what's not to like about that right and so that i i i moved up the ranks universe and became a department head and um i got 10-year promotion within three years so wow at the and i was 26 or 27 and i was a full professor tenured and all that in the department amazing how did that happen so fast 26 years old that you know politics wow i played the game yeah i just got ten year last week and i'm 36 congratulations you know 36 it took 26 that's amazing yeah well they were they were desperate and i was the only sane one in the art department i mean art departments are filled with uh prima donnas whom are adorable and some of them are um repulsive but um i i knew how to i had good social skills i knew how to get along with people yeah you know yeah sure most importantly the people higher up you know yeah so anyhow that's the that's the background atheist existentialist artist um my whole life was about me and my career as an artist and you know the great um desire was to be a successful arts which means showing in new york and people publishing books about me and i i mean i was having very moderate small success so you know basically i was a big fish in a little pond in kentucky and that and you know i knew i knew that was never going to go anywhere you know you know you know you're never going to get discovered in kentucky i mean right yeah the art world is new york city um that's it that's that's all it is um so anyways so i'm leading a group of students around europe you can edit anything that you want but i i put that in it because i want the the students to know i mean i don't think my story is that different than anybody else i think it's very normal kind of story and uh the the one problem was there was a huge emptiness inside me i did a lot of drinking i wasn't an alcoholic but i drank a lot and it's very cynical about everything and um i had a melancholy and i attributed that to my um my mother's from finland and so i figured that i'd sort of inherited this melancholy gene from my finnish relatives which made me um inside i was empty sad lonely unhappy um thought about killing myself a lot you know just because what what's the point none of it means anything anyways so what's the point of going through it you know and you know any pleasure that you ever achieve in this world um the minute it's over it's like it's depressing you know yeah and you you had already written off god at this point you thought this was good oh yeah yeah yeah i i thought it was a fantasy for um people that were too weak to deal with the um the great cosmic indifference you know yeah you know we're we're on this little speck of a a ball of rock you know floating in this vast universe and what if it matters at all yeah um so june 1st 1985 i'm 38 years old and i have my wife and a number of students and i'm taking them on a three-week art tour of europe and on the last day of the tour which was june 1st the next day we were going to the airport to leave to come back to the us um at 11 o'clock in the morning while we're in the hotel trying to rally the troops that i burned them out on too much art too many museums um we kept up a pretty frantic pace going off we went all over um i had a perforation of the duodenum which um your esophagus goes into your stomach your stomach goes into what's called the small stomach and then that goes into your intestines and um a whole burst in my small stomach so the digestive fluids the hydrochloric acid which is what breaks your food down stuff the bacteria and all that is now migrating out into my abdominal cavity well that's the technical thing what it was i was sitting there talking to one of my students in the hotel and all of a sudden i went down to the ground screaming kicking and in terror because i had the most amazingly acute pain in the middle of my abdomen from out of the clear blue sky and my wife called a medical service through the hotel desk they sent a doctor he came right away got me off the floor examined me and said that i had a perforation of duonom and i had to have surgery immediately he called the ambulance and they took me to the um city hospital in paris which is the hospital general the assistance public departing and i was taking an emergency examined by two doctors x-rayed medical history all that and they said the same thing if i didn't have surgery within an hour i died so i was like yeah let's do it um so i was sent from emergency to the surgical hospital which is koshan and because it was a saturday i'm sure the people in emergency didn't know that there was no doctor available at the surgical hospital because it was a weekend and most doctors there are monday through friday guys so i was put in a room to await a doctor the not only did i need the surgery but since there was no doctor to admit me i was not admitted to the hospital i was in the hospital but i hadn't been admitted wow so basically to put it in the vernacular i fell through the cracks yeah so i was never seen by a doctor for the next 10 hours and you were dying basically yeah and doctors united states said that my maximum life expectancy would be five hours wow but one of the things that kept me alive was i was terrified of dying because i was 38 years old i kept thinking this is impossible you know i can't be how could i be dying i'm just like i'm i'm just achieving you know i'm just i'm just getting where i want to want to go wow also so i wasn't thinking so much of the people that i leave behind although that made me a little sad what i was thinking was me you know i'd work so hard and yeah it's not gonna happen you know yeah yeah i mean i'm a i'm a mediocrity at best and i'm gonna die in that state of mediocrity that's what really terrified me yeah i i know this is very unattractive but it's just the unvarnished truth um i was i was never given any pain medication and um the pain that had taken me to the floor kicking screaming yelling and terror intensified intensely intensified because the stuff the digestive juices were migrating now not just in that area of the perforation but now we're going from my groin up to my shoulders so my whole um abdomen what part of the constitution made it very very difficult to breathe because um when you breathe you have to move your abdomen and i was struggling to breathe because every time i breathe it only intensified the pain was like maximum but when i breathed it went way over the top so it's like i had to fight i had to fight for every breath and i didn't want to die because i knew that when you died it's just over and everybody that i knew all my friends all my friends in the world were from the university and all the people i hung out with were all atheists and we all made fun of the people that were christians um i mean they were all a joke seriously they were a big joke to us and you know we'd laugh about it with stuff like that about you know how can you be a educated person and believe in fairy tales i mean we put religion up with um cinderella and sleeping beauty and snow white and stuff like that and basically disney walt disney stuff um that's the culture yeah and i don't think well not i don't i think but i think it's still pretty pervasive in a lot of academic it's it hasn't changed at all it's exactly the same so yeah um i want to talk about that later when i keep going with the story yeah because i think i think they're doing a huge disservice to our young people but anyways um at 8 30 that night this started at 11 8 30 at night the nurse came into the room and she said she was sorry but they were not able to locate a doctor and that they would try and get one the next day which would be sunday well i was i i mean i i i mean i knew i i didn't feel i didn't think i knew i was dying and like she said we'll try and get a doctor tomorrow it's like i'm done you know then or like i can't do this anymore i'm i'm outside of strength yeah and uh so my wife and i said our goodbyes and that was um it was painful because i'd never seen her so sad in her life i mean it was a miserable day for her because i'm sitting there watching her watching me fade away you know and then when we said our goodbye she knew you know that i i was done it was over and i went unconscious and then i don't know how long i was unconscious and i woke from that and i was standing next to the bed and i felt wonderful i felt better than it ever felt in my life and so i did a reality check sight taste smell touch everything and all my senses were heightened more than they had ever been i could smell more hear more feel more catch foreigners like i was like wow i'm not just better i'm better than i've ever been better like it's wonderful yeah and so i was trying to get uh the attention of my wife and she was just sitting in her chair next to the bed crying and ignore well i thought she was ignoring me i the only thing i could think was she was so mad at me because that's what i put her through and that made me very angry i yelled at her and cussed her out and stuff like that for ignoring me i turned to my roommate i had a very nice 68 year old french men really good guy my name is mr florent and um tried to communicate with him and i got no response from him which made no sense because he'd been kind all day to me and my wife and now he wouldn't respond to me at all it's like made no and so that made me i didn't i wasn't mad at him it just made me more confused and agitated it's like what's what's going on and i heard people calling me outside the room and by name in english howard come now hurry let's go come with us so i went over the doorway of the room and there was a group of people out in the hallway which was um darkish and gray and very fuzzy and there were people standing outside the light coming from the room and i said i'm sick i'm supposed to have surgery i need a doctor are you from the doctor are you going to take me to surgery you know um and they said we know all about you we've been waiting for you a long time there's no more time to talk let's go hurry up so i assume that they were hospital personnel to take me to my surgery to a doctor whatever and i left the room and i had a really bad feeling about leaving the room um although the room was very difficult because of the lack of response from my wife and mr floren which was very oh and i neglected to mention i also noticed that there was a body in the bed which i refused to believe was me although it looked just like me and i couldn't explain how there could be i that that made me crazy how could there be a body in the bed that looked like me weren't you thinking they swapped it or something yeah yeah i think that does crazy french that post some kind of trick you know oh that's so funny you know yeah yeah but of course that didn't make any sense either because why would they bother yeah and if they got a doctor why would they do this like weird trick on me you know but i knew the thing in the bed was me just a piece of me and that's not me because i'm i'm great you know i'm wonderful i'm fine wow so they took me on a long journey um at first i thought we were in the hospital but we never went um up or down we just walked and walked and there was no architectural features just space and that was all disturbing but what was more disturbing was that the people that met me that crowd grew and became initially more rude than abusive and then really ugly um and i would hear people say to one another i can't wait to get a piece of them and stuff like that and it's like so i i went from cautious to fearful to pure terror because now i'm in this mob of people and they're talking about me and whenever i ask them anything that say shut up you'll find out you don't need to know you know you know you'll know when you get there i mean stuff like that and i was like sure did it occur to you that you might be dead at this point or were you no not at all okay wow oh i i later i i don't know whether you want to use stuff but later on i asked you so what happens when people die and you go and meet them you say well the first thing we have to do is convince them that they died because they don't know they died because they all feel so good they they don't believe they're dead most people he said yeah they don't they they can't believe they did because they feel because when people are dying they're going through some kind of suffering and when they die they feel great they feel wonderful and they're like oh i'm all better now yeah that's amazing and also they're i'm disoriented because they're they're on a different vibrational state yeah also they're not they they not really um seen by the world have you ever if anyone ever seen the movie ghosts i love that movie because it does a really good portrayal of the confusion of trying to interact with the world yeah yeah so it's like okay and what about your uh you had a body of some kind right yeah what's the what how does that you think it was your soul or your body or what you know what kind of well i think i i mean what i come to believe that my consciousness was so materialistic that i had to retain that as my identity that's interesting i think that the um imperishable body that paul talks about the soul whatever you want to call it is not um really that much like our physical body at all but we carry into the afterlife everything that we had before it so whatever you whatever you think you are or believe you are or what you think is going to happen it's all going to happen just the way you believe it is that's why um you know in a sense you know people say we create our own reality in this world i don't believe that that i think we interact with a lot of things that shape our reality uh so it's not we're not self-created in this world but in the next world we're definitely self-created because we're caring you know if if if you're looking for god and for love and for jesus you're definitely going to find it and if you don't have any real faith in any of that stuff um you'll find that world yeah you know yeah so um we're in abject darkness there's a lot of people around me i don't know how many maybe hundreds possibly and uh i said i'm not going to go with you any further and they said um now you get further going so i started pushing pole and i fought back and i fought long and hard and they were playing with me and their punching hitting kicking turned to biting scratching um chewing clinging invasive things it got really um horrible now i'm talking about that um never have never will it's all it's all just totally disgusting and i i've said this the biggest sadist in the world can't really imagine how sadistic people can be in that world of hopelessness and there's there's no rules down there there's no boundaries there's no restraint because in that world of um nothing and hopelessness and despair people just you know yeah it sounds like it's like a jail if there were no guards you know yeah yeah exactly exactly recently i spent a week at a maximum security prison in ohio and got to know some prisoners and they were telling me about life in a maximum speech it's awful really yeah they said you never know when someone's going to stab you they said you have to always be worried that someone's going to stick yeah for reason because there's there's lots of crazy people in prison who are not in the mental board who who just as soon stab you just because they want to we were trying to of course um convince them to become christians and they one of the big dangers of being a christian and prisoners is that that makes you a target so if they become a christian they have to keep it secret because otherwise other prisoners will do them violence real buttons wow so anyways they did enough so that i was like basically look like roadkill and i'm lying there people are kicking me and i'm not responding anymore which irritated them greatly that i couldn't respond anymore and uh i heard a voice say pray to god and i think it came from inside of me that voice your chest right you said yeah yeah that's interesting and um i thought i don't believe in god and the voice said pray to god and i thought i don't know how to pray i don't pray and the voice said pray to god and i thought i prayed when i was a child what was that so then i tried to remember something that i memorized because my notion of prayer was is that there were things that you were taught to memorize and recite so i thought of um speech in the merchant of venice i thought of the pledge of allegiance i you know thought of all the things that i memorized you know in school and i'm not getting anything with god in it at all and finally i get the lord is my shepherd or you know yeah our fatherhood not the i don't mean the whole thing i just mean that line you know the lord's my shepherd our father who art in heaven that's all i could remember was do it so like i was so excited about them i kind of murmured them before i was just trying to think of things but now i murmured those things and with that the people around me became very very angry this is when they're attacking you basically right yeah yeah and they said in very vulgar language that there's no god nobody can hear me and that they're gonna make things much worse for me if i didn't stop saying those things which because it upset them and encouraged me to make up stuff with god in it and it drove them away from me so rather than being able to repel them with force i was able to repel them with um god stuff and i can't repeat that because it was really really vulgar um why do you think it repels them i mean have you ever reflected on this why yeah absolutely because first of all god wants everybody to go to heaven god doesn't want anybody to go to hell but lots of people go to hell and they they go there because they've rejected god and god's not going to force anybody to go to heaven like what some people um like to theorize and uh they are not willing to let go their unbelief or their unbelief in god yeah they're they're holding on to it because they're in c.s lewis's book the great divorce you know he which i like very much and i think he does quite a good job of describing some help they they get they're stuck in the thing you know it's like alcoholics um you know you want to say no why don't you try stop drinking you know which you better stand back when you say that because you might get punched in those for saying that but um you know they thought of that too it's no that's occurred to them yeah no they're not stupid yeah but they're they're locked in they're locked into it and it's more uh psychological addiction physical there's a physical aspect but then all addictions you know overeating you know sexual abuse except for all all these things reading a really good book by uh richard rohr breathing underwater great book but anyways he talks about everybody's addicted to something you know yeah yeah um yeah so um they're they're addicted to their misery yeah and they don't you know i as a pastor i'd love to say you want you want happiness you want joy you want peace you want love you want you know you want hope ask jesus and they're like get out of here leave me alone [Music] but i'm trying to give you i'm trying to give you everything you don't have you know yeah yeah it's not i can give it to him but god can give it i mean i'm trying to like you can get it just ask him ask god for it you'll get it you know it's like yeah leave me alone it's like no i'm serious i'm really serious you know it's really frustrating you know trying to i mean i have i have a few successes and lots of failures yeah yeah so um i'm lying there and i go over my life and i realize that i had failed and everything that i thought about i'd failed in my relationship with my parents my wife my sisters my kids my students as a failure as an artist and you know it's a big nothing in the art world and that i began to try and understand my situation i realized that if you i now realize that i was no longer in the world i was gone from the world um dead to the world but still very much alive in some other place and what i thought it was is that if you fail life or the way i thought about if you if you live a garbage life you end up in the garden sheet so what i concluded was i had gone down the sewer pipe into the cesspool and that this was um the entry to the cesspool and where they wanted to take me was much deeper into it and i hadn't gotten there yet wow um i did not want to be there and i felt like i was stuck there and there was no way out i mean this was it and the uh talk about uh the pit of despair you know hell it has has many names in the biblical literature you know sometimes called the abyss sometimes it's called the pit yeah um hell is uh only one of many names but the the name that's used most often i didn't know this since i started reading the bible is of course uh gehenna which is the valley of gehennan which um was the garbage dump of jerusalem and people would take their garbage and their rubbish and trash out there and um there were perpetual fires there when i was a kid don't do it anymore when i was a kid the town dump was always burning because that's how they got rid of everything that was combustible so every time dump just had fires all the time they really stank bad you know sulfur is um you know one of the most odious burning things there is and you know the town dumps smelled like this odious sulphurous kind of you know because of course in all that garbage and stuff there was um lots of toxic so we don't do that anymore but that's who it was when i was young that's the way it was in jerusalem in jesus time so jesus refers to um what's what's sometimes translated in the bible as hell actually what he said was you know if you don't straighten out you're going to end up in gerhart um johanna's a really nice place by the way right now i've been to israel i'm going there i'm going there in two weeks yeah i'm going back i love israel but um um yeah they've cleaned it up there's no more garbage actually now it's all a cemetery yeah anyhow so i'm sinking deeper and deeper into this complete despair and my mind reflects on myself as a child in sunday school singing jesus loves me and i could see myself as a little kid with a bunch of other kids and we're all like saying you know vigorously you know full of enthusiasm jesus loves me and as i saw that in my mind i felt it in my heart i felt what i'd believed as a little kid and i began to debate with myself could that be true you know what what i believed then was that in fact something trustworthy and as i started to think about it i thought i don't want to think about this anymore i just want to believe it you know i just i just want i just want it to be true so i called out into the darkness jesus please save me and um which is something i would have said as a little child and a tiny light up here in the darkness got very bright and it came over me and possibly brilliant white light and i i worked as a welder for a while when i was young and it was much brighter than a welding light which you know you have to wear this black glass visor to look when you weld you have you know because it'll blind you if you look directly into it and this light was brighter than that welding light but it wasn't so it's it's light but it's not light because it didn't blind me it was like it was like so beautiful and out of it came hands and arms and reached down and touched me and i came all together i just within like one or two seconds i was all healed up and more importantly than the healing much more importantly was i was filled with a love that i impossible to describe because it was so great so overwhelming and his hands and arms picked me up without any effort and embraced me very firmly up against himself and i put my arms around him and held on to him and cried all my tears of a lifetime of happiness and i'm holding on to him and slobbering on his chest really big time slobbering which was embarrassing but i didn't care he didn't seem to mind he was rubbing my back like a mother or a father would rub their child's back and he was just rubbing my back and i realized in all this that we were exiting going directly upward and out of that place of darkness and i was just happy about that holding on to him because i didn't want him to drop me which was funny because of course he wouldn't drop me i was actually worried that he might have dropped me yeah so i was hanging on to him and he was holding on to me and we're moving through space and i want to get i want to man up i want to stop you know weeping it's embarrassing and uh i'm trying to not cry so much and i look to where we're moving and i see what at first i think is a big galaxy of light all kinds of activity around it and all of a sudden i realized that's god's house that's where god lives and that i am the stupidest person in the world because i've spent my whole life saying it doesn't exist not only for me personally but for everyone that i knew you know it's like boy were we dumb you know and then i felt so ashamed and i thought i'm a piece of filth actually a stronger language but i'm cleaning it up um i'm phil he's made a most terrible mistake i don't belong here going towards this world of light of god's house and we stopped our progress towards it and he spoke to me in my mind telepathically for the first time and he said we don't make mistakes you belong here and then i thought how'd you know i thought that and he said to me telepathically i know everything you've ever thought and then i thought it's not good because i've thought lots of things i don't want you to know that i've thought immediately started thinking about those things mostly revolved around female anatomy i've always liked women too much and he laughed and laughed he thought that was funny that's amazing it occurred to me it was okay you know yeah he's not mad he's not upset because it's funny because you know if you try and think about things you don't want to think about you're going to think about right yeah yeah one of the things i like to tell people about jesus not only does he love us more than we ever possibly imagined how much we could be loved he also likes us the way we are and and that's not surprising since he made us if you read the gospel of john you realize that he made us and he made us he made our noses our ears our minds our hair you know our shoulders you know the whole works and uh what what mother what father doesn't like their child you don't always like what they do you know but i mean most parents love their kids you know somehow well yeah because then after we conversed a while he said he had some people he wanted to meet so he called out and what i refer to as a group of angels which i think was my angelic team which we all have that surround us during our life um they came over and we did a life review and as we went over my life they shared with me their feelings not judgment but feelings about things that that that made them happy when i showed compassion and things that i did that made them very unhappy when i was indifferent or cruel and most of my sin which sin means to miss the mark to fail to do what god you know asked us to do was more indifference than i mean i didn't rob i didn't steal you know actually i didn't even lie i just just didn't care it's just about me you know and uh that people think indifference is not that big a deal actually indifference is as bad if not worse than hostility and violence that's amazing yeah it's real it um jesus the angels gods do not like apathy they do not like indifference the greeks thought god was indifferent they divine described god as apathy they had it 100 wrong and that's interesting thing about the uh hebrew testimony of the old testament the hebrew testament is that a god of uh great feeling and compassion you know yeah this is interesting so in your book you talk about god having emotions and i was always trained in the you know aristotelian tradition that god is apathy he doesn't feel but yeah that's because that's what the greeks believed right right right but you're saying he has deep emotions right yeah this is where thomas aquinas really misled a lot of christianity and does to this day um i mean that would be a interesting philosophical discussion but the the bible can be confusing because of course they project a lot of their stuff onto god and i just read an interesting um two volume three thousand page book on how contradictions in the old testament about god saying don't harm these people and then say we're gonna kill them all no you know um there's a lot a lot of contradictions in the old testament um and so one of the reasons why we believe that jesus is the perfect true revelation of god is that there's no contradiction in the gospels it's consistent so when we read the old testament we have to go back and read it through the perfect revelation of god which is jesus christ or as a seminary professor quote we've got to read the old testament with our jesus classes on and so like when we read like psalm 139 yeah that's perfect you know it's prayer i mean it's completely consistent with jesus but yeah so um when my life review was over it was a disaster my life review was it was terrible i made jesus and the angels very very unhappy and the last thing i wanted to do was to make them unhappy because he's now my my best friend my savior my you know my buddy my god my you know everything and all of a sudden you know i'm like i mean i'm like really really and what his unhappiness was his disappointment that he had created me to be this loving kind creative interesting person and i um wasn't doing what he you know had hoped yeah and all he cared about was was compassion and kindness passion is the word i like i like the word compassion because it's more specific than the word love the word love in our society is so abused you know i love your lipstick i love you here i love your new sofa you know you know i love michael jackson i don't love michael jackson you know what i mean and so we you know um the word love is the most important word in the whole language of the world except it's been so abused that um it's misused and it's become sentiment and when you love someone you may feel warm and fuzzy but you can also love someone and make sure that they go to jail yeah you know yeah yeah um you know tough tough love means um not letting your um addict son or daughter into the house the wonderful movie that i just saw recently about this kind of love um ben is back there's about a mother dealing with her addicted son he comes he shows up at home he's been he's been in rehab and he shows up at home and he's running all the same games and she's trying to figure out where the how far to extend the love and where to shut it down it's a really beautiful movie um yeah another another movie that explores the theme i'm silenced by martin shakasey have you seen that great movie about love you know love love can be really really painful really hard sometimes doesn't feel so warm and fuzzy yeah sometimes love can be the deepest kind of suffering you know with someone yeah um so the word compassion being with passion being with passion with someone being with feeling with someone it's a little more specific you know one of the things you talk about i think is in the book and in interviews is uh students would come to your office and as you're looking through the life review you know uh homer fields or something his name was exactly absolutely yeah it's all about interacting with the person that you're with yeah and one of the ways that i try and lift that and this is so minor but i think it's important you know how when you go to a store now or a restaurant they wear name tags yeah i call people by their name i i'm especially interested in baggers because that's like the bottom run in the grocery store right being a bagger yeah so like chuck how's it going they always look at me like you actually think i'm a human being yeah you know i mean they usually are so surprised they don't know what to say you know you just acknowledge their presence and i thank them for bagging my groceries that's the cashier and i mean yeah this is just service this is what changed me reading your book 15 years ago and then keeping up with everything you do is that it seemed love the kind of love jesus was asking was so particular in small things and it seemed like just in minor interactions not these grand um yeah is that and most and most importantly of all with children really most important yeah jesus said the most important job is children yeah that's right and if we want to change the world we're going to have to change our um the way that we deal with children wow anyway so i'll go on with the story um so when it was done jesus said you have any questions i said i got a million questions so i asked him everything that i could think of at that time to ask him and he answered everything he showed me things he took me places we did stuff it was great past president future how long was this going on well since there was no time in that place i on i can only invent an answer and i said longer than it took me to go through graduate school which was three and a half years based on my limited understanding at that time i mean so anyways after all that i said i want to go to heaven i want to be in heaven you know he said no you're not ready you won't fit in you got to go back and live life the way you were supposed to in the first place and so we had a big argument and i argued as forcefully as i could to come back i mean to go to heaven and he made better arguments telling me that that wasn't appropriate at that time and i had to come back here and it was a very worthwhile um discussion argument because when i say argue i don't mean like yelling and shutting i mean you know i'd give us i make a statement and he'd counter it and i'd make a minute that's god you know anyways finally i agreed to come back and when i agreed to come back um without any transition bang i was just back and immediately when i came back was now nine o'clock at night and nurse came into the room that had been in the room at 8 30 and she said um a doctor has arrived at the hospital now this is weird saturday night you know nine o'clock doctor showed up a surgeon and you're gonna have a surgery so they prepped me in the room for the surgery and at 10 o'clock i had surgery and sometime sunday morning i woke up um and i felt like i'd been run over by a truck but it wasn't it wasn't the pain anymore the pain was gone this was just like um soreness like you know like a truck would run over me something just was sore all over um and i'm thinking about okay what happened was the most important thing that's ever happened in my life so now i have to decide whether i'm going to go with that or not go with it and i realized that i had that choice i had that freedom and just ignore and go back and do what i was doing before wow but i i knew that if i did that i wouldn't be able to live with myself and that i would have to stay drunk all the time i would have to anesthetize myself to live the lie that used to be my life so i'm going to have to do things but i don't know like exactly what that means what what do i change what do i do and so that's what i've been working on for um 33 years 34 years now what what what things do i do differently and what things i can do the same old way yeah so it's a basically a daily challenge yeah and when you asked didn't you ask jesus something like um what do you want me to do when i go back and what's the purpose of my existence and yeah and he told me love the person that you're with and i told him okay fine but what do you want me to do so we had we had a big discussion about that and part of it was is that i said well when i go back i want to build you a big shrine and i'll make it so i'll buy a piece of land on the country you know scavenge materials and you know rebar and concrete and stone and stuff and i'll make this big shrine to jesus and it'll be so amazingly weird and wonderful that people will come from all over the world to see it you know they'll know that you are you know the one you're the man you're god you're the lord and yeah he said please don't do that i thought why and he said i don't need it i don't want it and i want you to go bury yourself in a big project you've been doing that your whole life he said i want you to go back and interact with people you know yeah um people are a big distraction you know you're a megalomaniac well it turns out it's um sometimes it's extremely easy i mean sometimes i'm dealing with really sweet lovable people and they're just adorable and it's like um i fall in love with them my wife chastised me the other day because i was telling her how much i loved not my church secretary but another church secretary and uh she said don't say don't say you love her i said but i i love a lot of people i love i'm trying to love everybody that i meet she said you can't go around saying that don't say that and i said i want to say it it's true it's what i believe and she said well stop saying that say you like them a lot or you you know i mean i it's really frustrating because like after my near-death experience i told everybody that i loved them but and they all thought i was crazy you know i was sick so it's like okay you know he's he's renting i meant i would i would try and hug and kiss everybody and that um was a disaster especially when i did it to men um they didn't like it and women didn't like it because they misunderstood you know um it's really frustrating in this world because um we're here to love each other and i do not mean that in a sexual way at all um and then one of one of the many problems of using the word lopez and people are they've learned because of the way our society is the way we've raised them as children to not trust anybody so i'm a pastor of a church and people don't trust me they think i'm a predator because all men are predators and all pastors are predators all pre-suppressors right i mean that's that's what people come to believe and like you know hopefully after they get to know me they realize that i'm not a predator you know don't your parishioners know about your story and who you are or do they do some of them not even know that i've always wondered this like do they know that you've seen jesus i don't i don't know some of them do some of them don't i don't promote it that much um because i'm in a weird position because it's like you know it's i mean i'm obviously pretty open about that i love jesus and i know jesus and i met you and stuff like that but on the other hand it sounds kind of egotistical it's sort of like man in it yeah i know jesus you don't know you know it's true yeah yeah and uh and i am proud of it you know but it doesn't make me better than anybody else no no but matter of fact i mean the other egotism is i'm the worst sinner in the world right but i'm not because paul already took credit for that you know so so that's what i've been doing for the rest of my life trying to figure out how can i live a life fulfilling my potential given the gifts and the deficiencies that i have i have gifts and i have big deficiencies and i've gotta i gotta get work with that stuff you know um and most importantly how does my life present me opportunities to love people and to love god or to put it all very simply um how do i live live a life pleasing to god given the circumstances that i'm in yeah and so i've done like over 30 mission trips overseas and i've been serving churches as a pastor for 30 years um but that stuff's not important what's really important is how i have treated the people that i'm with when i'm with them wow you know yeah and you ever feel burnt out you know i don't feel burnt up but i feel frustrated with people because they um they just don't want to get with the program one of the things i love about the book and you know the other books is that you talk about the frustration you have in trying to help people talk about jesus love them and they don't want it and what do you i'm really interested in how you deal with that and what if you because you you've been doing this longer and you know what do you do it's like um being in the grocery store for example and you see someone slapping a child or yelling at a child and you want to go over and intervene you know you don't it's not gonna it's really not gonna work i don't have the skills to do that kind of an intervention that's not the way you do it just not the way you do it you don't do that with kids um making a big mistake and so you don't you don't do anything about it um it's frustrating because you you know if if i could put on sandwich boards and walk up and down the street and go repent the end of sneer and i if it would make a make a difference i'd do it but it doesn't that doesn't work i mean you just being foolish you know people you're crazy and don't take you seriously so how do we how do we make a relevant difference and i think one of the points is that um we have to realize we're not the messiah we're not jesus we're not the christ we gotta we got our little job we got our little tiny niche in the world to take care of and that's and that's what we do and it can have surprising consequences like for example i have never put other than my website which i didn't do somebody else did for me i've never put anything on the internet ever wow and people started putting interviews with me on the internet and now i have correspondence with people all over the world every day and um make helpful things i've you know i've written some books because with the interviews sometimes things can get misunderstood so if i write in a book i can be clearer yeah hopefully people won't misunderstand what i'm saying i mean you know some like biggest critics are other christians and it's disappointing because i don't think they um have either either willingly or unwillingly understood what i was trying to say i've never said all religions are the same but people say that i say that i didn't say it i never said it you know um one of the things i notice in your interviews is you're very careful you're very it's very contextualized you know who you're talking to and you try i could tell you're trying to speak to that person and not to offend you you can't offend us though so whatever you say you know like i'll go back to how difficult you know i asked jesus what's the best religion and what i was thinking because at that time i wasn't religious i meant presbyterian catholic baptist methodist you know episcopalian that's what i meant by best religion you know i technically what i should have said which is the best christian denomination but i don't even know what a christian denomination was i mean it was outside of my realm yeah and so i asked him what's the best religion meaning basically within christianity he said the one that brings you closest to god yeah now the it's a two-part question because it doesn't follow but i want to explain the one that brings you the closest to god is like go to that church that denomination that faith where you connect with god right it's good advice you know if you go if you go to a church and also preaching is hellfire and damnation get out of there you know if you go to a church and also talking about is fundraising or you know all they want is you know what are they going to do after super bowl sunday for fun yeah get out of there i mean you know not nothing wrong with churches trying gimmicks but i mean if if their whole focus is on that i mean you want to go to a church where it's about god and it's about you know love and it's about jesus and it's about faith and about you good to people not not a church that's self-serving or you know i i was with a group and uh there was a clergy counseling group in the psychologist said how upset he was because he went to a big church and preacher talked about how they were the best church in the whole city and stuff like that and he said well it was such a turn up because like churches are not supposed to be narcissistic not like we're the best like really i said when he told me go to the one that brings you closer to god it's like because he's thinking about me coming back at that time i wasn't thinking about me coming back he's thinking about good she's going go find a church he's saying go find a church you know he wouldn't tell me he wouldn't tell me to become a presbyterian or a catholic or anything you know because he wanted me to to figure it out which is consistent with jesus in the gospel she's always everybody asking these simple questions he says you go figure it out thanks jesus you know um you know with all of his problems so the follow-up to the question was um i said but which one is it you know which one which you know give me a name and he said there's good people and uh bad religions and there's bad people in good religions um and you need to find it out for yourself and i've been pastoring now for 30 years and um he's absolutely right you know in every church that i've experienced and that i know of because i hang out with a lot of pastors there's like some really terrible people and there's a lot of really good people and there's a whole lot of people in between and don't you can't judge your church that way churches are there for hopefully everybody and sure the churches would be a whole lot better there were a whole lot more sinners in the church and less people that thought they were so self-righteous so um my wife and i love to go to as a pastor i gotta i gotta show up at my church mostly i mean that's my job but we love when we go away we go to different churches and we love to go to jeremy church and some of them have been wonderful and some of them have been miserable and you know some of it's the music some of it's the preaching but mostly it's just like the the feeling of love there are not love you know that's it so if someone asked me what's the church church that's going to say what were you raised and i say methodist is like go to methodist church i don't have anything it's just like just go go where you belong go with if you're catholic stay catholic you know what and they say i don't want to go to california okay fine go to a physical church then you know whatever you know oh here's my answer here's my answer people people i mean when mormons fight me you talk to me they want me to become a mormon and so when catholics ask me and i me i mean this and say when they ask me why i'm not catholic or have i considered becoming i was telling me i'm catholic because i am in my heart officially not i have a letter from a catholic priest in belize central america saying i am their number one fundraiser i've built three catholic churches and police i mean i've raised i take that back i raised the money to have three catholic churches built in police and all the work i've done and believes i've done it under the authority and auspices of the catholic church we've built a catholic school in police when people ask me if i'm catholic yeah okay i i am not officially a member of the roman catholic church but um i consider myself a catholic but i also because and this is what probably people don't understand i also consider myself to be a methodist and a presbyterian a lutheran and an episcopalian um and that may sound like fancy well um i believe that and i also believe that that's what jesus believes jesus says in the gospel of john that they all may be one as we are one and um so i'm just trying to be faithful to jesus and not faithful to people that want to be divisive i don't see the divisions as healthy i see them as unhealthy yeah yeah right so i love the catholic church there's things about the catholic church that i could be critical of but generally i support it my wife and i when we have opportunities to go to mass and participate fully and whatever you know my best friend was a catholic priest he died unfortunately but he's he's working for me upstairs now so let's and you love thomas martin right oh yeah he was one of my his and was one of my biggest girls um right here i'm reaching on the wall of my office oh my man he's watching over me i like his hair yeah i totally relate um so so you eventually left academia and decided to become a pastor when did you make that decision well as soon as i was barely able i started going to a church which is the the denomination that i had grown up in and because someone invited me there it's the first time in my life i was ever invited to a church i was praying and praying praying for weeks about where to go i didn't know where to go but i i physically couldn't because i was too sick and uh this woman a woman that i hired at the university a painter called me and invited me to her church i asked her what it was and she told me like figured out that it was what i'd been raised in and i went there and i became very active it was like my whole life i was like the every priest or pastor's sort of hope and nightmare you know it's like hanging around the church what can i do you know my first thing at the church was i painted the nursery i started teaching sunday school and the pastor who was excited about having a college professor in his church he started after well i was taking classes and all this stuff but over time then he had me serve as liturgist and then i'd been there a couple years and he asked me to do a sermon one time and i was just like i mean every time i did that stuff it's like this is what i need to be doing so it's a real struggle but i told my wife that i wanted to go to seminary and she said no so um that argument went on for about a year or two and finally i told her i said well i'm going to summary and so you don't want me to but i'm going to go anyways and uh so i started seminary in 88 and in seminary you have i went to a methodist summary because it was i could commute there it was only 70 miles away so i was commuting to seminary afternoons and evenings 70 miles to 20 did that for three and a half years and while you're in seminary you have to serve as a student pastor so i started serving churches as a student pastor and my last year at seminary i was a student pastor and they asked me to stay and be their pastor there's a little dying inner city church and i um said i would and um so i started serving them in 91 and then i got ordained in 92 and i was installed as their full-time pastor in 92 after surtained um so it was it was a process and my wife didn't like it and she eventually left me i mean there were lots of reasons but that was a big one it's very hard giving up the university position because i love being an architect i mean what's not to love about being an art teacher it's like you know just play it's fun it's like you know students are great you know you get to talk about you know there's too much green in that blue sky you need to you know get back on good stuff and also nice thing about artists you know pretty specific i mean it may seem like all kind of like weird but actually art like music has rules it has laws and they're really incontestable it you know they there are things that you do that work and things that you do that don't work and that's like a phrase used as an art teacher a lot that works that doesn't work try this so you know and i mean the whole point is to get people as an art teaching to be able to express themselves you're not trying to get them to be like you or like anything just how can you be more authentic to yourself no so it's fun it's hard to let go of that i miss it but that's the way it goes and just the way it goes you felt academe was just not the right context to do this to do well that and also i felt that i was serving a um deceptive institution um university would the root of that word have anything to do with universe as in universal meaning like everything except that real faith real god real biblical understanding is excluded from the university and one of the corruptions of the faith is the only play well harvard university yale university all the all the big original universities in this country were all founded to be divinity schools um i mean people don't know that but that's what they were founded that they had one curriculum divinity and then they decided to add two other professions which was law and medicine and at the time they started adding more professions but originally their coursework was philosophy and theology basically that's what they taught biblical studies so pastors were trained at universities which were basically seminaries their purpose was to create clergy eventually universities broadened their curriculum and we got a distinctive form of school called a seminary whose sole purpose was to train clergy so people that taught at seminates tended to be people of faith promoting faith academia the universities moved away from a faith-based education to a critical look at university so the training of clergy outside of seminaries took place in places where there was very very critical academically ambitious people trying to make a name for themselves by carrying the faith carrying the church tearing the bible apart now the church the faith the bible are big enough strong enough that they can take it but it can do like a lot of harm to faith development and can do a lot of harm to the people in public and i'll give you an example there's a movement today and i've actually known some i've even had a class with some people of the jesus seminar where they look the bible and say jesus didn't say this jesus might have said that it doesn't do the faith any good at all does it a lot of harm and they all get to publish and they all get to write books and pat themselves in the back is what skulls there and they don't know flat out they don't know what they're talking about they do not it's all speculation and it's like me you know i have a friend that's obsessed with the conspiracy to blow up the twin towers in new york um i love i love my friend but he drives me nuts because like ultimately what is your point our government is so evil that they would kill thousands of innocent people and plant all these mine these buildings with bombs and then create this big trick of like airplanes flying into them which really didn't destroy the buildings because it's the bombs that blew up the buildings and but i mean what what what is your point in all this now where you where are you going with us and it's like so our biblical scholars who want to tear the church the faith and the bible apart and they're all interlinked so when you do one you do the other what are you trying to achieve because um i'm working the other side of the street you know i'm working like with a group of people called a church trying to give them hope trying to give them love trying to give them faith when i say give them i mean i don't give it to them i'm trying to encourage them to get it you know um and based on what wha what's my basis for this it's not psychology it's not because i'm a saint based on the biblical tradition based on the church tradition and based on the re the reality that's the stuff that's true and if that you put it to the test you'll find out how true it really is so like the bottom line is you know i say to people all the time don't believe a word i say ask jesus ask jesus if he loves you go go get on your knees and ask him and you'll find out whether he's real or not you'll find out whether he loved you you know don't take it from me take it from him go to the source um so that's that's what i'm working on and then i hear these quote well-meaning academics tearing it all down and saying it's all basically it's all a big lie it's all a big myth it's all a big story you don't don't put your faith in it and then doing the same thing to the church one of the most powerful things you've said is that i guess this was apparent to you with your conversation with jesus and the angels was that god gave you the gift of intellect and you were never satisfied with the answers you get that is just pervasive in academia even you know me years ago too you just we you know we just keep speculating keep speculating and then jesus told me to be satisfied with the answer you know like when i go i've been to israel three times i would love to go there every year if i could but i can't afford it so i've been there three times and going there in two weeks before time and you learn so much that like this stuff the bible is really based in real rock and real soil in real places i'll give you i'll give you an example how important it is to to follow your heart into the reality of it um in nazareth there's a church that was built in the 1800s and that's a real nice church and you find out that they built it on the remains of a byzantine church um and expanded the base of that but they discovered a byzantine church when they were doing some recent archaeological excavation they found that the byzantine church was built on a second century church a smaller church and as they were doing further excavation around the base of the church they came upon a little house and carved into the wall of the house was the home of mary the mother of the lord in archaeology this is saying when it's carved in stone it's as good as it gets you know scholars all denied that pontius pilate ever existed as a human being until i found a stone and caesarea with his name pontius pilate governor of judea you know you know that story don't you yeah i mean scholars i said they're out the bible's not true there's no pontius pilate in the records and then they find them carved in stone there anyways they found the house of mary now the house of mary also would be mary and her kids which one of her kids was named jesus you know this is like jesus's house it's right next to the church and it's like literally there's the church now so the the original church was built in the second century next to the house like to honor this would the people there in nazareth knew where mary and jesus they all lived they knew where they lived and they built a church next door to honor that place and it's been rediscovered like i i mean like i've been in the house where jesus grew up you know and and like and if you go there you can too and it's like a lot of places in the holy land are like maybe could be maybe not who knows you know whatever but i mean it's not really that important the important thing is just like when you when you walk around the land and you read the bible and you put it all together all this stuff starts to make make sense like you know i i won't belabor it but like when you go to megiddo and you see that big valley and you realize that was a perfect place for you for chariot battles you can't have chariot battles in hilly country they don't work you know you can't have chariot battles in sandy country you know and the plane of megiddo is a big flat plane it's all farmland today and the city of megiddo is up on this tell overlooking that whole thing and that's like the whole idea of armageddon and i mean it also it all comes together it all makes sense and you go like yeah it's all i'll be the i'll i'll start with this one thing it's like galilee is very very beautiful the sea of poly you know the sea of galilee is absolutely gorgeous people it's a big tourist destination and people come from all over the world to go water skiing and swimming and stuff like that i mean people go there not for religious reasons just because it's really beautiful um think about jesus did most of his ministry around the sea of galilee okay so he liked he liked nice places too i mean you know i mean he was he was hanging out in like a vacation spot of the world you know yeah i mean i mean it makes me like him it makes me like him more yeah you know i have the opportunity to go to israel every year and i don't go because uh he needs to fly i hate to fly but i gotta go over here but get actually yeah can you go claire can you go different universities so i don't have the opportunity you gotta take clare hey if you take clarisse you'll hold your hand and then you won't be afraid to fly that's true okay um so okay so can i ask you a little bit about jesus i know uh just yeah so okay um one of the things i i i noticed in two of your books the newest one befriended oh have you read that yeah i love it yeah i like it yeah i know it's good yeah no christians it seems like and it's much more you know because you're using the bible and all these things um i also like lessons learned too the only one i didn't read was the novel it's all love and my wife she hides things like i can't find my topic so i don't know where you hide things what uh my wife threw my crackers away the other day she said why'd you throw my crackers away she said i'm tired of looking at him it's like that's a reason to throw my crackers away one of the things you talk about in there and you've just mentioned in a line but it's in lessons learned as well my one of my favorite prayers is the jesus prayer it seems like you right and so i wonder if you could talk a little about the jesus prayer the prayer of the heart i i get the sense you pray that prayer a lot i like what you did with it you added uh uh i'm a sinner redeemed by your love oh yeah oh you did okay the uh when i asked jesus what was the best way to pray he said um honesty simple simple honest is the best way and that's been confusing to me because like when i first started going to church the pastor would write these very long very beautiful poetic prayers and then recite them um he didn't memorize him but he read he he worked really hard on composing these great pastoral prayers and then you read them and it's like wow i could never do that that's just something that's so beautiful and then um so when i started pastoring as a student you know it's like i would write prayers and try and you know cover everything you know and move on say it well and and god said to me finally he said you don't need to do that just just go up and pray the way you pray you don't have to put on a show for your pastoral prayer because i mean part of being the preacher is just like you you want to put on a good show you know you want you want to do a good job i mean you want to look good and do good and i said to god i said i when i get there i'm going to stammer i'm going to hesitate i'm going to mess my language up i mean i because i'm not i'm not thinking about sentence structure i'm just whatever go ahead and do it so it's like it was really scary really really scary staying up in front of your church and just praying from the heart and that's what i do now but what it has kind of come down to is sort of uh fernando my wife said to me she said when we say um you know table grace when we eat and she says why why do i say the same thing i said it's not always the same so they got a little formula that i use um she doesn't when she says we we try to alternate on the table grace and so when she says table grace it's like she may go off on this thing and neglect this other stuff that i think you shouldn't neglect but but she's pre she prays from the heart what it whatever it is is on her mind at that moment and that's fine that's i mean i'm not being critical my formula i kind of got the bases covered you know but it's my formula i don't i'm not using um somebody you know and and so and i deviate from it a little bit every time but um it works for me it's my honest prayer right because it's it's but i created it you know it's like when we do the um our father which i do in which we do in church and i think all christians pretty much do that's like it's a great prayer i mean not only did it come from jesus but it's like it's got to cut it's got the whole thing covered because when you take that thing apart and you could write a book about the our father and all and the ways includes kind of like the whole life experience it's wonderful and so it's good to have these prayers in our inventory of prayers but the bottom line prayer is the bottom line prayer is this god help me jesus have mercy on me lord i can't do this you know be with me jesus you know i'm scared jesus you know i mean that's those are those are the but you don't have to teach people those prayers because they just hopefully they just come up but we don't um we don't have to pray anyway the any particular way the important thing is to pray is to talk to god that's what people do understand prayer is a conversation and the people that miss as they don't listen and like praying without listening is like not good that's the wrong way to pray the right way to pray is to to pray means to ask so you ask and then you listen and if you're not listening and listening means shut up and be quiet and because that's when god speaks to us in our heart and in our mind and it's like when i say god speaks i mean you you you get to know something you didn't know and i don't know how it works i don't know how it works it just works tell people if they ask me well how can i you know just says first you gotta before you can hear him you gotta know him because if you don't know him there's lots of voices voices from our past voices from our culture and voices spiritual voices and they're all trying to get our attention you know voices saying you're too short you're too fat you're too ugly you're too stupid you're you're too conceited you're too wrong you're no good you know does all those voices and and voices saying you know you need more money if you had more money you'd be happy bubba i mean it's just voices voices voices i mean and we need to learn what the voice of jesus and that's real simple matthew mark luke and john you study those until you you know them until you own them until when when you when you know matthew mark luke and john you know what's the voice of jesus and what's not and if you hear a voice telling you that you're no good you go like get out of my life in the name of jesus i don't want you in my house you know how what is the relationship between jesus and the father because and i ask this practically because for me i god is impossible to know i only know jesus i don't right well you got right you got it absolutely right that's why that's why god has given us jesus in the holy spirit is that god um is so one of the ways that i like to try and understand god is that god is um consciousness i mean there's a lot of things that you can say about god that are um painfully inadequate but there are some things that you can say about god that are insightful that are helpful like for example you can say that god is omniscient and i think most people would agree that that is a pretty adequate description of god god knows everything so god is knowing to make it simple god is knowing god is consciousness is awareness and um that's one of the ways that we participate with god is that god god's omniscience and god's knowingness he knows our knowingness you know and he knows us i am not a pantheist i do not believe that god is in everything you know this is not god you know not god hello excuse me you know i mean i can pick up you know there's definitely definitely not god um i believe god is aware of everything so god is um you know pan-emphasis god is with everything in the knowing of all things but in terms of our ability to know god uh because we're like it's like the ant trying to understand the elephant you know just you know just hopeless absolutely hopeless but god in god's creative activity in the world has another kind of another kind of consciousness which is literally being involved which is um the word the logos the divine economy uh and ultimately um the christ and for that um cool little event called uh jesus you know that little 30-year event where god said i'll just i'll just wear the meat suit for a while and show them does the creative activity of god and i know this is impossible to talk about but it's as if god consciousness splits and then becomes interactive with the world and the economy yeah yeah yeah because because god knows in his country we can't we can't handle god and i could talk a lot about that because jesus and i talked a lot about that god is way too much for us we yeah um frankly if any of us right now were in the presence of god would blow up would we we would we would we would wish ourselves into the farthest abyss of hell because we're so overpowering because we're not ready we're not ready for it yet i mean we will be someday i mean that's where we're going towards we're going towards that unity with god but like not today thank you so god said okay i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm going to be present to you in a way that you can't interact with me in actually two ways so one was the jesus event which god is willing to reveal to us in the form of jesus any worshipper and like millions and millions of people have met jesus in the history of christianity and the other way is through the holy spirit which is that spirit of god so i am greatly offended when shirley maclaine stands by the ocean and says i am god matter of fact i think god's offended and i call that blasphemy and i think that's a really big sin now i think it's um immensely ignorant to call oneself but i can say and you can say that i have god with me and uh i got i got a label for that called the holy spirit spirit of christ you know spirit of god um and so that that's what speaks to me so like when i um when i'm reading the bible and i ask god i don't what does this mean what am i you know and i sit there and i read it and i read it i go over and i read it some more and then i think about it and i read and all of a sudden it's like oh wow i get it you know and um that's the beauty of the bible is that it will literally if you give it a chance it'll literally teach you it'll speak to you through the holy spirit now you can have that kind of eureka experience with art with poetry with literature but the bible just doesn't stop giving i mean most literature most art when you kind of get it you kind of you got it and it's not too much more but with the bible it's endless i mean i i can read the same passage a hundred different times you get a hundred more things out of it so well i'll just ask you this then did jesus tell you why he had to die in the new testament it just seems like this is the ultimate revelation of the love of god the death of jesus and it's just everything hangs on it that you know we know yeah yeah but yeah yeah a good one of my best friends is a theology professor at the united theological cemetery his andrew park he's korean and he wrote a really good book on the atonement and he talks about the four historical understandings of the atonement and more modern interpretations but so it's really good because i i think that there's some truth in all of those different ways of looking at the atonement but my bottom line is the exemplary i think is primarily the exemplary thing before i talk about the exemplary thing i do believe that jesus defeated the power of sin and death because that power was what drove the world everyone was trying to we got to kill a lot of animals for our sins you know we got i mean like you know um we've got to sacrifice women and children for our sins you know like we gotta we gotta do all these really like ghastly things this has been going on throughout the history well it still goes on today people sacrificing for their sins um and it's funny because in the bible you know it says god does not want your sacrifice he despises your sacrifice but anyways people do it anyways so jesus wasn't sacrificed to pay for our sin that's not it he sacrificed he gave himself up to defeat the power of evil and i think one of the ironies of it all is is that evil thought it was his greatest victory and i think this is where in the passion of christ mel gibson got it pretty good you know the the evil one sees the crucifixion as his victory and doesn't realize that the crucifixion is actually his defeat but i see it more i see the um suffering and death of jesus and resurrection more as an exemplary act like the number one fear psychologically that all humans suffer with is the fear of death and if you think death is death and there is no nothing else then why have any morality you just make up your morality you know i'll take care of my family and to hack with everybody else which is what a lot of people believe you know or i'll take care of my country my tribe and the heck with everybody else uh if death is the ultimate end of everything jesus said death is not and not only i mean he resurrected several people before he was resurrected i mean he was the only resurrection matter of fact in the gospel of john the resurrection of lazarus is probably a real big factor about why they killed jesus but anyways he showed us that suffering which is almost as bad as death death are just not don't have any real power and that his power is the power to give us life which he promises to give us even if we even if we suffer and die and i think that the suffering death thing are people skip the sudden but he suffered terribly before he died and they forget about the 39 lashes and um that that whole cross thing was meant to be exquisitely painful one good fraud just a little aside one good friday i got the bright idea to read a ama report by a doctor on what jesus experienced on the cross i got into it about a page or two and people it's a good friday service okay church i'm the pastor i'm up there reading this thing from the pulpit people yelled at me stop it we can't take anymore so i stop it's like horrible the nails that went into his wrist are like up against like a major nerve because like you know all the nervous nerves you have in your fingers well that whole nerve bundle goes right here so that was like right up against that nail and it was just like i'd go on and on and on let's suffocate blah blah blah anyhow um he suffered terribly we think suffering i mean one of the reasons why i'm afraid of death is we're afraid of the suffering of suffering and every everybody pretty much unless you're lucky enough to have a brain aneurysm um you know most people suffer when they die and people are afraid and she said hey this is that's it's it's it's not the end of everything it's this isn't it you know it's the beginning this is actually prelude to the beginning of everything and um his erection resurrection was just like a little hint of like being a being able to appear in rooms they locked rooms since you know eating eating on the i last time i was in israel i was at um the table rock where he fit his disciples in the resurrection appearance and he gave me a nice little hit up there his presence i was alone in that chapel at the table where he met and i prayed and he he um he loved on me real good um and um i mean that here's the resurrected christ cooking fish for disciples you gotta you gotta love it i mean you know um or the rest of us resurrected christ meeting paul on the road to damascus and saint paul why are you doing this my own my own interpretation or making more controversy really paul really you know yeah so and you think if when you were outside of your body you know when you saw the meat there had you just so i always think about this when i die i'm just gonna say jesus you know you know you always quote john 14 when he says i'm going to come and take you and we could that's something we can be sure of we can hope for that right yeah absolutely it's a it's 100 sure thing the other thing i tell people that's a sure thing is that it may be these words or something like it but like when we meet jesus it's going to be eye to eye and we need to be ready to look him in the eye and not turn away you know i mean he's going to he's going to look in our eyes and we need to look in his eyes and not be ashamed or embarrassed or afraid just meet his because his his look is all love and some people can't handle it you know you know what a hand shy dog is handshake handshake dogs are um there are certain dogs that have been hit slapped a lot hit a lot and if if you put your hand up or raise your hand the dog like powers and turns away because it's afraid it's gonna get hit um it's disturbing because like there are other ways to discipline dogs other than slapping them around you know both ways and uh my art dogs like when you put your hand up and put it out they're like oh pets it's a little time you know like i mean they're like you know they see it as a good thing and that i mean there's a whole dogs are really into hands they're very they're very they're it's responsive to science even more so than they are to commands matter of fact some people that a lot of people that train dogs just use hand signs and don't even use verbal anyways like people when they meet jesus need to get ready you know um and not be afraid of him or not be simple here's a here's what's on my desk do you know this guy that's scary you know who it is yeah yeah that's nice i love it because uh we need to think of him as our buddy this buddy jesus here buddy right it's my buddy he is my lord he is my savior he is the king of kings but he's also my pal uh so i tell people like god when he says well done good and faithful servant enter into my kingdom you know he's going to say something that's what we want to hear um and actually the people that have rejected god and rejected jesus they're going to make jesus they're not going to meet him anyways i don't want him well yeah but for those of us who want you know we're eager to see him uh you know and you said you always say he just wants us to try and do our best yeah and give it the old and the bible the bible says that in i'm i'm being kind of loose with interpretation but four times the bible says anyone who calls upon the name of the lord shall be saved so even if we've not done our best if we at the end we call on him says that's good enough okay you messed up but you know yeah uh do you wanna oh well i mean so you talk about loving people and how that's the most important thing and how do you how do you love people who are i mean people who try to take advantage of you or who are the kind of people who just take and take i mean how what's the right way to love people like that well that you know that's really a big important question and like um sometimes the best way is to not enable them sometimes the best way is to walk away from them i was talking to a friend of mine on the phone who lives in wisconsin he was talking about um his wife who's their second marriage his second marriage his wife's son is an addict 29 year old addict he's back in the house revving him off and living off them and i keep telling him my friend i said you know i said you're there you and your wife are the master enablers you know you're teaching this kid who's not a kid anymore 29 year old man you're teaching him all these skills about squander your money on drug sex and rock and roll and come home get fired from your job and come home you know take dope get drunk go to jail come home it's all okay you know um you know if you talk to any any person in um n a or a a you know like that's not gonna work sometimes you have to turn your back on people so um when i was in prison when i was at the prison talking to these guys about real serious stuff i mean life and getting stabbed and getting beaten up and getting raped in prison which is something that i would rather not do um you know i talk to them like avoid confrontations walk away when someone comes up and insults your mama walk away i turn to one of the prisons this is true i turned to one of the prisoners and i said so what would you do if i told you right now that your mother's a he said he looked at me in the eye and he said what i would do is he said i would punch you out and i said you know there's another thing that you could do i said we're doing this hypothetically okay we're not acting this out right i said there's nothing you could do is you could walk away from me you know i said what i did was i just threw poison in your face okay i made it talk so why did i do that because i want you to be angry i did that because i knew that that would make you angry and for some reason i have a desire to make you angry so that i can be angry at you so we can both live in anger i said why are you going to give me the opportunity to make you angry why do you give me the power to do that there's something else you could do you said you could walk away from me and don't and don't give me the satisfaction of having that control over you i don't know if i could do that and i said well you need to learn how to do that you know um like wars you know the uh pope yesterday was in the united arab emirate and he said there's no more religious words we've got to stop it no more no more religious wars um it's like let's stop fighting over religion um i i've been around muslims and of course lots of jews and you know hindus and stuff like that and i try and get along and try and find out what we have in common we've got seriously we've got more in common than we have differences yeah so it's it's a real challenge because the big challenge is to my ego ego being my conscious sense of who i am so you say my mother's a right and i go no response no i mean there is no appropriate response to that comment and by the way my mother was a saint thank you very much you know this is there's no way to respond to it just just let it die you know um but it's hard it's hard when like i mentioned earlier that movie uh ben is back about what does the mother do when she's got an addicted son he comes home and like i'm sorry mom but i want to steal your jewelry you know not i mean he doesn't say it he just doesn't oh since the jury's gone you know again the eighth time you do i don't stop uh but that's that's what i do i like the best way to love them is to walk away from and pray from you know when people do mean things to me i try sometimes it takes a while minutes hours days i try to pray for them lord why so-and-so was so nasty to me why is he always belittling me and making me feel bad can i can't i have a better relationship with him i find this too when you try to really love people you make yourself very vulnerable you know i try to be very joyful i'm a naturally happy person and people just don't like that and they constantly are belittling me and and you know i think you have the same experience and it can be very hurtful you know and you don't know you just think you know i used to believe that if you were kind to people they'd be kind back and that's just it works sometimes yeah so i mean that's the problem with loving it you make you i mean you've said it and i'm wiser people in me who said to me is love makes us vulnerable so it's a really dangerous thing to go around and being a loving person and more so if you're a woman because women and there's too many men in our society that are have a predatory attitude towards women so like if you're kind to a man all of a sudden they're misinterpreting that as um you know you declare you i mean you know you're an attractive lady you show men a little bit too much warmth and all of a sudden they think you want them and like i really don't want you you know it's like just being nice you know i don't know it's tough and going back to what you just told me it's all about the way we're raised children like um i'll give you anything i was raised with two sisters two older sisters and like so i came to understand women as they were people so i'm not buying anything but like if you if you have sisters and you realize they're people that have to be treated like people with respect you can't abuse women so i never forced a woman to do anything because i wouldn't do that to my sister and i wouldn't want someone to do it to my sister and like you know i mean it was just so that that was like um part of my upbringing but i know that there are men that totally don't get that about women not like don't respect women it's like so how did you raise a male without ever giving him a sense of respecting women or conversely it could work the other way how do you how did you raise a female and have her not respect a man you know um there's a lot of dangerous people in our society um as a pastor people want to con me out of money which is like really really i mean you're going after i'm going to kenya in may to preach and i got a letter sunday from a kenyan pastor who read my book uh when it was the letters oh i kind of he he he sent me a couple letters and he sent me the book which i haven't gotten to read yet but anyways she heard that i'm going to kenya and he said he said he sent me two letters and the um one letter is be real be really careful when you go to kenya because it's going to be a lot of people asking you for money and they're um basically they're con artists you need to be really really cautious well i appreciate him giving me that warning but i've done enough mission trips we're like oh i've been conned by the i've i've been constantly i mean i mean i've i've given away thousands of dollars to con artists and i'm trying really hard not to do that anymore um you know so you know i your question was how do you love people that are dangerous to love or hard to love well get away from them don't give people what they ask for try and figure out what it is you can what they need what you can give them like part of my my job as a pastor is if someone talks about harming themselves i am by law obligated to get them to a hospital um and i've done it i've i've literally taken people from my church office to the hospital and signed them in um and i try and be nice about it so they don't get too angry but they don't really want to go to the hospital but if you i i promise you if you come if you come and get in my presence say i'm thinking about killing myself we're going for a ride to the hospital um that that's the kind the most loving thing you can do um enabling people is not loving them yeah that's that's hard for sometimes we we don't know the boundary there you know yeah yeah yeah yeah enact in academia being put down or in clergy being in a clergy group i would belong to two clergy groups getting put down it hurts but i i mostly just try not to react you know i sort of see it like you know when you're driving you meet uh someone that's like into road rage you know you're driving alone in your lane you're on the highway you're going 65 70 miles an hour and all of a sudden like someone comes screaming past you and cuts you off and stuff at 90 miles an hour like it's a really good thing to put distance put distance i pray for him i put distance and i pray for him i mean i go to the right lane i slow down like go have a life bye bye go far away go go go if you want to kill somebody it's not going to be me i mean i wish i had a direct line to the police and say but by the way there is a idiot in a you know black monte carlo going 90 miles per hour yeah i don't yeah especially academia it's a lot of hazing you know there's just before especially before you're tenured it's just constant amazing some of it's good that like we clergy we do a lot of kidding but most it's fun we're here two hours talking to you we're so sorry for monopolizing your time i'm really really sorry so a lot of kids come to me and and claire and and they're depressed they they say they feel numb inside you know and you've talked a lot about joy but you know i try and it just seems to fall in difference i don't know what to do with that i imagine as a pastor you get a lot of people with you know so what's like with depression and anxiety what do you think about that um i'm a big follower of francis mcnutt m-a-c-n-u-t-t he was a catholic priest and he's written a lot of books on deliverance deliverance prayer and i believe francis mcnutt um he's an old man now he lives in florida but i would highly recommend him and um he says that all that can be attributed to demonic influences and that prayer consultant but first of all the person wants god they have to want the prayer they want to be delivered you can if you pray for them and they're not cooperating well you're wasting your time and two it's going to be done with a team and it may it's probably going to have to be several times so more than just you one of the things when you're doing deliverance periods you've got to realize that you're going to come under attack the person who's praying you you've got to be really strong in your faith and in your prayer and you've got to be with the team so that you're all strong because if that person has some demonic spirits influencing them they're going to go after you because they don't like being attacked they don't like being driven up and you're going to probably have to repeat it so i would i mean you asked me a serious question so i'm giving you a serious answer i wouldn't tell anybody this because like it's too weird you know okay so deliverance prayer if you want to know more about it read francis mack not not mikna hackner unfortunate last name he's really great and his um it's probably the best book to read i think it's just best solaris healing but what you're saying is this is spiritual the other thing um is that if they're receptive what they need what everybody needs the the anecdote to everything is more love from god and the scripture says is that if we ask seek knock we're going to get that stuff but the part that the people missed is it follows that after asking knock with good gifts god wants to give you the good gifts so you can ask seek knock for a bmw or a mercedes or a lamborghini if you're really greedy you can ask for those things all you want and they're not going to happen because they're not the good gifts the good gifts are what in the bible are described as good gifts and of course the the biggies are love hope fate you know and then other important you know patience self-control you know generosity et cetera but and they can ask god for those good gifts love would be of course the number one but also the ability to forgive hope joy faith those are all things that they can ask for if they're receptive to having that kind of relationship with god because i i know god wants to give us the good gifts god gives me good gifts when i ask for him but god doesn't give us everything that we ask for like for example i've i've participated in some healings a few physical healings but typically it's not my gift i am not i don't have the gift of healing i've met people that had the gift of healing and they they do heal people um and i know people that want to be healers and they don't heal many people you know i i would like to be a healer but i'm not we only we only get in terms of our really big gifts we only get a few you know well i mean we should be happy with one my previous sunday when i was preaching i talked about hospitality as being one of the greatest gifts of all like where would a church be without hospitality well i know where they are because i've experienced churches that have people with the spirit of hospitality and i've been in churches where it isn't you know and hospitality is that man or woman that comes up to you and makes you feel so welcome like you want to go back there yeah yeah you know have you ever gone to a church and felt totally unwelcome oh yeah oh yeah it's i mean it sucks to put a plane it's like does anybody care that i'm a visitor really yeah we're looking for a church now so we've been to probably every church in the area yeah where do you live uh we live in spring area scranton pennsylvania right oh yeah i've spent a night or two in motels in scranton because my parents lived in massachusetts so i drove through scranton that's the most direct way from kentucky to massachusetts bias yeah yeah well thank you so much howard you know i have a thousand other questions and you know we've been talking for two and a half hours but you know maybe we could do it again sometime yeah yeah um hopefully you can edit it down into a

Channel: Duane Armitage

Views: 75,611

Keywords: Howard Storm, Near-Death Experience, NDE, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christianity, Aferlife

Id: BsYFDUSS-eI

Length: 132min 31sec (7951 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 15 2019