“Hang On, Let Go” with Frank Viola
Shownotes:
Our lives are full of unexpected changes, difficult transitions, and painful crises. In the midst of these realities, we all experience moments when it seems like we have no control and all hope is lost. Some of us may descend into apathy and numbness, and some of us may enter into “fix-it” mode to attempt a solution. How can we abandon our inclination to be passive and wait for God to intervene? What steps can we take to sustain hope during our trials?
Frank Viola’s recent book, Hang On, Let Go: What to Do When Your Dreams Are Shattered and Life Is Falling Apart, gives practical advice to anyone who has found themselves in a hard, dark place. Shaped out of Frank’s own pain and struggles, Hang On, Let Go offers a roadmap for experiencing transformation that points back to God’s love. He joins Eddie and Chris to discuss the difficult questions about human suffering, the gifts of presence and empathy, and the importance of perspective.
Resources:
Follow Frank Viola on the web:
Order Hang On, Let Go here:
https://frankviola.org/hangonletgo/
Check out Frank Viola’s other books here:
Listen to The Insurgence Podcast from Frank Viola here
Full Transcript:
Eddie Rester 0:00
I'm Eddie Rester.
Chris McAlilly 0:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.
Eddie Rester 0:04
Today, our weighty question is truly a weighty question. It is about suffering. What do we do when we find ourselves in a crisis, in a hard dark place when we've lost, whether that's lost a loved one, lost a battle, lost a job? And we've brought somebody alongside to have the conversation with us.
Chris McAlilly 0:27
Today we're talking to Frank Viola. He's written a number of books. He's a best selling author. Radical discipleship is typically his lane. But he's written a new book that I think has wide, wide appeal. The book is called "Hang On, Let Go." And it's really about crisis and trial.
Eddie Rester 0:49
He offers it as out of his own pain and struggle. And I think that when I read the book, that's really, I could hear that honesty. And sometimes when we're going through trials or difficulties, we need to hear from somebody that we can tell authentically has been there in the darkest places.
Chris McAlilly 1:12
I think Frank gives a kind of a guide or roadmap to kind of navigate what's going on in those moments. I think one of the things that I noticed when I'm experiencing a crisis, or when I feel like I'm off the map, is that sometimes the ways that I was putting together the situation or my theology, or even the way in which I kind of set a number of expectations about what would happen, have broken down. And I need, I just need to kind of flesh out some other models or maps or frameworks for thinking about how suffering and pain and trials and crises fit in. And I think that you can hear in the conversation and in the book, if you pick that up, Frank is offering just a whole range of them. And I think that that maybe could give you a way in to to your own explanations.
Eddie Rester 2:18
Here's what I like about the book. One of the things I like about the book is that it's about 300 pages, but every chapter is about three or four pages at most, so it's one of those books that you can kind of, you can mark the chapter that you need to go back to or you can quickly move through the book and just find different tools and handrails to grab onto. He's got a website for the book, if you want to check it out before potentially buying it, hangonletgo.com. He also has a podcast of his own, The Insurgents podcast, you can find that and a lot of the chapters, a lot of the sessions... What word am I looking for? A lot of the episodes of the podcast actually become chapters in this book.
Chris McAlilly 3:04
I think that my favorite thing about Frank's approach is how he brings it back to Jesus. Yeah, I think that he, in the way that he reads scripture, particularly some of the places in scripture that are most difficult, he wants to read those Christologically, you know, in light of Jesus. And then also, when, at the end of the conversation Eddie asked him if you're having a hard time at this moment, he points you to a good practice of breath. But also brings it back to Christ as the one who understands our suffering and our pain, and who has gone before us in grace and love. And that, I think that's a good word.
Eddie Rester 3:50
It's a great word. We thank you for listening. We hope you enjoy this. If you know someone who's struggling right now, this might be a good podcast to offer to them.
Chris McAlilly 3:59
We, as always, are glad that you're with us. And you can help us out on the podcast simply by subscribing on Apple podcast or on Spotify, or by leaving a review. That is always helpful. It helps other folks find the podcast, so thanks for being with us.
Chris McAlilly 4:16
[INTRO] We started this podcast out of frustration with the tone of American Christianity.
Eddie Rester 4:23
There are some topics too heavy for sermons and sound bites.
Chris McAlilly 4:26
We wanted to create a space with a bit more recognition of the difficulty, nuance, and complexity of cultural issues.
Eddie Rester 4:33
If you've given up on the church, we want to give you a place to encounter a fresh perspective on the wisdom of the Christian tradition in our conversations about politics, race, sexuality, art, and mental health.
Chris McAlilly 4:46
If you're a Christian seeking a better way to talk about the important issues of the day, with more humility, charity, and intellectual honesty, that grapples with scripture and the church's tradition in a way that doesn't dismiss people out of hand, you're in the right place.
Eddie Rester 5:01
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO]
Eddie Rester 5:04
Well, again, we're here today with Frank Viola. Frank, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today.
Frank Viola 5:10
My privilege.
Eddie Rester 5:12
So for people who don't know you, the kind of scope of your ministry and your work, share just a little bit of your story. Let folks know who you are.
Frank Viola 5:21
Well, I guess I've been described, for better, for worse, as an iconoclast of the highest orde,r a provocateur, and someone who moves in the edges of the Christian faith. I am one who believes that things have to change in the body of Christ in a radical way. And so ecclesiologically, I stand with the Anabaptists, which the modern Anabaptists are very different from the Anabaptists that were slaughtered during the Reformation. They were people who believe that institutional Christianity had lost its way. And they returned to a more primitive gathering style. And also the Wesley movement in the early days was very much along those lines. So I'm a radical when it comes to ecclesiology.
Frank Viola 6:17
I wrote a book with George Barna, many moons ago, called "Pagan Christianity." And that sort of put me on the map. But beyond that, and even in that book, my heartbeat is the centrality and the absolute preeminence of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I have written three books with Leonard Sweet, whom you know.
Eddie Rester 6:17
Right.
Frank Viola 6:23
On the centrality, the supremacy, the sovereignty of Christ, and how he's been pretty much relegated to a footnote in the Christian faith. He's given honorable mention in circles. But I believe that we can know him in a real, living way. We can encounter him in a real living way, and we can experience what Paul calls the unsearchable riches of Christ in the book of Ephesians, and so that's my heartbeat.
Frank Viola 7:17
And another, I guess, another strand of that whole brand there is, I believe that we have lost the incredible, explosive Gospel of the Kingdom. There's a lot written about the Kingdom of God, but there's this business of the Gospel of the Kingdom. And so my landmark work is called "Insurgents: Reclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom," and anybody who wants to know anything about me, they can read that book. It ties everything I've written beforehand, all of my spoken messages, into that one book. So that would be kind of the crowning work.
Eddie Rester 7:56
And one of the books, I guess, that I read of yours that you wrote with Len Sweet, "Jesus Manifesto," if people want to, I think, really begin to see clearly your understanding of the centrality of Christ, that's a great place for folks to start. I know that one of our staff members read "Pagan Christianity" years ago and was really challenged and changed by that book alone. You've got a new book that's out now, "Hang On, Let Go." And it really feels like a departure from some of that previous writing or maybe a shift in gears from the previous writing. It's very personal. So why was this the book that you wrote right now?
Frank Viola 8:42
Great question. You know, in some ways, it's different, because it's really a survival guide, where my other books more or less speak to the mind of the heart. This is a lifesaver for someone who's drowning. And the reason why I wrote "Hang On, Let Go" is because over the last five years, Eddie, many of my friends--why, I would say 85 to 90% of my friends--have been going through some kind of personal tsunami, where they've been pushed into an emotional spiral. And, you know, I'm talking about a trial, first class trial, that signaled the death knell to their hopes and dreams. And I myself went through a health crisis related to people close to me (that I can't talk about because it would breach privacy; it involves other people), but it was horrific.
Frank Viola 9:50
So many people even now as we're talking, and the book has just released, are going through hell on earth. And so I wanted to write a book that would basically be a field guide to navigate God's people when they're walking through the northeast corner of hell and don't know what to do. They don't understand it. And it's basically designed to show them how to get through the crisis. And not only to get through it, Eddie, but to survive it and thrive through it. So that when the dust settles, and their garments are still smoking, they can look back and thank God for it, which, while you're going through it, it'll break your jaw to do that.
Chris McAlilly 10:47
It sounds like a book that's a survival guide, or almost like a map for a period of time where you feel like you're a bit off the map. And I do think one of the things that we see in pastoral ministry often is that people have a set of cultural scripts for the way life is going to go. And we're in a college town as well, so that often looks a particular kind of way for a young person. And then as you travel through your 20s or 30s or 40s or 50s, inevitably, life will go off the script. And what I see is a lot of people that are lacking the concepts, the language, the practices to navigate. So I wonder if you could just kind of chart out some of some of the the contours of the field guide for folks.
Frank Viola 11:41
Yeah, I'll go over some of it. Oh, my goodness, there's so much in the book. And as Eddie mentioned, off camera or off audio here, it's a 300 page book. So it's very, it's very dense in the sense of being full of insights and practical handles. It's so practical, you know, it's not just a theoretical concept book. But each chapter is super short. And that makes it very easy to read. And it makes it very easy to implement. And the implementation is the big thing. But I'll say this to everyone listening, you right now are either going through a first class, Grade A USD certified crisis. All right, you're going through a severe trial of some sort. It could be a relational crisis, it could be a financial crisis, or it can be a health crisis.
Frank Viola 12:37
Now, those of you who are listening to this and life is just wonderful, and you're not going through anything--get ready, because, and I hate to break the bad news, but something horrific is going to come your way, flying out of left field, centerfield, right field, or the bleachers. And it will get so bad that you're going to come down with the blind staggers. You're not going to know what to do. And this is where two things happen in my experience in observing people go through trials, and I've had my own severe ones when I was younger, as well. One of them is some of them just hand divorce papers to Jesus Christ. All right, they say, "Look, I didn't sign up for this. This is not what's supposed to happen. This is not the way life is supposed to be. And God, you let it happen. And so, you know, I'm done." All right. That's one.
Frank Viola 13:34
The other one is they make very bad decisions. And this is a temptation for every one of us when we're going through the fire. We're not thinking clearly. We overreact. We try to fix it. Okay. Now, I will shamelessly admit that for many years, I was a fix-it guy. There was a problem in my life, in the life of somebody else, my first instinct was, you know, to pull out all the tools I had possession of and try to fix the thing. Well,
Eddie Rester 14:02
Strategic plan it better. You know, you just lay out the map, yeah.
Frank Viola 14:07
Yeah, exactly. And, but I realized that there's some crisis, and the Lord orchestrates the things of my life where he takes away all of your fix-it skills. They're meaningless. You know, everything that you bring to it to try to save it in your own power is gone. And so that's the second thing is people make really bad mistakes because they're trying to fix it. But the third alternative and reaction, and this is what I'm trying to teach people in the book, is that you could get through this trial and even thrive through it by on the one hand hanging on, and on the other hand letting go. And the whole book explains how to do this in minute detail, in whatever setting you're going through. So that's why it's called "Hang On, Let Go." But that's kind of that's the introduction. You want me to drill down a little bit more, I can do that.
Eddie Rester 15:04
Well, and as a part of the book, there's also a website, hangonletgo.com, for folks who want to kind of just get an introduction to it. Listened, I think to some of what you have to say about it. One of the, I think, most important things that you say when earlier on, you were talking about people falling into crisis, you say that every crisis is a spiritual crisis. Say a little bit more about that. Because I think sometimes people think that their faith is somehow separate from the actual things that go on in their life or their faith doesn't speak well, or maybe their faith that they had doesn't address them. So help us flesh that out a little bit.
Frank Viola 15:47
Well, when you're going through a storm, it is going to inevitably lead you to a spiritual crisis in the sense that you're going to question why. All right. You're either going to be a victim or a student. Okay. And there's a marked difference between the two. You know, victims believe that God is punishing them, or they believe that God is, he's asleep, you know, he's on vacation. So he's letting them go through this hell. Students look at it and say, well, the Lord is allowing this to happen, because he wants to teach me something. Students look at it, and they see it not as a sign of God punishing them, but as a sign of God's love for them.
Frank Viola 16:39
In the book, I talk about what the writer of Hebrews said in chapter 12. And in effect, and I'll just reduce it down a little bit. But anytime you go through a very difficult time, it is a sign of God's love. It shows that you're a child of his. He's trying to get at something in your life. The big goal here is transformation. Victims beg God to remove the trouble so they can be happy. Students, however, they understand that contentment and well being is found in a living relationship with Jesus Christ, not a trouble-free life. So, that's just some of the examples. But it will always lead us to confront our belief, our relationship with God in either a negative way or a positive way.
Frank Viola 17:32
I've seen trials basically wipe a Christian out, wipe them off the map, and to use your image there, where they're no longer following the Lord. I've seen trials do the opposite in many people. And that's what he's trying to do. You know, David said, "If I was not afflicted, I would not have sought the Lord," right. Trials are, in effect, a mechanism, an instrument in the hands of God, to demonstrate his power, and to transform us into Version 2.0 of ourselves. And every one of us, including myself, we are in need of transformation. None of us has arrived. But oftentimes, we're blind to certain aspects in our character that only a trial will expose and reveal and will give the Lord room, if we allow him to, to change those areas, dramatically change them, profoundly change them.
Frank Viola 18:31
And I know nothing else but a good hard trial to actually have that happen. Now, when you're going through it, you're not thinking those thoughts. Right? You're just crying bloody murder. But this is what the book is for. It is that field guide. It is that compass to navigate God's people when they're really going through the fire.
Chris McAlilly 18:56
I feel like one of the, I mean, I do absolutely agree with you that the takeaway from a crisis or a time of suffering is to draw... I guess one of the one of the things that can happen is that you're drawn into a deeper living relationship. I think, the place where I hear people getting caught up and that I get caught up is when you begin to get... Where the conversation begins to be about the mechanics of all this, is this coming... I mean, the way that you describe it there I think I'm a little bit uncomfortable with, which is the sense that the mechanics of suffering are that you know, God has these mechanisms in place to drive us in that direction. I feel like sometimes what I hear in pastoral ministry is just folks, things happen, right, that are almost... I don't know. It's almost inexplicable or beyond the action of God that are coming towards us. I just want to make sure that I'm understanding clearly kind of how you're thinking about that. I wonder if you could maybe just spell that out a little bit more?
Frank Viola 20:09
Well, I have a whole chapter in the book called "Who Brought This Trial?" And that's a question a lot of people have. It's like, Okay, well, is this the devil coming after me with tooth and claw? He's trying to take me out, because we know that the devil is in fact, the one who kills, steals, and destroys, right? Others they blame God. God brought this on me. Others, they can't see anything in the unseen realm because their mind or heart isn't there, and so they see everything is just humans, human based.
Frank Viola 20:48
So if the trial is coming from, let's say, it's coming to you at the hands of a co-worker, or it's being dished out by a family member, right? And you're going through hell because of that, well, then they blame the human. Now, I'm not going to give away how I do it in the chapter. But I'll just ask this question: who crucified Jesus? Who was responsible for crucifying Jesus Christ? Who's behind it? And that's something that all listeners in your podcast should contemplate. Who was behind the crucifixion of Jesus Christ?
Frank Viola 21:25
Now, some of the listeners will say, well, that was the devil, right? Satan was behind it all. And 1 Corinthians chapter two, in effect, tells us that, you know. If the principalities and powers had known, they would not have crucified the Son of God, and he's speaking spiritual principalities and powers there, alright.
Frank Viola 21:47
Others would say, well, it clearly it was the Romans. Others would say no it was the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem, right? They were the ones who hailed crucify. Others would say it was a sovereign God who delivered his son unto death. So the answer to the question really is, was it Satan, was a God, was a humans? The answer is yes. And when it comes to our trial, the first thing that the Christian ought to do is look beyond what they can see in the natural and say, you know what? My loving father allowed this to happen. And he is the one who is an expert at writing straight with crooked lines. And he is weeping with me through it. His heart aches as my heart aches. And he is going to turn this into good.
Frank Viola 21:47
And we have many, many examples of this. The story of Joseph is the classic example. "You meant it for evil," Joseph tells his brothers, "but God meant it for good." We have the classic example in the book of Job. We have the classic example in the crucifixion of Jesus. So, you know, it's a very complicated question. But it all boils down to this one thing: am I going to trust the Lord through this hellscape that I'm going through? And I can tell you this, in case after case after case after case--just set aside the Bible. We don't even have to look there. We can give many examples from there--I can tell you this, your Lord is committed to bring you through this thing, to show you his power, and to bring good out of it, that which you cannot even imagine. And so you're okay. And you're going to be okay. And the Lord is going to do something wonderful if you allow him to do that.
Frank Viola 23:45
And that's where "Hang On, Let Go" comes in. There's certain things in a storm we should let go of, the Lord wants us to let go of. And we're not going to survive if we don't let go of them. And then there's other things we need to hang on to it, hang on to during that tsunami. And that's what the book is all about.
Chris McAlilly 24:05
I remember, hearing Luke Timothy Johnson, a New Testament scholar, give a lecture and his wife was in need of care at the time that I was hearing the lecture, and she's passed away. But Luke was talking about kind of the use of scripture in the midst of situations of suffering. He said his wife was in the hospital once and he went in, and he's a biblical scholar. So he wanted to bring in a bit of scripture, and he said, you know, she was in pain. And it was just, he wanted to give her something, but he didn't have anything to offer. And so he just picked up the Bible and started reading from the book of Job. And his wife said, "sweetheart, that's just not the thing to do right now." She said, "just hold my hand and be present."
Chris McAlilly 24:49
And I do think that, you know, I do think that you're drawing our attention to that as well, that there are moments when you're in the midst of intense trial or crisis or suffering when language and explanations or even bits of Scripture are not helpful. They don't give the explanation in that moment that you need. But the longer that you live and as you reflect backwards on those crisis, you do need a guide. You need language and explanation and you need a way out and even some anchors or some handholds. And it sounds like you're providing a lot of those.
Frank Viola 25:28
Yeah, absolutely.
Chris McAlilly 25:28
And that's really important.
Frank Viola 25:31
Absolutely. And there's temptations, too, that will come with every trial. There's five big ones. And so there are certain things that we can arm ourselves with, in order to avoid those particular temptations. But I will tell you this, you know, when the trial really hits you like a Mack truck or freight train, alright, there's really not a lot that can help you at that moment other than having a friend--even if it's just one friend--stand with you and show empathy. I have a whole chapter on the power of friendships and how we need friends in our in our trial. I know every trial I've endured, if I didn't have friends, I would have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, not to be found again. We need friends.
Frank Viola 26:24
And you know, the friend is not going to say "Rejoice in the Lord always!" "Hey, you're going through this, rejoice!" You know, it'll break your jaw to do that. You need the friend to be there with you and to encourage you in a way that reminds you things like okay, you're going through hell right now. But Romans 8.28 has not been deleted from the Bible. It really hasn't. You are okay. You're gonna be okay. It's hell right now. It looks hopeless. But your God is bigger than the circumstance. And he's the one that walks on the waves, the very storm that you're in, that you think is going to sink your boat. Remember the disciples, "Lord save us." Right? "Where are you? Wake up!" He's walking on those waves.
Frank Viola 27:13
And I'll tell you what, after every trial I've been through, my faith has gone up. Well, I'd say faith raised to the 10th power in Frank Viola's, life because I saw a God I didn't know existed. I knew the Lord, right? I knew him. I knew his power. But when you go through a trial, and you hang on, and you let go, he shows his hand in ways that are beyond your imagination. Things that you would never have expected. And so it really becomes this beautiful tool of God's love in the midst of that hell that you're going through. And that's why I wrote the book.
Eddie Rester 27:51
You know, I think about, as you talk about, you know, the importance, we never want to invite, although sometimes we do, we never want to invite the hardships and the trials and the crises on ourselves. But if you allow God to begin to work in them, it grows your faith. You know, I think about sometimes when I'm talking to young couples who are about to get married, and we're looking at the vows "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part." And we talk about how critical it is to understand the worst and the sickness moments of life as those moments that will define and shape a marriage.
Eddie Rester 28:30
And what I hear you saying as you talked about hanging on and letting go, and I want to push a little bit into that in just a second, is just that if we allow these moments to grow us, we take a different perspective on them. They can become significant parts of our story. So tell us a little bit about when you talk about hanging on, specifically, what are we hanging on to? And why should we hang on to that?
Frank Viola 28:57
I'll give you an example I give in the introduction of the book. And this is like so much divine truth. It's paradoxical. Like how do you hang on let go at the same time, right? But I think Abraham is the perfect example. Here we have this delicious irony in the life of Abraham. He has this beloved son, that he has waited so long to meet, to have come into the earth. And he, you know, he tried to rush the promise of God, and that's how we got Ishmael. But the Lord was, gracious. This is a little sub lesson. You know, God never really fails his children when they are taking a test. He just gives you the test over and over again until you pass it. And that's what happened with Abraham.
Frank Viola 29:54
So he has this son Isaac, and then out of the blue, he asked him to take him up a hill and sacrifice him. Now, what's fascinating to me about Abraham is that he was willing to let go. And in your trial, there are going to be things that the Lord is going to pinpoint. The Holy Spirit will pinpoint and say, "I need you to surrender this." All right. "I need you to surrender. I need you to let go." And that's what he did with Abraham. All right, he gave that word to Abraham. And Isaac was given as a sacrifice. Abraham let go of his beloved son. Right? Here's the interesting thing. He also hung on. Because God gave Abraham a promise that it was through Isaac that there would be a family that would end up redeeming the whole world, or through which the whole world would be saved. He believed that. He hung on to that. He didn't let go of it. Even though in the natural, it didn't look like that was going to happen at all. Right? He thought this was the termination of his son, Isaac.
Frank Viola 31:08
But in the book of Romans were told, and Hebrews alludes to it, we're told that Abraham's saw in his imagination, he saw Isaac rising again from the dead. So he believed, even though he was letting go, he believed that there would be a resurrection and that Isaac would come back. So he hung on and he let go at the same time. And of course, we know, the Lord stopped him. But it's a beautiful picture, too, of how the God the Father let go of his most beloved treasure, and that was his own glorious Son, he let go of him. And then of course, he received him back.
Frank Viola 31:55
Well, every trial we go through, we have a choice: we can waste our crisis. And I have wasted trials before. And guess what? The Lord had to teach me all over again, by giving me the test over again. In Scripture, trials and tests, it's the same word, interestingly enough. But we can waste a crisis by not reacting to it in a certain way, by overreacting to it or miss-reacting to it. But we can leverage, let's put it this way, you can leverage that crisis for God's glory and our gain, which is the Lord's intention, by hanging on and letting go.
Frank Viola 32:35
And I get more specific in the book, because people are dealing with various different things. But I think it'll be clear to them as they're reading, okay, this is what the Lord wants me to let go of in my trial, and this is what he wants me to hang on to. And one of the hardest things to do is to hang on to God's promises when you see absolutely no evidence that they're going to be fulfilled. And you see all the indicators are pointing toward them not being fulfilled, okay? Perfect example was Abraham. There's so many others in Scripture. But there's a powerful insight there, to hang on and let go in the midst of your trial, and that is the way to survive it and to thrive through it.
Chris McAlilly 33:16
That story of Abraham and Isaac is just so hard. But I do think it's hard, I guess, for me is my son is going to be 10 this week, and I just think about that story. And I do think that, you know, when I talked to some of my friends who are not Christian, or if when we have conversations about scripture and its reliability, I think the question that they pose is the question of is God trustworthy? What kind of God would ask of any of his children to submit to that kind of a test? And I think both answers are difficult, right? One is that God is sadistic, you know, and desires to take pleasure in human pain just so that we get to a certain kind of outcome.
Chris McAlilly 34:10
I think, though, if that's your outcome, if that's where you go with it, then the rest of the Bible will not be read. You know, I mean, we could just give up the whole shootin match, because that kind of a God is not trustworthy. I think the opposite and it seems like what you're calling us to is the sense that God calls for the test. Because in this relationship between Abraham and God, there needs to be trust, and it needs to be unquestionably reliable, you know, from Abraham to God and God to Abraham. And so there is a connection between the test and the trials and a growing sense of trust. And it sounds like that's your testimony to that, when you've experienced trials and tests in your own life that it leads in the direction of trust and a deeper hope and not the other direction, am I hearing you right in that?
Frank Viola 35:05
Well, if you if you hang on, yes, if you hang on to the Lord through it, it will happen that way and it will increase your faith. The Bible talks about moving from faith to faith. The interesting thing is that, Peter, in his letters, he warns us as Christians, he warns the believers he's writing to. And he says, don't think it's strange when you're put in fiery trials. And he talks about this as being the test of our faith on the one hand, because your faith is put on the firing line every time you're put through something that, you know, you didn't expect, and it's difficult, and it's painful. Our faith is tested severely. Is this God really good? Is he a good God? Why did he allow this to happen? Or maybe why did he cause this to happen, if that's your theology.
Frank Viola 35:56
But it comes back to doubting the goodness of God. That's one of the big temptations in every single trial. But the other part of it is, as James puts it, he says, if you endure these trials that you're going through, it will produce gold. It will produce gold, you know. Christ will be formed in you in ways you cannot imagine. And I can speak from my own experience, every trial I've gone through, the ones I didn't waste--and I have not gone through my trials flawlessly. You know, I have made mistakes. And I talk about that in the book, the mistakes that we can make, because I've made those mistakes--but when you go through a trial the way the Lord wants--and thankfully, I do have that backlog as well--something changes in you. You're not the same person.
Frank Viola 36:50
You know, there are areas of my own life, you know. I have a strong personality. I'm Italian, I'm 100% Italian. Okay, so I could get very passionate. I was an overreactor through much of my early life. And I was someone who had an anxiety issue. I didn't even know I had it until I went through a hellish experience, and I talk about the feelings and the struggles in the book. Now, I'll just tell you right now, and this is the Lord's work in me but I'm unrattled by what goes on around me. I mean, I've been to hell and back, and right now I have a level of contentment and peace and well being that I never knew was possible. And I believe that is God's will for every saint.
Frank Viola 37:43
I'm not perfect by any means. And something may come down the pike that will jar me. But I will say this, that the transformation that the Lord wants to do in our lives and how he wishes to leverage a trial is astounding. And that's one of the reasons why I put it in the book. Unfortunately, I've seen some Christian people take their own life because it was too painful. And it really grieves me because I think, well, gosh, I just wish they read this book, because it would really help them. We also have a course that goes with the book. It's a supplement to somebody who's really getting hit hard by a trial and they want the human voice and they want some practical help. I have a Methodist seminary professor who's my partner with me, and we just navigate you step by step, you know, through what you're going through.
Frank Viola 38:34
But you know, going back to Abraham, I mean, people blame God for all sorts of things. But you know, I look at Abraham's story and what I see there is God the Father and Jesus Christ. You know, there was only two people that were called an only begotten son in Scripture. It was Isaac, and it was Jesus. Okay. There was one father who absolutely brought his son to be a sacrifice. And there was a real resurrection where God said to Abraham, alright, lower than knife. You got it. Okay.
Frank Viola 39:16
But that was a picture for us to see that this is what the Father agonized over in yielding his own son, delivering, as the scripture says, delivering his son to death. That's different than, you know, wanting to torture him. It was something that had to be done. He delivered. And it was the evil, it was the hands of the Romans and at the instigation of, you know, the Jewish leaders who were jealous of Jesus. They were the ones that drove the nails in his hands, and the father wept. But look at what happened as a result. The salvation of the world. Incredible, incredible. So that's what I see when I see Abraham and Isaac. But we have to have eyes to see Christ in the scripture.
Frank Viola 40:00
You know, Leonard Sweet and I wrote a book called "Jesus: A Theocracy." And what we do is we show that all of the Old Testament, even that violent stuff, the stuff that we can't stomach, all of that, those were pictures and shadows and types of the thing that the Lord was really trying to get our attention with, and that his glorious son and his beautiful bride and his eternal purpose, and we can see it in spades in Genesis one and two, if someone points it out to us. So a Christ-centric reading of the Scriptures really solves a lot of problems.
Chris McAlilly 40:35
Yeah, I think I'm 100%. on board with that. I do think that's incredibly helpful to bring together the suffering of Abraham and the suffering of Christ. And I think what you see in both of those is that trusting love suffers on both sides, the sense that, you know, there's something that God is suffering there, in addition to the suffering that we're going through. And if that's true, then the story of our trial and our tests and our pain is a story of trusting love, you know, and one in which God wants to kind of draw us into himself. I think that that's a beautiful picture, for sure.
Eddie Rester 41:19
I want to push on a little bit. You talk about hang on, but you also talk about letting go as you get deeper into the book. In what, as you think about letting go, what's the difference in your mind of letting go and just giving up? What's the difference there?
Frank Viola 41:41
Well, that is a great question. And in fact, I dedicated a whole chapter to it. They are very different, though, even though at first blush, they would appear to be the same thing. But hanging on really is, it's a spiritual posture that has to do with hanging on to the Lord. Letting go has to do with surrendering that which God is asking us to take our hands off. There are some areas that of life that we go through, that if we try to keep our hands on it and try to correct it or make it better, it actually turns out being a lot worse. And so the Lord is saying, look, let your hands on detach. And a lot of this comes down to detaching from the outcome.
Frank Viola 42:45
We don't know what the outcome is going to be. But we can detach from it and say, you know, as hard as it is for me to imagine, say, losing this person, for example, okay, or losing this job, or losing this part of my career, or losing this relationship, as difficult as it is for me to imagine going through life without that, I'm going to trust that the Lord is going to get me through it. And he's going to replace it with something better, because that's in effect what he always does, throughout Scripture, you know. "He takes away that he might establish," that's a quote from the book of Hebrews, and he's talking about the New Covenant and the Old Covenant. He takes the Old Covenant away, that he might establish the New Covenant, well, that's a principle embedded in the bloodstream of the universe, that when God takes something away, he gives something better in exchange for it, even though you can't see it.
Frank Viola 43:46
Letting go though. That's when you just throw in the towel. And that's where you say, "Look, I'm done. I'm done with the Lord. I'm done with this thing called the Christian faith." And it's also, "I'm done with life," in some cases, you know, where you just, you end it all because the pain is too much. You give up. God is taking too long. And let me just say this to you. Those of you who are going through a trial, the Lord's time frame, he lives in a different timezone than we do. Okay. All right. By that I mean his clock ticks a lot different than ours does, right? We want the solution right away. He will wait, sometimes for days until the body of Lazarus is, it smells so bad that the air is turning green. Yet he will--he will--step in. And it's always the right time by his clock, even though it's not ours.
Frank Viola 44:52
Here's a principle I will share. Delay is God's instrument for doing his greatest acts of love and power. Delay. We hate delay. I hate delay. I'm, by nature, I'm an impatient person. Some of the trials that I've gone through have taught me how to be patient. But, you know, this business of letting go... Letting go really is an act of acceptance and surrender. It's an act of love. It's not an act of defeat. "We're giving up" is an act of defeat. Right? It's where you wave the white flag and you say, you know, this is it, or the rope is torn out of your bleeding hands because you've given up now. But when you hang on, you're not giving up. You may let go, but you're not giving up.
Eddie Rester 45:45
Yeah, so letting go sometimes is saying, okay, I can't control the outcome, so I'm going to release my control of the outcome. I can't solve the problem that my friend is raging through, so I'm going to let go of my need to do that. Sometimes it's letting go, as I think about all this, letting go of the anger or the resentment that simmers in us to allow the work of forgiveness to begin in us.
Eddie Rester 46:15
You know, one of my favorite quotes about the waiting that sometimes we get stuck in is Lewis Meads, when he talks about waiting being the hardest work of hope that, you know, that we would fix it all in, you know, 10 minutes, two weeks, three weeks, definitely not let things linger more than a month. But for so many people I know, people listening, you know, it's year two, or it's year three of struggling through family drama, or a cancer diagnosis or those things. And that's just not the way we typically write our lives. And so finding ways, sometimes even little ways, to let go of our plans to allow God's redeeming work to take place in us I think is so important for us. And in the book, you write about waiting a lot. But you also write a lot about surrender. Give us just a one sentence, two sentence definition of what you mean when you call us to surrender.
Frank Viola 47:30
Yeah, well, I think it's probably best encapsulated in the idea that you're going to have your own Gethsemane. When you go for a trial, there's something that is in jeopardy of being lost. And at Gethsemane, it's fascinating, because here you have the Son of God, and he is struggling with his own will. And he had his own human will, as one who is fully man. He had his own will, which was not to go to the cross, you know. He didn't want to have to deal with that kind of torture and that kind of shame. But then you had the Father's will. And the Father's will was "this has to be done."
Frank Viola 48:22
You're not going to get the longing of your heart--I'm going to put it in a way that people may have never heard. But, you know, Jesus Christ for eternity, in his pre-incarnate state was a lone bachelor. And there was so much love beating in his heart that he wanted to pour that love out and express it to a creature that did not exist. Now, every storyline of every romance novel has within it the storyline of the divine romance. And that is that God wanted a counterpart, a creature, who was like him, who was part of him, in whom he can pour out this unsurpassing, relentless, insatiable love.
Frank Viola 49:10
And so Jesus was this lone bachelor for so long. And he had it on his heart that his purpose was to have a bride, a bride that was like him, but was different from him. And so, you know, when we talk about the Bible, I mean, the Bible opens with a boy and a girl and marriage and the Bible ends with a boy and a girl and a marriage. All right. And so the Father is saying, you will not be able to take her hand, you will not be able to issue her out of your own being, to have the desire of your heart, unless you go to death. You know, unless that one seed dies, it's not going to be able to produce the many seeds that will produce that one person that you've had in your heart for so long.
Frank Viola 50:01
And so the Father's will was running contrary to the will of the Son of God. And here, the Son of God said, You know what, I'm going to go ahead and jump off the cliff so speak. I'm going to hold my nose and dive in. I'm going to let go of my will. "Not my will, but your will." And that's exactly what it means to surrender, you know, whether that is a loss of a relationship, for example, the loss of a person, the loss of, it could be a material. It could be your house, you know, that you've built memories in and you love so much. It could be loss of a trusted, loved friend, you know, who you would go to hell and back with and for. And you're saying, "Lord, I don't want this. I don't want to lose this person, this relationship, this friendship, this possession, this job, this career. I don't want to lose it. I don't want to lose my reputation. But if this is your will, then I surrender. I let go."
Eddie Rester 51:09
Right here, as a we're almost out of time, somebody's listening, and they're deep in the darkness, deep in the weeds today. What would be your final word of encouragement to them?
Frank Viola 51:27
The first thing I would say to you is breathe. Just stop and breathe. Okay? Breathe deeply. Take four second inhalations in your into your being. Hold your breath for about seven seconds, and then let it out very slowly. And do that four or five times. You have to breathe. Because right now your mind is going three thousand miles an hour. You're being plagued with worst-case scenarios. You have to breathe. And when you're going through a trial, when we're anxious, that's when we make bad decisions and the trial gets worse. Okay, that's number one.
Frank Viola 52:10
Number two, live in the present. That worst-case scenario, that may happen. But guess what? It's not happening right now. You're still alive, right now. The thing that you fear the most, it's not going on right now. So live in the right now. Set your mind on right now.
Frank Viola 52:36
The third thing I would say is like you never have before, run after Jesus Christ, tooth and toenail. Go after him with your heart. Get on your knees, get on your face, cry out to Him, share your pain. The Bible calls this pouring your heart out. It's all over the Psalms, pour your heart out.
Frank Viola 53:01
And then the fourth thing I would encourage you to do, and by the way, you know, don't hear this wrong because I don't make money from selling books. I mean, you heard starving authors, okay? There's a reason for that phrase. we don't make money with our books. I would go ahead and get a copy of the book and read it. And I'm available to talk to you if you're really catching it bad. I'm available. I'm not a counselor. I'm not a pastor. I'm not a professional. But you know, it helps, talking to somebody, and you can reach me by email.
Frank Viola 53:34
But that's what I would say is to do those things. And then the other thing is you need at least one friend who you can trust, who you can share with. Because I'll tell you right now, when you're going through a really bad trial, your perspective very often is not correct. You're not looking at things the right way. And you can have a friend, an external voice, preferably a believer in Christ, who cares about you, who can speak to you a different perspective. That's vital. So those would be... That's the triage for the bleeding soul right now.
Chris McAlilly 54:11
Oh, Frank, I really appreciate that. And I think that's a great place for us to end. And I appreciate you writing this book. We need as many tools in the toolbox as we can have, as we navigate life's crises. So thank you so much for being with us today on the podcast.
Frank Viola 54:31
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Eddie Rester 54:35
[OUTRO] Thank you for listening to this episode of The Weight.
Chris McAlilly 54:37
If you liked what you heard today, feel free to share the podcast with other people that are in your network. Leave us a review. That's always really helpful. Subscribe, and you can follow us on our social media channels.
Eddie Rester 54:49
If you have any suggestions or guests you'd like us to interview or anything you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email at info@theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]