You're listening to the Bible for normal people the only God ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete ends and I'm Jared bias.

Hey folks welcome but before we get started a quick announcement it's August man it's August and we are coming to the last summer school class of the summer and this is on reading the bible from the margins with Miguel de la Torre and hopefully you've gotten educated yeah that's the goal.

Getting yourself educated but but but what is the one left Wednesday August 10th 8 to 9 30 PM Eastern time is reading the bible from the margins so what is this class about I'll tell you I'm glad that you ask me it's a one night class offering insights on how to read the bible in a way that honors the unique and helpful perspective of people on the margins while also engaging in the best in biblical scholarship I would I mean helpful valid right just just the humanity of it.

And you know all theology has an adjective right as you say around here it's all important it's all good it's all valid it's all real it's all true and we're going to get something from the margins which is where the bible tends to speak out of so if you miss the first two you won't you don't want to miss out on all of them so this is your last chance to sign up and if you got the other two why would you want to miss out on the third one and you know miss a perfect score and if they miss the others they can go back and do that anyway true there's no excuse here that's right.

So go to the bible from all people dot com front slash summer school to sign up.

Now for today's episode we are talking the honesty of grief with Amanda held up all yeah and she just wrote a book a whole in the world which is about her experience of grief that's actually a key phrase the experience of grief the experience of morning that she had to process after the death of her sister Rachel held Evans and I you know I knew this was going to be a good episode

before we even started but as we got into it I was really of the sense of evangelical I was sort of touched by the depth in the humanity of a discussion of grief and by someone who has sort of hack through the jungle of it all in ways that's you know I have to say my I haven't you know and I just haven't that way I mean I've been around the block of few times I've experienced deaths but not to this degree of just existence.

So I'm just saying that's a very substantial pain right and and there's this is not a special or weird thing it's a normal thing it's what the talk about the Bible for normal people this is about making room for that in our faith which for a lot of us there wasn't room for that growing up and so how do we expand our faith understanding in such a way that brings that we feel valid and we feel comfortable bringing deep pain and suffering to our experience.

I know what you're saying make room for there's another level of restructuring our faith so that this is woven in right which is what you meant yeah so it's not just tacking it on as I have to make room for this to make room we will often have to rearrange all the furniture or or the house down or that or that I have 800 square foot apartment but I want a swimming pool so I can work where you got to tear this stupid thing down okay all right let's get into it.

My faith absolutely has met me in my sorrow the Bible met me in my sorrow not in the way I thought it would but in a way I needed in a way that was real and true it was like true in my bones and I can say that now that I'm a little bit farther down the road but it took some re learning and rereading and re understanding.

Hey Amanda it's great to have you on the podcast thanks so much for having me Pete and Jared so we want to start with a little bit of your story because we're talking about grief today and so what's your story with grief what led you to write a book about this from the perspective that you bring.

Yeah you know it's it's funny when you ask me that question I'm still sitting here thinking I can't believe I wrote a book about grief because you know my childhood like I can say with like a hundred percent certainty that my childhood was just about as when some and beautiful and I did look of a childhood that you could possibly hope for you know it was a trauma free growing up experience.

I had experienced very little loss in my life death in my life in fact I I don't think I went to my first funeral until I was maybe my late teens or early twenties I lost a couple grandparents in my teen years but they they lived far away and they were much much much older when they passed away it was a kind of the type of losses that you see is kind of just like the natural next step in life like you know death in the past.

Death in the proper order if that makes sense and so while it was sad it was also a celebration of their life and so I guess I always like looked at grief books or like people who talked about grief as being like those people those unfortunate people that had you know experience catastrophic loss or trauma or the unexpected death of someone they loved at a young age I just thought that would never be a loss.

I just thought that would never be me I don't know why I thought I was immune to tragedy or that I could somehow bypass it my whole life but I'd always just ignored resources or books or teaching on grief because I just didn't think I needed it I I had no idea that I would need it and so I you know like I said life had proceeded very happily until I guess I got to my early to mid 30s I just walked through a

season of loss and a series of losses started with the death of my grandmother a grandmother who was really close to me she lived nearby she was older but pretty healthy when she suddenly got sick and passed away and I was actually on a work trip in Congo and East Africa when she died and so I didn't make it home for the funeral.

And then shortly after that I had a difficult experience I traveled for for work to northern Iraq and this was kind of during the offensive to take over a Mosul back from ISIS which should you know as you may recall had taken control of a large area of the region and so we had victims of war coming into our hospital to receive treatment and so I think just kind of seeing the wounds of war.

So the wounds of war seeing the effects of war on bodies and souls for the first time in person it was just kind of this aha moment of like wow this level of suffering doesn't just happen on television like it happens in real life you can you smell it you can hear it and so just to have that I guess really kind of traumatic experience and to have that type of confrontational experience I guess with suffering.

Very shortly after that about four months later I had the first of what would be three miscarriages after a season of infertility and so that that loss really rocked me in my my husband and and then about a year and a half later was when my sister got very sick suddenly you know she was perfectly healthy had a three-year-old son and 11 month old daughter

and she became suddenly ill and died and even saying it right now it just feels unreal and so that was kind of the moment that was the shattering loss the atomic bomb that went off in my life that really kind of set me on this journey to understand what grief is because suddenly it was my story

and so that's that's kind of how I started studying grief rituals and came to write this book.

So can you give a little background to your experience with grief in your church tradition and how would you have been taught to handle it or not or what would the conversations have been and how did that lead you to going toward these practices?

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