Dream Awakener

My good friend Jim Pace (blogging here) has an excellent book that will be released April 8, 2010 entitled Should We Fire God? While the release date is still a couple of weeks away, you can actually pre-order the book now on Amazon.  It is a book that I highly recommend, if you like to go through the full range of emotions -  from tears to laughter – while you are learning more about God, reality and the problem of evil.  Let’s get on with the interview, which I have broken up into four parts.

THE INTERVIEW
JR: Having been friends with you for sometime, I know you quite well.  But many of my readers may not. Could you share some things about yourself with the readers of my blog?

Jim: Sure, first of all, I am rakishly handsome.  Second, I have been known to use the word “rakish.”

Now that everyone can get a sense of how attractive I am, on to other things.  I grew up a big skeptic of the whole Jesus thing.  If I had to describe my view, I would say I saw the scriptures as an extended, oftentimes boring, collection of Aesop’s Fables.  Good ideas for life, but in no way authoritative to your life.  That continued through the bulk of my college career.  It wasn’t until just before my senior year at Va. Tech that I worked through my doubts and (at the time) quite begrudgingly came to see that I needed to follow Jesus in my life.

I met JR just after that.  I started attending the church he was leading and began to ask him questions about how this Christian life is supposed to work.  Honestly, some of those conversations still shape me today.

I guess the main thing is that I have been functionally outside the church longer than I have been inside.  I think that part of my story has been very helpful in the ministry God has me in.  I didn’t grow up being shaped by too many Christian views, so I have wrestled with them from that framework.

JR: The book has a provocative title, what is the story behind the title of the book?

Jim: I was hanging out with a friend of mine that does not follow Jesus but is spiritually intrigued.  We were talking one day and the conversation turned to God; he posed an interesting question to me.  He asked if I felt that God could ever do anything bad enough that I would not want to follow him any longer.  Should We Fire God? came from that conversation.

JR: How much does the book talk about the Virginia Tech Massacre, and how has this tragedy shaped your approach to writing this particular book?

Jim: Really good question.  A great deal of the media that I have interacted with has focused on that connection.  I would describe it this way.  As long as I have entertained and considered spiritual questions and issues, the question of God’s goodness and the issues that surround it have orbited my thinking.   Both before I was a follower of Jesus and since. I also live and work out my ministry in a university town, and our church has hundreds of college students, graduates and professors in it.  Suffice it to say well-informed and intelligent skeptics and cynics surround me.  So, I continue to interact with these issues as I interact with the people that have them.  I was primed to write this book by years of this.

The shootings on April 16, 2007 essentially lit the match that set the whole thing off.

The book is not about the shootings, but it deals with them.  It is a book about our generations’ struggle to come to grips with a God that claims to be in control and yet seems to have very little control over what happens on a daily basis.  The shootings are forever a part of who I am and as such are blended in through the book, but the book is not about the shootings.

JR: What would you say is the heart of the message of Should We Fire God?

Jim: The heart of the book is that you and I and everyone else are very dearly loved by God.  He doesn’t take our suffering lightly.  The questions we are asking about God and his love for us are fair and he is willing to engage with us over them.  I think what he might say, if I can be so bold, would be that if we will seek him over these areas of confusion, we will find him in them.  Maybe not the way we wish he would be, and maybe he wouldn’t say what we wish he would say.  We will find him more mysterious than we could have imagined, but also more extraordinary than we could have ever guessed.

Tune in to Part II of this interview Friday.