KRISTEN: Ben, thank you for being here. It’s such a special privilege and blessing to spend the time that you have with us. I’m just so grateful on behalf of the Alliance Defending Freedom.
BEN: It is a blessing. Thank you for making time for me.
KRISTEN: I want to start with why you’re here. You’ve talked a lot about redeeming the time and the importance of the time you have left, and yet you’ve determined to spend some of that time having conversations like this. Why is that?
BEN: I mean, I think—and I want to say this in particular if my mom knows a Blackstone fellow and she’s listening—we don’t do many of these. My mom thinks, “How could you not go to dinner with us tonight? You did seven interviews in the last week.” I’m like, no, we did one per two weeks. We didn’t choose to get a terminal diagnosis in public, but once we were honest with people about what the prognosis was, I was stunned at how many people ask you questions like, “Are you angry at God?” And I feel incredibly blessed that we’ve never had that feeling. We’ve had lots of tears and lots of sadness about shorter time with people you love, and some regret about misinvestment of time in the past. But we’re all on the clock. We all have a terminal diagnosis, and giving an account for the faith that we have is a vocation, I guess, even if just for a time.
KRISTEN: Well, I have to tell you that when I think about being a Christian and going through the season that you’re going through, this reminded me of the Book of Jude, where Jude talks about being prepared to contend for the faith that was delivered to the church. One of the first things he says in the book is contending inwardly to build up your faith, so that you can take that faith to the world—as you’re doing. And when I think about the season you’re going through, I think about how I’ve seen you endure hostility in the public square, and criticism…
BEN: Really?
KRISTEN: Yes.
BEN: I thought everybody was always a fan of everything I said.
KRISTEN: Not really! Which probably means you’re over the target. But this, to me, is something different. I think most mature Christians would even question themselves about how they’d respond in a moment like this. How are you not bitter? How are you not angry? How can you come in like this? What are the habits you’ve cultivated in your life—or that you think others should cultivate—to have that kind of unwavering faith in every season?
BEN: Well, first of all, thanks for the gracious way you put a lot of that. At the beginning, when you talked about contending for the faith—I’m adding to your words, but for all the saints—it’s a kind of crazy thing that we get to come out of the world every Lord’s Day, cease our striving, say no to the Sisyphean temptations around us and in our hearts, and receive grace and the gospel as a gift. We get to go to the Lord’s table and make this big trade where we receive the body and blood of Christ, and we get to hand off our sin. It’s an unbelievable trade. And I do think that when we get to sing—not just on the Lord’s Day, but especially on the Lord’s Day—we should view it, as in Jude or Hebrews, as if we’re singing with a choir that transcends time and space. Our true community, our true fellowship is with the saints of heaven. And I think if we believe that—and we do confess and we do believe it, but we don’t always feel it, and so you want to rise to that occasion—it does transform what you want to invest your time in.
And if we really dedicate ourselves to the gift that is the Word—the fact that we have a God who speaks, and saves, and gave us a written word—I could never introspectively possibly believe that the terrible sin in me could be forgiven if I didn’t have this word coming from outside myself. To quote Luther, “The ear is the most important of the five senses for now.” Eventually all five senses will be able to perceive, and we will actually be able to live not just by faith, but then by sight. For now it’s by hearing. And when that echoes in us, it’s fun to be able to shout it back.
KRISTEN: But you have to have the discipline, I think, to get in the Word, to know the Word, to ensure that it does echo. They say it’s like a teacup—when you’re bumped, what comes out. You’ve been bumped…
BEN: Feels like a big bump.
KRISTEN: … And I think one of the curiosities is: You’ve been bumped, and look what’s coming out—the fruit of the Spirit, in this moment. What can we do as people to cultivate those kinds of habits? How do you think this happened in your life?
BEN: I go back to the blessing of Linda, my mom—early on, always having Scripture and prayer at the center of our family life. And now, having been married—in two months, it’ll be 32 years—if I ever watched crap television at 7:30 or 8:00 at night and we hadn’t had family worship at the dinner table, my wife is going to be there slapping me and the kids. So, in a very healthy way, there’s a sense that the daily liturgy of family life in our family has had Scripture as part of it for a long time—both my family of origin and my family of procreation. I’ve been incredibly blessed in that regard.
KRISTEN: Well, it’s living and active. It’s clear.
BEN: Yeah, Amen.
Senator Ben Sasse on Parenting and Being a Father
KRISTEN: Your daughter Alex recently wrote about the three things that you would ask her—which had a big impact on me when I read it. Those three things included a reaffirmation of her relationship with God, a reaffirmation of your family’s unconditional love, and then also the qualities that she has. I’d like to borrow that. Can I?
BEN: It’s all yours. I’ve already praised my wife once. I don’t want to do it too many times, but Alex gave me a lot of credit for that. Her mom taught her to write, and I told her, “Alex, you have enough to do right now—you don’t need to write an essay about your dad’s parenting style.” But it is really fun to recognize how the indicative precedes the imperative, right? All of our kids who get to be raised in the covenant—she’s a princess of heaven. She lives in a family that loves her unconditionally. Now, go grit—go grind—go love somebody, get out of your own head, and serve somebody else—not to earn status or standing or identity, but because you already have identity, acceptance, and standing. We all want to be known. We all want to be accepted. And that’s a precondition to serving well—you can’t serve well out of a quest to be accepted; it works the other way around.
I’ve had a weird experience over the last couple of months where a number of sports teams and coaches have asked me to speak. I’m the son of a football coach, and I’ve said no to all but two of them. But I have spoken to two football teams, and as I thought about that—I think that high acceptance and high accountability, if you do it two by two, the best place to live is with lots of acceptance and lots of expectation, but one precedes the other. And I think that’s what Alex was getting at in her essay.
KRISTEN: That’s so good. I’ll also say, when I read that and thought more about it, I thought it was actually more a reflection on your marriage, to be candid. Many of those listening are young and married, or older and still working on their marriage, as we all have to do. And I just wanted to ask you: Are there habits or practices that you’ve found, that you’ve cultivated to help create a healthy marriage that can endure not just this season, but the season of raising children? So many times, we see fractures develop through both success and suffering. I’m curious to hear, in this moment, as you’re going through the good and the bad—the sickness and the health—how does that work?
BEN: Those vows—sickness and health, richer for poorer, for better or for worse—we all, on your wedding day, you know you’re supposed to say these grand things, but because it’s such a beautiful day, you mostly picture the health, the riches, the better. And really, so much of where you get to serve somebody else and live a life in response to God’s goodness to us by loving someone else—well, now, when you’re the weak party, having somebody be a caregiver and take care of you all the time. As parents, there’s an unbelievable opportunity in holding your kid’s hair back while they’re throwing up. In a way, it’s more special than the high-five after an athletic success. This is the opportunity to serve someone, because that’s the state in which Christ redeemed us.
I’m incredibly blessed to have a partner that I never had any doubt about. I don’t like talking about the cancer much, but this part is relevant to your question: I became symptomatic in late October but wasn’t diagnosed until mid-December. Then, we pounded on doors everywhere in the country to figure out who the best cancer specialists were. I have pancreatic cancer that’s metastasized into five other systems. Pancreatic cancer is the most fatal kind—an 87% death rate overall, but a 97% death rate within 12 months if you present at stage four, and I presented at advanced stage four.
From mid-December until the first of the year, we were trying to figure out if we could find an oncologist who could tell us the best clinical trial to try and get into. While cancer’s terrible and I’m sick all the time and I vomit constantly, I’ve had five months that have been pretty great compared to last fall, when we didn’t know what was wrong. When I was, for seven weeks, symptomatic but hadn’t yet been diagnosed, we had a million things were wrong. We weren’t making any cancer tumors get smaller; we weren’t yet poisoning them; I didn’t have any morphine to relieve the pain. I look back now and I just stand in awe of my wife’s kindness to me—her incredible patience when we didn’t know what was wrong and I was a terrible person to be around. I felt like death warmed over all the time. So—long-winded way of saying—I don’t know exactly what habits you need, but my wife probably does.
KRISTEN: Well, it doesn’t happen in a moment either. As you said, it happens over 30 years—it’s a building. In a society that maybe doesn’t value marriage, and is in a state of loneliness, I think people are asking: how do we build those kind of marriages that will be there in that moment?
BEN: It’s a theological truth, for sure, but also a common-grace matter. I mean, we’ve wrestled with worldview development together for more than 60% of our lives now. We’re only in our early-to-mid 50s, and yet we care what each other thinks—not to earn acceptance, but because you’re smart, you care, you have the same root values I do. I don’t know how to make sense of this problem, but how do we tackle it? What are we reading? How are we wrestling? Who are we talking to? Who are we listening to? What’s the next podcast, the next dinner guest? I can’t imagine not having a shared life of the mind with your partner.
I don’t say this to be too aggressive about the point, but I think a lot of people believe that once your career is worked out—at 35 or 40—then you can figure out who you’re going to marry. We didn’t do that. We fell in love in college and married the first year after. I’d kind of hate to have spent ages 22 to 32 getting to full adulthood on my own, and then met this person as a fully formed adult, figuring out compatibility from there. I’m kind of glad we got to wrestle through a lot of identity formation together.
KRISTEN: That’s good. I got married at 19. I feel like I’ve met a lot of different people, but it was good.
Senator Sasse on the Institutions that Shape Our Kids
KRISTEN: I want to talk about our kids for a minute. You’ve written a lot about the impact of social media, the moral hollowness in schools, and schools taking on the role of parents. But I think, content-wise, there’s a difference in the lies kids are being told about who they are and who God created them to be. And I’m just wondering: What are the conversations that should be happening at the kitchen table that aren’t?
BEN: Yeah, I mean, the history nerd in me has very strong views on this—you’ll probably want to edit this part out, because nobody cares what my views are on meta-history. But I’m pretty strongly of the view that for most of human history, there were four institutions that shaped kids, and two of them have withered while two new ones have taken their place—and we’ve made it much, much less interesting to be a kid coming of age.
So here’s my theory: for most of human history—definitely hunter-gatherer, definitely agrarian, and lots of industrialization—the four formative institutions for kids were family, religion, work, and something like war: violence that preserved a peaceable public square. Family and religion are still central institutions forming kids; there are problems in both, but they persist. Work and war are mostly gone from child experience. There’s very little child labor among rich nations today—and I’m including, say, 30 to 80 nations, depending on how you count. Median middle-class Americans are the richest people in any time or place in human history—and until 30 years ago, almost all kids had always done meaningful work by 12, 14, or 16. This isn’t some old guy standing on your lawn screaming about what’s wrong with kids today—it’s an observable fact that most kids don’t have much productive output today, and they’re poorer for it. They’re impoverished spiritually, morally, maybe physically as well.
As for war—we’ve so insulated children from the idea that the world is broken, that somebody wants to take your life, your liberty, your things. Of course, I don’t want kids engaged in war, but an awareness of the reality of a broken world that does require a certain kind of courage and strength to preserve order is not something we should insulate them from.
The two new institutions that replaced work and war are school and social media. Factory-model schooling as we do it is a recent creation that is only about 110 years old. In my telling of American history, John Dewey is one of the great demons—one of the great bad guys. He wanted to make sure especially Catholic kids were separated from their parents and their parish, and that they would be moved into an institution that would largely replace parents. In loco parentis, at least, had a theory of the moral formation of kids. Today, most school districts don’t have anything like that. And as for social media—Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge and others have done great work explaining this—but I think what’s most important when you put together the big six: the two that persist, the two that have declined, and the two that have replaced it. The two that declined (work and war) were hierarchical and there were objective outcomes. The two that have replaced them (school, social media) are peer-based. So there’s enormous contending for status without service to anyone else.
School on its own—school is different from education, right? Education, reading, intellectual wrestling are very important; that’s different from schooling—and social media, both of which segregate people by the accident of their birth year. There’s a lot that’s great about being 15. It’s disastrous to be surrounded only by 15-year-olds—their frontal lobes aren’t done; there’s no wisdom there. We need 15-year-olds to know 80-year-olds, and vice versa. One of the things that’s not happening around dinner tables is that parents don’t know how to do the work of saying: “Hey, by the way, you have a lot of friends. We’re grateful to God for the friends that you have. They should be about 8% of your consciousness, not 88%.”
KRISTEN: Right.
BEN: Sorry—history nerd.
KRISTEN: Well, no, it’s so true. Even looking at text messages—all the ways kids have access to each other now that they didn’t used to. I’d get one call a week from a boy.
BEN: And your mom was probably listening on the other line!
KRISTEN: [laughs] Now, it’s like I can’t block enough girls. So, I hear what you’re saying.
Ben Sasse’s Advice to Blackstone Legal Fellowship Students
KRISTEN: We’ve talked about contending internally and what that looks like to build up your faith. So when we think about carrying the faith out, and we move from the status of our 15-year-olds to young adults, as an example—our Blackstone program, the purpose of the program is to train up Christian law students to be excellent lawyers, but more importantly than that, to be excellent Christian lawyers, to integrate their faith and to make an eternal impact. Many of them want to join some of the powerful institutions in which you’ve served. I feel like those that serve in elite circles—whether it’s the schooling they go to or the profession that they’re seeking to enter—many times there will be a strong temptation to just keep your head down, keep your mouth shut, and suggest or rationalize to yourself that you’re waiting for that bigger platform. You’re waiting until you’re sort of untouchable to be able to really have influence. And what that can mean is at least half of your life is spent essentially developing a habit of silence. But there is a discernment that comes into deciding when silence is prudent—
BEN: Sure.
KRISTEN: —or when are you using it as essentially a way to hide a fear of man, or naked ambition? How have you discerned that in your own life? Or what advice would you give in those moments? We get those questions a lot at Blackstone.
BEN: That’s a really good parsing. And I was going to say, I know a medium amount about the intergenerational feel to Blackstone, but obviously I don’t know it like you know it. But I was going to say, what you need in life are things like Blackstone—so you have mentoring, so that people who are at different life stages can help hold you accountable to whether or not that really is a compromise you’re making this year at 28, or 32, or 36, about the thing you’re trying to do. That’s not the same as rushing headlong into battle every day, right? I mean, let’s serve vigorously in all good and noble causes—but that doesn’t mean you talk about every topic all the time. The opposite of courage isn’t just cowardice—because then you’d think the opposite of cowardice is recklessness. There should be discernment about which questions you pursue, and at what time. But you do need older wisdom in life, and so you need mentors, right? That’s one of the things that’s helped me. I’ve made tons of mistakes as well, but when I make a good decision about those hard tradeoffs, it’s usually because I have some wise counsel that’s a lot older than I am.
KRISTEN: Don’t you think some mistakes actually move you forward…
BEN: Sure.
KRISTEN: … in terms of developing the wisdom and the judgment?
BEN: Yeah.
KRISTEN: It’s part of it.
BEN: Amen. I think about this—it’s a different analog, but it’s still instructive: Peter Thiel said, “I’m amazed at how often young people who are scared to take any risk look at me and think I’ve been super successful because they see two wins. But I see two wins and 47 losses in me, and I see zero wins and one loss in them. They think the difference between us is the two wins versus the zero wins. It’s the willingness to endure one loss versus 47.”
KRISTEN: Oh, so true.
BEN: It’s fine to fail. Get up and try again. You learn something.
KRISTEN: What is one thing that the smart, sharp, ambitious, untested 28-year-old Ben Sasse needed to hear—that he might not have wanted to hear?
BEN: I’ve got a few that I heard and took counsel on, but I think, probably more to advance the ball you’re offering, I would say: one that I heard and didn’t listen to enough was that I was pretty much always willing to just work harder. That’s different than understanding seasons of life—tradeoff costs, rhythms, the need to actually have a Sabbath rest, not just for physical rest but for ceasing from striving to make a name for yourself.
For me, at 28, that played out as being way too much of a road warrior. If there was a project that was hard and somebody needed to fly around the world, I’d hop on the plane and go immediately. I definitely had people in my life, but they maybe didn’t work in the same sector, so I didn’t think they understood why what they were saying—oh, that’s fine for whatever job you were doing today, but it won’t work for what I’m doing right now. And I traveled way, way too much. A lot of my peers and I convinced ourselves that seven nights away a month was the threshold where it got too expensive. The expense starts way before seven nights a month away from your family. And I wish I’d listened more to the people who said, “Do you really need to do all that traveling?”
KRISTEN: One thing that strikes me about what you’re saying that though—and about some of the other things that you’ve written—is the importance of community. For a Christian in particular, Christian community is extremely important; Scripture talks about our brothers and sisters in Christ. And at least from what I’ve read, you have some really good male friends. We have young men listening—talk about what that’s meant to your life, because even though you’ve maybe made these mistakes, or traveled a lot, you’ve been able to maintain some relationships. What has that meant to you? And again, what would you say to those who are thinking, “Oh, I can do that later”?
BEN: Yeah, that’s good. I’m very critical of so much of the digital revolution—it’s both near-heaven and near-hell on a lot of dimensions. The social media pieces, I think, are way more costly than beneficial. But I do think a lot of the digital communications technology that allows you to stay current on people’s lives, even when you have seasons where you’re not going to be in the same geography, is an incredible blessing. If you look at all the relationships around your hypothetical 28-year-old in your last question, the vast majority of them are not going to be in the same geography five years from now as they are now. And you don’t want to have to have a whole new batch of friends, because you won’t build the same kind of accountability at 33 that you had—or started building—at 23 or 28. Genuine accountability requires a lot of relationships that are durable over time, even though you’re going to go through seasons where geography changes a lot.
I’ve got maybe three different groups of guys I’m close with—a group of six, a group of three, a pair—pushing a dozen guys I’ve been tight with for decades. If we didn’t have something like a WhatsApp thread for accountability on these kinds of challenges before us, or on family issues, or on not becoming too enamored with or despondent about work successes or failures—I don’t think we’d have maintained the thickness of being able to get in each other’s grills. Hebrews 10, about not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, is more precisely about the local church, but I think there are applications for accountability groups like this. I’ve been blessed by that for 33 years.
KRISTEN: That’s a good word.
Ben Sasse on America at 250 and Principles That Will Help Us Endure
KRISTEN: We’re about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration—I think we both agree it’s a pretty amazing document.
BEN: USA! USA! USA!
KRISTEN: [laughter] But reading through it again, and thinking about this moment—we can diagnose the problems, and I think one problem is that the truths that were self-evident to the founders aren’t so self-evident to this generation, even though they should be. How do we pursue renewal in a moment when we can’t even agree on some of the fundamental questions that our founders at least held in common?
BEN: I have two different ways of coming at that incredibly important question. One, it really is important to decouple our constitutional commitments—1776 is unbelievable, but it’s only lived out to be unbelievable because of 1787 surviving, right? The constitutional moment—Lincoln’s image of the golden apple and the silver frame, and his re-explanation and reinterpretation of Washington’s Farewell Address—I think we should constantly take the miracle of Philadelphia in 1787 and reread 1776 in light of it. Our constitutional commitments have to be so much more fundamental to our core than our policy preferences.
At a time of weird tribalism, when people are so lonely—to use your word from earlier—there’s a real desire for people who come to politics to find community, and particularly an anti-community: Who are the bad guys? Who are the people we can really dislike because of their policy preferences? There are people on our public stage right now whose policy preferences I think are really neighbor-harming and should be rejected. But it’s important to sometimes speak about constitutional principles and sublimate the need to talk about policy preferences, so we can move past tribalism and invite more people into loving the Constitution and the glorious inheritance we have in this system. So at one level, I think we have to resist tribal temptations to be able to do constitutionalism right, which can enable a civic transmission. As Reagan said, we’re always only one generation away from the extinction of freedom in any republic. It doesn’t happen in the bloodstream—you’ve got to pass it on by teaching people. That doesn’t mean people are necessarily going to have my right-of-center policy preferences on every question.
But at a more fundamental level, to go back to what you said about social media earlier: a deliberative republic requires people who take a long historical view. Almost everything about our technologies and communication at present are “Insta.” You got to have an opinion about everything, all the time. You got to have a hot take on everything. That’s not a healthy way to live life. Most things, I don’t have to have an opinion on right now. And if I do take a position, I should be able to preserve room to grow, to mature, to realize I was wrong. It’s hard, in a digital world, to ever admit you’re wrong, because somebody’s going to own you for it, but nobody’s going to say, “I respect the integrity of that self-correction.”
If the republic survives—and I think we will, though there are good reasons to bet against it—ten or fifty years from now, looking back on this moment, we’ll have had to figure out how to get beyond this “Insta” spray of information about everything all the time, delivered with more passion than reason. So we’re going to have to get to a deliberative position. I think about C.S. Lewis’s line that the reason to read old books is because all people, in all communities, at all times and places have always had biases, and have always been wrong—and we need to get outside our own moment. And I don’t have any means by which I can go to the future, so I have to go to the past to get a perspective on this moment. A fish can’t explain water, because it’s never not been in it. It’s really important for us to read older things.
I think some of why people don’t see the gifts of the American experiment is that they presume everything good anybody has ever had came cost-free, and the thing they don’t have is the thing someone else should get for them right now. It’s historically naïve to not understand: For most places in history, people haven’t had freedom of worship, they haven’t had freedom of speech, they certainly haven’t had this kind of economic largess. And so, we’re going to need to become more deliberative, more historically minded—and that’s going to require a pendulum swing to use these technologies for self-restraint rather than self-adulation.
KRISTEN: Right. When I…
BEN: Sounds super sobering.
KRISTEN: Yes.
BEN: I didn’t mean to give you that many vegetables.
KRISTEN: It is a sobering moment. But I also think—our kids are about the same age—telling them how bad it is is important, so they can be sober-minded. Scripture talks about being sober-minded, but also hopeful.
BEN: Yeah.
KRISTEN: You said you think the republic will survive. We can come up with all the reasons it might not. But in talking to our Blackstone interns and our fellows and others who are listening, it can be overwhelming in the moment because you try to have civil conversations, and it’s hard. People don’t want to talk about these things, and, like you said, the tribalism… What would you advise these interns who want to go into the institutions that you serve, who want to make an eternal impact? How do they do that in this moment? How do they pursue renewal?
BEN: I mean, don’t you think a big piece of it is: If the desire really is to serve, as opposed to just build a really great résumé, then they’re going to be pretty well served by that impulse to figure out how you do neighbor-love stuff, and some institutions are going to cease to be useful, and so you have to move on to other institutions. And we also need to build new institutions. Tocquevillian America in the 1830s wasn’t the same as what Tocquevillian America was recovering to be in the 1910s and ’20s, when people thought it had been lost in 1890. The agrarian-to-industrial, urbanizing movement of 1890 required a new set of institutions. Our challenge is bigger—we’re going to need to build hybrid institutions, because we’ve got these tools that allow our consciousness to leave the time and place where we’re actually sitting together, breaking bread together, or able to hug somebody. You’re able to have a transcendence over time and space that has lots of opportunity, but lots of peril as well. We haven’t built the new institutions to do that yet.
So a lot of the institutions that our well-meaning, ambitious, and most-talented 24-, 28-, 32-year-olds want to serve in probably don’t really exist yet. They are going to have to go build a lot of those institutions. But the desire to actually serve your neighbor, as opposed to accumulate a bunch of trophies, is a pretty great impulse, and I think they’ll figure it out. You mentioned my daughter Alex’s essay. Another thing that we do at our house a lot is: when any of the five of us sound self-absorbed, we sort of have everybody with a free “Joker’s Wild” card that you could play, which is just to say, “Who have you served today?” And until you’ve talked about somebody you poured yourself into today, let’s not really talk that much about the fact that you really thought you should have gotten more playing time in that game.
KRISTEN: But I think when you follow those three questions—and we use that discipline in our own lives—the next generation are builders. I believe God is calling them to be builders, and that they’ll rise to that task, assuming they build the inner habits it takes for the moments where grit is required. In many ways, I’m hopeful.
You’re enduring some difficult treatments right now while trying to redeem the time with your kids—especially your son, who’s about the same age as mine. For me, shaping him—nothing else matters. I want him to serve Jesus. At the same time, I find myself wondering: What do those conversations look like as you are trying to redeem this time? How do we, as parents, form our kids in a more intentional way? In these few months, what are you trying to accomplish?
BEN: We’ve reflected a lot on Romans 5 together as a family through this—and Romans 5 is paired with Genesis 3, because there was union with Adam, and now there’s union with Christ. And yet, in Romans 5, it also talks about suffering producing perseverance, perseverance producing character, character producing hope—and believing God’s grand plan in that. Christ’s suffering was salvific; my suffering isn’t salvific, but it is sanctifying, and there’s an opportunity to suffer with Christ in it. It reminds me of David Gibson’s commentary on Ecclesiastes, where he talks about the kind of wisdom that comes “from behind”—like a sucker punch that later makes you say thank you. There’s all kinds of wisdom that you can get frontal, but there’s some things you have to go through before they add up to wisdom. That’s the “from behind” wisdom—terrible news that lets you acknowledge your finitude, your misprioritization, and then say: this suffering was good, it was needed for me. I believe that for me. But it’s much harder to say that God is also going to use this in the sanctification of folks in my family.
My wife and I have been married just shy of 32 years. Our daughters are in their mid-20s, they’re out of college—these are three strong women with rooted worldviews. My son is 15, which means, by definition, he’s an idiot. [laughs] You look at him and ask, how could this be used for good? God can accomplish all things. His name is Augustine, but that’s a lot to shout at a sporting event, so we call him Breck.
Breck loves football and baseball—playing them, but also learning what it would look like to coach or manage, but also to spectate, or to clean up trash at the stadium after events. We’ve spent a lot of time at the edge of sporting events together these last few months, but we spend a lot of time getting to walk and talk as well. If it’s God’s plan for him not to have his dad in his life really young, it’s because it’s God’s plan to strengthen and grow him through that. And I believe it. And so being able to talk about that with him is a blessing. It’s not fun—it’s a bit like spending the day with the phlebotomist.
KRISTEN: You’re something.
BEN: I’ve got accessible veins, I’ve been told.
[Both laugh]
What Eternal Truths Are More Real Today Than Before?
KRISTEN: Last question. I’ve been curious—you’ve lived a faithful life, but I have to believe there are some truths, eternal truths that feel more real and unshakable to you today than a year ago. I’d like to know what those are.
BEN: The power of pancreatic cancer prayer. I was in a lot of pain—again I’m on a lot of morphine now, and on this unbelievable—scare quotes—“miracle drug,” Daraxonrasib, that’s shrinking my tumors like crazy. We’re poisoning the heck out of them, and they keep putting their arms over their head and the tumors keep getting smaller. I’m not going to make it, but we’re going to get a lot of extra time because of this drug. I have maybe 10% of the pain now that I had in November and December, when tumors were pushing on my spine and we didn’t know what was wrong. I had to be dependent in a way that was true, but that I’d been able to lie to myself about most of the time. We are mortals. We are finite.
I heard a theologian recently distinguish between the communicable and incommunicable attributes of God as being a useful guidepost for different kinds of sin in our lives. It’s pretty easy to say, “God is patient, I should be patient”—that’s a communicable attribute, and I’m imperfect at it. I don’t live out the kind of patience with my spouse, my kids, let alone some stranger on the freeway, that I should. We recognize those sins. But the deeper sins are the incommunicable attributes of God that I kind of passively say, “Maybe I should be omniscient, maybe I should be omnipotent.” God told Adam and Eve “No” about the Tree of Knowledge in the garden. It’s good to acknowledge our dependence. I don’t ever really get to have storehouses—God gives us gifts. We are children, and Jesus tells us to approach the Father as “Abba, Daddy.” That’s not what we say to ourselves the day we win an NBA championship, or argue a case before the Supreme Court and you win—then we say, “Hear me roar.” It’s better to be humbled, to have our idol factories and our hearts shattered. I’ve definitely gotten to experience that in a new way. And it sucks, and I’m grateful.
KRISTEN: Thank you.
BEN: Thanks for having me.
KRISTEN: Thank you for bearing witness to the gospel. Thanks for your humility, your courage. We’re praying for you, for your family, and I look forward to seeing you again.