FamilyLife Today®

Andrew Peterson: I didn't grow up in a church that did this, but later in life, we ended up in a more liturgical church that celebrates Holy Week to the nines. I love starting with Palm Sunday. It’s like, "Okay, here we go. We're about to walk through the story in a pretty intense way."

On Wednesday of Holy Week, we would have a Tenebrae service. It was done in a way that ended with darkness. You blow out a candle, you read a scripture, and you remember how broken the world is. But you don't provide the answer yet. Learning to sit in the grief of the brokenness of the world makes Easter morning all the more precious, doesn't it?

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: And I'm Dave Wilson, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today. Well, we've got Andrew Peterson back in the studio. Andrew, welcome back to FamilyLife Today.

Andrew Peterson: Hey, thanks for having me.

Dave Wilson: We are coming up on the critical historical moment in the whole Christian faith. Everything hinges, rises, and falls on this one moment in history: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Obviously, that's something that you believe in and have written songs about—albums about—the resurrection. So talk about resurrection and why you've written three different albums on that one topic.

Andrew Peterson: There's this book called *Surprised by Hope* by N.T. Wright. Some people don't agree with everything he says, but this book in particular, I haven't really talked to anybody who's said he's wrong about it. It's this book about the resurrection and what it really meant to the early church and what it means for us now.

Somehow, I missed it growing up in the church. I just didn't really understand the significance of what it was that Jesus did and what that means for us. This idea that we also have this bodily resurrection that has been promised to us.

I love Easter because in the Northern Hemisphere, at least, we get to see all of creation resurrect. We get to celebrate Lent and Easter in this season where the earth is going from very dead-looking to daffodils poking up out of the ground—these little trumpets of the resurrection. It's like all of creation is preaching this sermon to us, and I just want to embrace that wholeheartedly. It's one of the great joys of my life that we're touring around and proclaiming that truth and saying, "Hey, keep your eyes peeled." The thing that's happening all around you, the way there's a song my friend wrote that says "The hills remember green again," as that happens, it's this great reminder that Christ conquered death and that we also will through his power.

The centrality of it was something that I missed. I've read plenty of C.S. Lewis talking about it. Every sermon in the book of Acts mentions the resurrection as the centerpiece of the thing. If that thing didn't happen, why are we even here?

The short version of the story is maybe 12 or 13 years ago, I wrote an album. Usually, you put the songs together and I kind of look for some connecting thread like, "What's the theme?" I noticed that all the songs in one way or another were about the coming resurrection or this idea that the resurrection of Jesus kind of sent these shockwaves into creation and we're experiencing those.

I went to the label and I was like, "I want to call it *Resurrection Letters*, but I realize that I should have written an album about Jesus's resurrection, that this would be the answer. So I want to call this one *Resurrection Letters, Vol. 2*." They were like, "What are you talking about?" I was like, "*Star Wars*, man. We're just going to go do the prequel later." So we called it *Resurrection Letters, Vol. 2*, and 10 years later was when I finally had the guts to try to write the songs about Jesus's resurrection. It was this huge, scary project, but eventually we finished writing *Resurrection Letters, Vol. 1*. Then I was like, "Well, that opens with Jesus's heart beating in the tomb and I feel like we need to at least acknowledge the crucifixion." So we went and wrote *Resurrection Letters: Prologue*. The whole thing holds together as the crucifixion followed by the resurrection of Jesus, followed by glorying in what is coming to us.

Ann Wilson: Take us back. You said that you never really got it growing up. Talk about when you first got it and what happened.

Andrew Peterson: It was like reading the Narnia books and *The Great Divorce*. I don't know if you guys know *The Great Divorce*. It’s a great, great book. It kind of began the process of making me realize—I think Lewis said—that the people who did the most in God's name for this world were the people who were thinking the most about the next one. This idea that keeping your eyes fixed on what is to come kind of changes the way you behave now. I loved that idea.

Even when I listen to my older records, I can hear this kind of "I'll fly away" theology that still was missing the puzzle piece that the New Jerusalem descends and God makes his home with us again. That's what Revelation tells us. Man, it's like the good news is better than I thought it was. It isn't just that Jesus died for us, paid for our sin, conquered death so that we could be in heaven. There was almost this "what for" kind of elephant in the room as a kid. I was like, "But why? Why would he do all of these things?"

Slowly realizing that the answer is because he loves this world. He loves his creation and he made us to be stewards over it, to rule over it and to take care of it in a proper way. That was the puzzle piece that clicked into place and made me so excited about what's to come. I talk to kids who sometimes are terrified of eternity. The idea that we're just going to be in this disembodied state floating around forever—who wants to do that?

I heard a theologian talk about how in John 3:16, when it says "For God so loved the world," I always assumed that meant the people in the world. But it actually could be translated "For God so loved his creation," which includes us, but it's all of his creation that he gave his only begotten son. He's in the process of redeeming creation and us. I'm thrilled. You can see that I'm excited right now. I get so worked up talking about it because it just feels like I just want to go back in time and tell 12-year-old Andrew that all that stuff that he aches to be true is more true than he can believe. It just fills in the blanks that were left in that typical cultural Southern Christianity that I grew up in.

Dave Wilson: So talk about, if you're thinking about telling 12 and 13-year-old Andrew, a lot of our listeners are parents, like us, who have experienced the radical transformation of the resurrection not only of Christ but of our own lives. How do we teach that, translate that, pass that on? How did you try to do that with your own kids?

Ann Wilson: Besides having them listen to your albums.

Andrew Peterson: Making them listen to my albums. I can tell you one of the ways that I have tried to help my kids see it is through gardening. I went through depression when I was 40 and it lasted a few years. It was a really tough, confusing season for me. It happened to coincide with this awakening to my love for taking care of the property where we live. I started keeping bees and trying to grow flowers. We have this cottage garden out front. A friend of mine gave us this 30-year garden plan. She's an English gardener who gave us this really elaborate plan for our property. She was like, "Don't try to do this all now. It'll cost you a fortune. Just pick a little section and work on it every year."

I was doing all that work and at some point, I began to realize that depression doesn't really have a hard end date. I realized one day that I was talking about it in the past tense. I was like, "Oh, I guess whatever the thing was is kind of over now."

I realized that the gardening, the putting things in the ground, embodied the metaphor for me. I spent a lot of time feeling like God was mad at me, that he was pushing my face into the dirt, that he was punishing me for something I didn't even know I'd done wrong. I remember vividly going out into the garden with my daughter and taking a little seed and saying, "Hey, it's spring. We're going to plant some seeds." I took the seed and I pushed its face into the dirt. I kind of wounded the earth in the process. I cut a hole in it and covered it over like a death. We would go out every day to wait for that new life to come breaking through.

It was like that was when the light bulb kind of began to come on for me—how much it means that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, that the heavens declare his handiwork and his praise. Paul talks about it in Romans that we're without excuse because if you've got your eyes peeled, you can see this truth showing up all the time.

So that to me was like, if God didn't intend for our bodies to be resurrected one day, then why would he give us such a perfect metaphor for it? I think trying to help my kids live close to the earth and in a way that pays attention to God's creation, to the fact that it is preaching to us, kind of lays the groundwork for this widened imagination for what it means for us to one day die and be resurrected.

Dave Wilson: Yeah, there is that picture in the garden—and I'm not a big garden guy—but I could see the image. It made me think more of death than resurrection, but there is no resurrection without death. We run from pain, we run from anything that feels like it's dying. And yet, talk about that a little bit because you have to embrace a little bit the death or the crucifixion before you can have resurrection as a mom, as a dad, as a person. How does that impact you?

Andrew Peterson: A lot of us aren't super good at dwelling on the dark parts. At church, we tend to kind of brush over that. There's a whole theology of suffering and of lament in scripture. Lament needs a place in our worship services. I really think silence needs a place. But also, celebration and rejoicing—it's all part of the deal.

So for me, I didn't grow up in a church that did this, but later in life, we ended up in a more liturgical church that celebrates Holy Week to the nines. I love starting with Palm Sunday. It’s like, "Okay, here we go. We're about to walk through the story in a pretty intense way." On Wednesday of Holy Week, we would have a Tenebrae service. Have you guys ever heard of this?

Dave Wilson: We've done it at our church.

Andrew Peterson: Yeah. There's a zillion ways to do it, but at this church, it was done in a way that ended with darkness. It's like you blow out a candle, you read a scripture, you remember how broken the world is, but you don't provide the answer yet because we're experiencing it in the wider context of this week. So learning to sit in the grief of the brokenness of the world makes Easter morning all the more precious, doesn't it?

I think that's part of it, is teaching our kids that we don't have to be afraid to lean into lament and into darkness. Let the suffering do its work in us. The fact that you're suffering doesn't mean that you're doing anything wrong, necessarily. It could mean that you're in the cave because God loves you, not because he doesn't.

Dave Wilson: I tell you what, one of the best things we ever do for our marriage is get away and focus and work on our relationship. We don't want to do it, it's hard to get on the calendar, but when we do, we grow and our marriage gets better.

Ann Wilson: You know what goes along well with that getaway is something that's cheap or that's on sale.

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Ann Wilson: And here are the sale dates: March 20th through the 30th, you can get that 40% off. So visit weekendtoremember.com. There's no promo code needed. Again, that's weekendtoremember.com to get that sale. Go back to that, Andrew, talking about that two-year time of depression because a lot of us, a lot of our listeners have gone through that. How has it marked you? How has it changed you?

Andrew Peterson: I feel a lot of empathy with people who are going through that. Quite a few people came out of the woodwork when I wrote about it in *The God of the Garden*—people I knew and some people I didn't who have said, "Thank you for expressing this. It's not often that Christians talk a whole lot about that." So yeah, I've made some good friends out of the process.

But really it's given me a better relationship to time. What I mean by that is that I'm a very impatient person. But gardening—when I plant a tree now, I plant the tree and I'm better at imagining what it's going to look like in 15 years. Now I do work in the garden and I go, "Okay, this isn't going to look great for a while, but I'm going to do the work now and I'm going to trust that this plan is going to come to fruition."

What I mean by that is that when I am in those seasons of suffering, I'm better now at holding on to the fact that this is not going to be forever. That's the great lie of depression, I think, is that this is your life and it will always be this way. That's despair. It's a lack of imagination that one day some great, good thing could fall into your lap. It's trusting that the author of the story has good intentions for you.

So for me, it's reading our kids' stories when they were little, listening to music—great music by people sometimes who aren't even Christian—to understand better what it feels like to really ache and then to show them that Jesus is stronger than all of that, that they don't have to be afraid to engage with it because there is some good coming.

Anyway, I could talk about this for days, but one of the last things I would say about that is that I saw this theologian talking about *The Lord of the Rings* once and he talked about how one of the main themes is the triumph of hope over despair in that story. Some of the characters despair and one of them, Denethor, actually commits suicide because he thinks, "How can we ever defeat the orcs? There's no way. There's too much darkness." Then Sam and Frodo find their way—I'm going to spoil the ending for people—but the ring ends up getting destroyed in a way that nobody could foresee. If you've read that story for the first time, you would never guess that that's how it happens.

What I love about it is that Frodo is not the hero of *The Lord of the Rings*, and Sam is not the hero of *The Lord of the Rings*. The author of the story is the hero of *The Lord of the Rings* because providence is the thing that ended up working all of these threads together and allowed the ring to be destroyed in a way that the characters were unable to do on their own. So in that context, if we think of our own lives that way, we don't have to be the hero of our story. It's not our job to destroy the ring. It's our job to be obedient, walk into the darkness trusting that the author of the story is good.

Dave Wilson: Yeah, and I think it's important what you've actually modeled for our listeners, especially for parents, is talking about the darkness. Not hiding that, not pretending you didn't struggle, but actually if we as parents could talk about that in our family room with our kids, I think we're afraid to do that. I know that when we would do a Good Friday service—and we did it for 30 years—we would walk out of Good Friday like you talked about the Tenebrae darkness. I was in the planning of those services, I'm like, "What? We're going to walk out? No, no, no, I want to give hope." Everything in me is like, we can't let people walk out. But because we did, and people are quiet—there's no talking, it's just dark—and then you walk in Sunday and the resurrection story has so much more power because you've experienced the darkness. I think as parents, we need to talk about the darkness and the struggle so that when we talk about the power of the resurrection, they feel it, we feel it, our family feels it in a way that's powerful because we've experienced both extremes.

Andrew Peterson: Yeah, I completely agree. I feel like Jamie and I have always erred on the side of being open with our kids about what we're dealing with at whatever time. We've had a few times when we've let our friends in on some crisis that we're going through and we'll mention in passing that our kids know about it and they would be like, "You told your kids about this?" It's like, "Well, yeah, we would talk about it over dinner."

Especially that season when I was in that depression, I couldn't hide it. They knew something was wrong. The worst thing would have been for me to just pretend. So instead they would say, "What's going on?" and I would say, "I don't know. I'm just really sad." And that went on for about two years. But they would also see Mom and Dad get up in the morning and go to church and sometimes stand there unable to sing when the songs were too happy—which, by the way, as a person who has led music before, I remember in that moment whenever people would say, "Now sing, let me hear you sing louder," I wanted to be like, "Isn't it enough that I'm here, man?" Like I showed up. Let me off the hook. Maybe the people in the audience need to just be silent and to listen and to be present.

So I'm kind of bouncing all over the place, but I was just thinking about how when somebody's in real crisis, it doesn't do a whole lot of good to tell them everything's going to be okay. What they need is somebody to just feel the pain with them and to just say "I'm so sorry" and to weep with them. We get to do that. We get to grieve like those who have hope. We don't have to be afraid of grieving. We don't have to be afraid of trying to fix it all today. That goes for when you're trying to lead somebody to Jesus. Sometimes we feel this great pressure like, "This is the conversation. I've got this one chance." And it's like, man, it's going to be a thousand conversations and a thousand meals together and walking together. So anyway, that's kind of what I'm getting at when I talk about my relationship to time. I'm learning to be patient with the suffering and really give that seed time to germinate.

Ann Wilson: And the good news is that Easter is just around the corner and that is our hope. The resurrection of Christ is always our hope as we keep our eyes on him, whether we're in a good place or a bad place, to have him at the center. Andrew, could you pray for our listeners, for all of us as Easter is approaching?

Andrew Peterson: Most merciful God, we give you thanks and praise that when we were still far off, you met us in your son and brought us home. Thank you so much for giving us such a good story. We pray that you would please come back soon. In Christ's name, amen.

Ann Wilson: Andrew Peterson is a gifted guy. I mean, he's an author, singer, songwriter, musician. He's the guy I want to be when I grow up.

Dave Wilson: You kind of are him. Dove Award-winning, yeah. Anyway, the conversation about the resurrection—you talk about a truth that will literally change your marriage. Do you remember the day I came home from sitting in my office at our church? I had a couple that was going to get a divorce. They were so in despair. I'm embarrassed to say what I did, but as I was listening to them, I was like, "They do not understand that Jesus rose from the dead and he can save their marriage."

I got so frustrated with them because they just weren't listening. I stood up on my chair. I don't know why. It was so stupid. But I stood up and they were looking up at me and I go, "Jesus rose from the dead! He can save your dead marriage! That's all you need. You need to surrender your marriage and your lives to Jesus. Let him in. Let him do what he can do. He has the power of resurrection to raise your dead marriage back to life." They looked at me and said, "Okay, we'll see you later," and they walked out.

Ann Wilson: But it's true. What you said is true. It's a great reminder for all of us, especially at Easter. This has changed the entire world—the empty tomb.

Dave Wilson: Yeah, and you can get *The Resurrection Letters* by Andrew Peterson. Just go to familylifetoday.com and click on the link in the show notes. That truth will not only save a marriage, it'll save your life. As we think about Easter, I don't think there's a greater truth ever in the entire universe than the fact that we had a God that came to planet earth for us. He didn't just die for us, which is miraculous in itself, that we are forgiven by his blood, but he rose from the dead. And he says, "The power that raised me from the dead, that same power can give you new life."

FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, celebrating 50 years of God's faithfulness as marriages grow stronger and families flourish in him.