Well Done, Good and Faithful Dad: A Review of SEASONS OF SORROW by Tim Challies
A comforting, honest book for those in their own seasons of sorrow.
Many people remember November 3, 2020 as election day of a contentious United States presidential race. I remember the day, of course, but for two other reasons.
November 3, 2020 was the launch day of the book I coauthored with my friend John Beeson about blogging for God’s glory. Months and months before the book launched, we picked November 3 to release the book. And when we picked the date—as you might expect—we neglected to notice it coincided with the Trump-Biden showdown. Unfortunate timing, to say the least. We could have planned better.
The other event, however, we could have never seen coming.
My favorite blogger is Tim Challies. He’s so faithful in his theology, so consistent in his output, and so generous in promoting the work of others. When John and I thought about which author might write the foreword to our book about blogging, we, of course, asked Tim first. Thankfully, we didn’t have to ask anyone else.
But the day we launched our book was also the day Tim’s only son died.
Tim wrote on his blog the following day, “Yesterday the Lord called my son to himself—my dear son, my sweet son, my kind son, my godly son, my only son.” His son Nick had been playing a game with friends and his fiancée on his college campus when he suddenly collapsed and could not be revived. When Tim posted about the tragedy, he added, “And we ask that you remember us in your prayers as we mourn our loss together.”
I wrote my own prayer to God and posted it online, as did many others. I prayed to our Heavenly Father asking, among other requests, that “when a man who loves words—and spends his life using them for your glory and the good of your people—has nothing to say, whisper to his heart that you are still God and you love him and his wife.”
It’s been two years since that season. Joe Biden is still President, our book is still on Amazon, and Tim’s son is still gone.
But these years have not gone by without effort from Tim to capture the story of his loss and the ways God has remained faithful. Those reflections, many of which have never been shared in public before, became his latest book Seasons of Sorrow. The book chronicles his reflections over the first year of grief. When I finished reading the book, I emailed Tim to tell him that, for so many reasons, this book is the best writing I’ve ever read from him. Here are two main reasons I love the book.
Seasons of Sorrow puts the pain of loss on the page. I’m a sucker for stories about fathers and sons. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and Harry Chapin’s song “The Cat’s in the Cradle” make me melancholy like few other stories and songs can.
In Seasons of Sorrow, we see the picture of a father who loves his son. He loves the way I want to love my sons. He always made a point to wake before his family to pray for them so they would know that, before they woke, their father was praying for them. Tim would make his son coffee before his son went to work. Even now, he writes about occasionally bringing a cup to the gravesite.
All this love makes all the loss so hard and leads to excruciating moments of introspection. In one reflection, Tim asks a question that anyone of us might ask were we in his place, namely, whether the tragedy came from God as punishment for some sin in his life. “Could it be,” he asks, “that Nick’s death is God’s discipline toward me? Could it be that Nick was some kind of idol in my life, and to loose my grip on him, God took him away? Could this all be my fault?” Then he adds, “I’m haunted by these thoughts and questions” (33). As any good and godly father might be. In another passage, Tim wrestles with the emotions involved with emptying his son’s bedroom to prepare it for future use as a guest bedroom. “What right do we have,” he asks, “to barge in and sort through his possessions? Who are we to decide what will be kept and what will be discarded, what will be treasured and what will be thrown away? Yet it must be done” (102). Some nine months after Nick’s death, Tim wrote, “I miss my son today. That goes without saying, I suppose, since I miss him every day. But on this day, the pain is particularly sharp, the ache especially deep” (170). Here, Tim normalizes for readers what I’ve heard others say: there will be good days and bad days.
In all these ways, Tim does not shrink back from putting his pain on the page, telling readers his many frustrations with what William Cooper called God’s “frowning providences.” But that is not all he does.
Seasons of Sorrow points us to both the comfort of God’s promises and the comfort of God’s people. In a reflection he titled “My Manifesto,” Tim affirms his resolve to follow God and trust him despite the pain of loss. “By faith I will accept Nick’s death as God’s will, and by faith accept that God’s will is always good. . . . I will be forever thankful that God gave me a son and never resentful that he called him home. My joy in having him will be greater than my grief in having lost him” (36). Many such things he says. In the concluding paragraph of the chapter, Tim poetically strings together scriptural promise after promise after promise, affirming his belief in them with the concluding words, “This is my manifesto” (37).
In a chapter titled “I Fear God and I’m Afraid of God,” readers will notice overlap with themes from the book of Job. Tim writes of fearing God “in a new way” and of how “some kind of innocence has been shattered.” And still, he affirms his desire to continue praying, “Thy will be done,” while also noting, “even as I pray, I cringe just a little” (45). As Job came to learn, there is an unexpected comfort that comes to us when we remember that the God who is who he is, is who he is—he’s not a small, tribal deity, but sovereign and good, awesome and kind. There’s an unexpected comfort in having our innocence shattered and our foundation rebuilt.
In these ways and others, Seasons of Sorrow pastors and comforts those who grieve by sharing the ways God sent people to pastor and comfort him. In one section, Tim mentions to a friend he’s concerned his own eagerness to see his son one day in heaven has overshadowed the hope of seeing Jesus in heaven. To this, Tim’s friend tells him he does not sound like a pagan. “You sound like a grieving father” he says (122). That’s good pastoring.
Near the end of the book Tim notes the sadness that Nick “was the last male in the Challies line” and that now even the Challies “surname will in the course of time disappear” (183). But to this, Tim also encourages readers by sharing the truth he encourages himself with, writing that “Nick doesn’t need to be remembered by other people, because he will never be forgotten by God” (185). Amen and amen.
* * *
In the opening pages, Tim writes, “Writing is how I reflect, how I meditate, how I chart life’s every journey. And so when the sorrow was still new in my heart, when the tears were still fresh in my eyes, when I barely knew up from down and here from there, I began to write” (xiv). He goes on to say that he had to write because writing teaches him what he actually believes and what he should seek to believe. “I had to know,” he says, “whether to rage or to worship, whether to run to bow down, whether to give up or to go on.” Painful as the prose was for him, I am thankful he went on, bowed down, and worshiped.
For all these reasons, the subtitle could not fit more perfectly: the pain of loss and the comfort of God. It seems to me that not only has Tim been a good and faithful dad (the hope he writes about in the final chapter), but Tim has been a good and faithful author. In the coming years I expect I’ll buy more copies to give to those in our church going through their own seasons of sorrow.
* Photo by Jonah Pettrich on Unsplash
Batalla Contra la Pornografía: The Spanish Edition of Struggle Against…
Here’s a quick update to the translation of my “struggle” book.
About a year ago, my friend Kevin Halloran encouraged me to find a way to get my book Struggle Against Porn published in Spanish. Kevin is bilingual and tells me there are few gospel-centered resources in Spanish to help men win the war against lust, especially compared to the abundance of English resources. So, Kevin connected me with Daniel Puerto, the Executive Director of Soldados de Jesucristo, a prominent Christian website in the Spanish-speaking world (Soldiers in Christ, in English).
Now, fast forward to just last week, and the book was published as both a paperback and ebook available on Amazon. My friend Chase Replogle helped me create a cover similar to the original.
Soon, Soldados de Jesucristo will post all the chapters from the book in a long blog-series on their website. The material is so important, we want to make it freely and widely available to anyone who wants help.
Back in January of 2021 I asked for financial help to cover the cost of the translation. Thank you so much to the dozen or so people who helped. It means a lot to me.
If you know anyone who would be interested in the book, please send them this way. I can offer discounted pricing for bulk orders.
And if you can read Spanish, I’ll end the post letting you enjoy the endorsement from blogger and author Tim Challies:
Cuando comencé a escribir sobre pornografía, muchos cristianos se asombraban de descubrir, no solo la dimensión del problema, sino simplemente que existía un problema. Hoy, una década más tarde, la situación ha cambiado radicalmente y los cristianos están tan acostumbrados a escuchar sobre pornografía que casi ha llegado a ser aceptada como si fuera normal. Sin embargo, la pornografía sigue siendo tan peligrosa y devastadora como siempre. Por esa razón, estoy agradecido por recursos como este que continúan combatiendo en contra de esta plaga terrible.
Tim Challies, conocido blogger en www.challies.com, cofundador de Cruciform Press y autor de varios libros incluyendo Limpia tu mente.
* Photo by Sab Qadeer on Unsplash
DO MORE BETTER by Tim Challies (FAN AND FLAME Book Reviews)
I want to do more—better. Don’t you? Tim Challies has written a short, practical book to help us steward our gifts for the good of others and the glory of God.
Tim Challies. Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity. Minneapolis, MI: Cruciform Press, 2015. 120 pp. $12.99.
I want to do more—better. Don’t you?
The problem, however, is that my ambition often leaves me feeling like King Solomon described in Psalm 127: with vanity-ache. Rising early, going to bed late, eating the bread of anxious toil—it’s no way to live. Solomon writes, in contrast to this, God “gives to his beloved sleep” (v. 2).
And it’s here that Tim Challies begins Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity, with the encouragement that if a man as busy as King Solomon could figure out how to live a productive but not anxious life then by the grace of God, so can you.
For those who don’t know, Challies is a husband, father, pastor, author, and has about a half dozen other important roles, such as co-founder of a publishing company (Cruciform Press) and host of a very popular Christian blog (Challies.com). And when I say “popular,” that’s an understatement. His blog had just under 16 million pageviews in 2015. For comparison, mine had less than 16 thousand.
Yet for all this, Challies maintains that he’s no productivity guru.
That’s okay by me, though. He’s certainly a practitioner, and his aim in Do More Better, as he writes, is to “open up [his] life and to let you in a little bit” (7). In other words, Do More Better is decidedly not a bloated textbook of source material with footnotes. Rather, as the subtitle says, it’s a practical (and we might add “personal”) guide to productivity.
Do More Better has ten short chapters, and begins by stressing the importance of knowing your purpose; you can’t be truly productive without it. Then, Challies talks about how to find your particular purpose and mission, that is, how to find the sphere of responsibility that God has called you to be productive in. The book concludes by exploring tools for collecting your tasks, planning your calendar, and gathering your information. There are two bonus chapters, one on taming your emails and another with 20 tips for increasing your productivity.
What is Productivity?
Let’s talk for a moment about definitions. Challies defines productivity in this way:
Effectively stewarding your gifts, talents, time, energy, and enthusiasm for the good of others and the glory of God.
When defined in this way, Challies underscores that productivity is first a theological issue. Thus, productivity is not merely a good thing that Type-A personalities kick-start in the early morning hours. Rather, because productivity is about “stewarding your gifts . . . for the good of others and the glory of God,” then to be unproductive is a sin of omission that must be forgiven and forsaken. In short, every Christian, not just go-getters, must strive for productivity.
Drop and Give Me 20
Speaking of striving, be aware that Challies isn’t writing to simply relay information. Get ready to work. To see what I’m talking about, consider how the opening paragraph to Chapter 4 ends: “And that means you are ready for your next assignment” (35).
Assignment? Wait—what?
The assignment he’s talking about is related to identifying your specific purpose and mission, and the responsibilities associated with it. He’ll metaphorically hold your hand through the process, of course, but in this way Challies is more personal trainer than author.
Just as it will do an athlete little good to know the proper form on squats (inhale on the way down, exhale on the way up; flat back; eyes up; and keep your knees from extending beyond your toes—by the way), so it will do the reader little good to burn through this short book without application. Remember, it’s not receiving good coaching that matters. It’s good coaching followed that matters. And by way of encouragement, I can say that I was helped as I completed the assignments.
Small Book, Big Strengths
There are many things I appreciated about Do More Better. Here are a few of them.
First, I appreciated the simplicity. For example, if you have ever found yourself staring at a “To do list,” remember, you can only do four things with each task: delete it, do it, defer it, or delegate it (p. 59).
Second, I loved the bonus chapters, especially the one on taming your email. My approach to my inbox didn’t seem so silly until Challies proposed this: “Imagine if you treated your actual, physical mailbox like you treat your email” (p. 109). If every time you received a letter or piece of junk mail you just peaked at it and stuffed it back in the mailbox, the result would be both humorous and sad.
Finally, my favorite aspect was the distinctively Christian approach to productivity. For example, note this comment about delegating tasks to others.
Most productivity gurus will encourage you to be as selfish as you need to be, to get rid of anything that doesn’t interest or excite you. But as a Christian you can do things that do not perfectly fit your mission but still do them out of love for God and with a desire to glorify him. (p. 42)
Here, as throughout, the book is in stark relief to a selfish, secular approach to productivity. Every aspect of our lives, including our productivity, is to be bounded by godliness. For, what profit is it to us if we achieve massive levels of productivity without glorifying God? Any attainment in God-dishonoring productivity is like running the race backwards—really, really, really fast. Ultimately, you won’t win; instead, you’re productively running in the wrong direction.
If there had been more space, I would have liked to see a little more discussion of Sabbath and contentment. God has appointed limits to our productivity, limits for our good. Also, more critique of the idols of achievement would have further highlighted a distinctively Christian view. The book, however, is purposefully short. I appreciated this, and I think you will too.
I highly recommend Do More Better. It will help you discover God’s purposes for your life and move productively towards them.
