LITMIR.BIZ

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and working on the book projects we had in process. I had previously mentioned that I was with my grandmother as she succumbed to pancreatic cancer, and I offered to help in any way I could. Jane asked if there was any wisdom or experience that I could relay about the issues they might face toward the end of Dallas’s life. I told her all I knew. Like my grandmother, Dallas was experiencing the highs and lows, times of strength and clarity followed by moments of significant weakness. When Jane called that Sunday morning, she was characteristically deferential in her request, making me promise nothing would inconvenience my family. I told her we were all happy to help.

      As I packed an overnight bag, my wife gathered our two teenage daughters to pray with me before I left. It was difficult for me to tell my children about Dallas’s prognosis, and I struggled with my emotions as I discussed what might lie ahead. My elder daughter asked me, “Dad, what is it about Dallas that has had such a strong impact on you?” As I looked into my daughter’s eyes, my mind raced back some twenty-five years to my first encounter with Dallas. For a person who often can’t recall exactly what he had for breakfast the day before, for some reason I have been able to maintain a vivid memory of that first introduction. Even now, whenever the weight of that distant memory hits my heart, tears are not far behind. For me and countless others, God saw fit to use Dallas and his teachings to spark a foundational shift in our lives, our understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and our awareness of the grand purposes God has for humanity in and through his kingdom. Though unknown to me at the time, my daughter’s question can serve us well as a means to both explain my participation in this work and start our journey into the objectives and hopes we have for this book.

      I was first introduced to Dallas’s work in 1991. I had been out of college for two years and had two years of marriage under my belt. My wife and I were living in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I was attempting to establish a business career in the “real world.” As my new bride and I were settling into our cramped little apartment and the challenges of adulthood, we also began to attend a local Covenant Church. There I met a fresh-faced associate pastor named Keith Matthews, who soon invited me to an early morning breakfast. After pleasantries and personal histories were exchanged, he suggested we consider a regular one-on-one breakfast session during which we would discuss a chosen book. Keith was then, as he is now, encouraging, energetic, and intentional about discipleship to Jesus, and I was beginning to miss all the deep, late-night conversations about God and the meaning and purposes of life that I so enjoyed during my university days. So I agreed.

      The next week Keith handed me Dallas’s first book, In Search of Guidance: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God (available today as Hearing God). I remember immediately balking at the title.

      “Developing a conversational relationship with God?” I asked incredulously.

      Keith only smiled. He told me Willard was a philosophy professor at the University of Southern California and also a Southern Baptist minister. Keith was toying with me now. He knew of my deep Southern Baptist roots, and we had previously discussed some of my growing discomfort with the eccentricities of modern evangelicalism. Having studied postmodernism briefly in college, I was familiar with some of the emerging ideas in epistemology that conflicted with the traditional modern conceptions of knowledge used to underpin many Christian doctrines. I assumed Keith had to be mistaken.

      “You don’t mean the USC, as in the Trojans’ USC?” I asked.

      He assured me I had understood him accurately.

      My head was spinning. An ordained Southern Baptist minister who taught philosophy at one of the most prestigious secular universities in the country? I was more than a little intrigued at the iconoclastic possibilities. That little résumé, along with the title of the book, caused a surge of hope and excitement to stir within my heart. Could someone possibly have found a way to break out of the Christian bubble I felt closing in around me? I agreed to read the book.

      As it turned out, In Search of Guidance, which was followed by The Spirit of the Disciplines, began to reveal a spiritual life that was significantly foreign to my previous Christian experience. Little did I know at the time, but those two seminal works allowed me to take the first steps on a journey that I had been yearning to take, even though I was not fully aware of my longing. I am not alone. Increasing numbers of Christians are looking for a reality that is as big as the beliefs we profess. I knew, I just knew, there had to be more to my faith than mental assent to a set of doctrines and practices. I knew that reality was not limited to all that I saw around me. I hoped against hope that there was more to this life and to life in the kingdom of God than hanging on by my fingernails until I died and entered eternity. I knew there had to be a greater purpose for both my life and all of creation than was currently being realized. I was a closet, hopeless, C. S. Lewis–esque romantic who deeply longed to find a Narnia. And just when I was about to let go of that lingering sense of what the world could be, to begin rationalizing away my dreams and longings as nothing more than misplaced exuberance and youthful naiveté, God used Dallas’s insights and wisdom to stoke those fading embers of hope in my heart and mind.

      Still, this transformation wasn’t easy or quick. Keith was a willing and able guide, and together we waded purposefully and sometimes painfully through the pages of Willard’s work—often staying stuck on one idea for weeks on end. Keith was patient and committed, despite my stubborn resistance to the revolutionary ideas I was encountering. What was most compelling to me, then as now, was the level of courageous critique I discovered in Willard’s writing combined with an encouragement to seek a deep level of personal authenticity. This blend of critical analysis and a vision for change was missing in most other Christian authors of the time and more accurately reflected the style, rigor, and insight of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s works. Still, my traditional evangelical roots kept me mildly skeptical of Willard’s description and use of the spiritual disciplines. It all sounded a little too “Catholic” or works-centered for my “Protestant” grace-first tradition.

      A short time after finishing The Spirit of the Disciplines, Keith invited Dallas to come to our church to speak at a weekend retreat and then preach the following Sunday morning. I eagerly anticipated meeting Dallas. To say the retreat was influential would be the height of understatement. I would learn later that Dallas was lecturing from notes that would eventually become The Divine Conspiracy. I was captivated by his lectures. Dallas solved the grace-versus-works dilemma in the first half hour. His words seemed to tax every inch of my being. My mind hurt from the challenge of wrestling his elusive ideas to the ground. My heart ached from both the level and degree of inspiration. My body was fatigued because I was not used to this level of exercise of the spiritual muscles of contemplation, meditation, focus, and study.

      Yet the most compelling and memorable aspect of that weekend was the effect that the authority and power of his teachings on the nature of the kingdom of God had on my vision and understanding of the purposes God had for my life. Dallas was the first teacher or minister I had met who inspired me to pursue the idea that I could know Jesus—really know him, and be convinced of that fact—in an experiential and relational way.

      When Dallas spoke, I sensed that I had encountered a man who knew Jesus just as completely as the original disciples—John, Peter, or even James, Jesus’s brother. There was an undeniable authenticity in his teaching that emanated from a unique combination of the way he spoke and what he described; he almost seemed to reminisce about Jesus as if he had just moments before been on the Sea of Galilee with the other disciples, rowing along in Peter’s fishing boat, telling stories, hearing new teachings, and witnessing miracles. The nature of the testimony Dallas gave of his experience of the kingdom of God was so fresh, it was as if I could still smell the aroma of fish on his clothes and hands. Of course it wasn’t fish; it was, instead, the savory essence of authentic relationship. It was then, for the first time in my life, that I believed Jesus was actually knowable in much the same way I knew any other person. Not as a myth, an elusive mirage, or a historical relic, but as a living, talking, engaging, personal reality. Dallas helped me to discover something more grand, far beyond just religion or profession of belief. Dallas introduced me to the possibility and benefits of knowing and loving Jesus as he actually is, in the minute-by-minute experience of my existence.

      Dallas’s

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