Amanda Stubbert:
Welcome to the SPU Voices Podcast, where we tell personal stories with universal impact. I’m your host, Amanda Stubbert, and welcome to Part II of my interview with Bob Petterson. He’s been talking about his early years, and if you missed that episode, please go back and listen. It will change your life. So this time, Part II, welcome, Bob. Thanks for joining us today.
Bob Petterson:
Good to be with you, Amanda. It’s always good to be with good folks from SPU.
Amanda:
And I believe we ended our last session with your time at SPU. So you came to SPU, attended a meeting, found God for the first time. Tell us about the rest of your time at SPU.
Bob:
Well, SPU was very formative for me because I went to a little church on Orcas Island whenever it wasn’t good golf weather or I wasn’t fishing with my father in the Pacific Northwest or up in Alaska. And so I didn’t have a lot of formation in my Christian life. And so Seattle Pacific was a great place to come, because I saw a good Christian community. I learned, I got grounded in a biblical world life view. I remember this strange guy coming to Seattle Pacific with britches, kind of a buckskin coat, and long hair and a wispy goatee, guy by the name of Francis Schaeffer. And he was a great theologian at that time. And I remember being shaped by him. I remember some of the professors that were there at the time, the Edwards and others, who really shaped me. And it changed my … And the best part in some ways is, I met my wife, who had an assigned chapel seat next to me.
Amanda:
So God really brought you your spouse in a very tangible way.
Bob:
Well he did. And I’d been hurt. I’d gone with another gal beforehand and we had a painful breakup, and Joyce was sitting next to me and we went out for a while, but I was determined that I wasn’t going to get hooked with a gal. So the next semester I switched my chapel seat up into the balcony, and I came to my new chapel seat, and there was Joyce sitting in the seat next to me, and I thought, oh, God is sovereign; he’s determined this; it must be from Lord that I marry her. And about 10 years after our marriage, she admitted to me that she had a friend in the chapel office, and when she told her I had switched seats, she got her to switch her seat next to me. So maybe it was a little more of human responsibility than God’s sovereignty in all that.
Amanda:
Well, that’s okay. God rewards the crafty. It’s in the Bible. There’s plenty of stories.
Bob:
Yeah, the Bible says “be as harmless as doves, and wise as serpents.”
Amanda:
Yes, she was a wise woman. She knew what she wanted.
Bob:
She was, and I married above myself, or, as they say down in the south, I’ll kick my coverage. And so it’s been a wonderful 54 years. And so Seattle Pacific gave me Jesus, Seattle Pacific gave me my wife, Seattle Pacific gave me my education, my start of my educational journey. And so how can you not be grateful for all of that?
“And so Seattle Pacific gave me Jesus, Seattle Pacific gave me my wife, Seattle Pacific gave me my education, my start of my educational journey. And so how can you not be grateful for all of that?”
Amanda:
So with your background, which you’ve given us an unbelievable snapshot, what does it feel like to graduate from college when there had to be parts of your childhood where you didn’t even know what a university was, much less being able to receive that diploma?
Bob:
Well, remember I told you I had never gotten above a C or a D in school until I was adopted and it was a climb out of the hole. I went to Seattle Pacific; I made the dean’s list the first semester. Unfortunately, it was the dean of students and not the dean of faculty’s list. And I think I had a 1.8 accumed the first year. So I really had to learn how to study hard to end up with, I think it was a 2.8 or some average at the time, but Seattle Pacific taught me the discipline of study. And yet study to an end, the end was that we would make a difference in the real world.
Amanda:
That is such a big difference. And I feel like you can see that in students to this day, students that have been taught the grade is the final outcome, that the grade is your goal. That’s going to fail you, not just because occasionally you’ll find a professor that you can’t quite click with and give them what they want, but education is the rest of your life. Your grade is just this quarter to the next.
Bob:
Well, yeah, and it prepared me because I went on to Covenant Theological Seminary a couple of years later after being a youth pastor in a large church in Seattle. I went on to Covenant Theological Seminary; it was very difficult. It was a three-year program, two years of Greek, two years of Hebrew, a year of Latin, and all kinds of theology, and thought I was going to flunk out. The first class I went to, it was a theological class, it was on Romans. And the guy said, today we’re going to talk about the traducian concept of the imputation of Adam’s sin as opposed to the creationist concept. And I thought I actually had been dropped into a Pentecostal seminary and they were speaking in tongues. I didn’t understand any of that stuff.
But I went to the president, Dr. Robert Rayburn, who had started the seminary. He is the brother of the Rayburn who was the founder of Young Life. And he put his arm around me and I said, I’m going to flunk out. And he said, no, you’re going to graduate at the top of your class. Again, speaking positive into a person. And I did. I graduated with the second highest grades in the history of the seminary and then went on and got a doctorate. And so if it hadn’t been for Seattle Pacific teaching me the discipline of study and applying that to real life, I wouldn’t have gone on beyond where I went.
Amanda:
Wow. And you’ve done so many things, we could spend the next several hours going through all the things you’ve accomplished in your career. But I know one of the things you’re here to talk about today is what you actually did after you retired. And I’m doing air quotes on retired, because it took about five minutes into retirement and you ended up creating the Legacy Imperative. And I know if our listeners heard the first half they heard just the beginning of what the Legacy Imperative is all about. Let’s talk about that.
Bob:
Well, thank you Amanda. I was going to retire, I was going to write books. I wrote a couple of bestselling books for Tyndale and was doing very well with that. Going to spend a lot of time with my grandkids, enjoy the life here in southwest Florida. But I had said all along in my church in Naples, I had said to largely an older community; we have a saying down here in Naples. I thought I was old, I thought I was rich. I came to Naples and discovered I was neither. And so I had said to people in the large church that God allowed us to build here. I had said to these people, it’s not time to retire, it’s time to refire. There’s nothing about retirement in the Bible. And we’re in the fourth quarter of our life. If you watch football, most games are won or lost in the fourth quarter. And I know that I’m going to stand before God. And if he asked me to give an account for my life, I don’t think it’s the first three quarters that are going to matter most. It’s the last quarter, because I have the benefit of the first three quarters and now I have time, resources, and wisdom, hopefully. And what am I going to do with that in my last quarter? And we don’t even know if we’re not in sudden-death overtime.
So what am I going to do with that? And what are all of us that are older going to do? And so God just put it on my heart. When I discovered the alarming statistics that there’s 168 or 66 million people under the age of 40 in America; that would make it the eighth-largest nation in the world. Only one out of five high school kids has ever been to church in their lifetime.
Only 11% of the people in evangelical churches are under the age of 30, and 65% of them drop out of church after they go to college. The statistics are bleak when you look to the future. And we’re losing for the most part our next-generation kids to both Christianity and even the values that come with it. And so I notice something though really incredible, that, when asked who are your favorite people in the world, 83% of them say “our grandparents.” And so I thought, well, if we could leverage grandparents, the love that their grandchildren have for them, and also to use the wisdom, the resources to invest in their grandkids’ lives, we could change the next generations.
“Only one out of five high school kids has ever been to church in their lifetime. Only 11% of the people in evangelical churches are under the age of 30, and 65% of them drop out of church after they go to college. The statistics are bleak when you look to the future. And we’re losing for the most part our next-generation kids to both Christianity and even the values that come with it.”
It’s a novel idea that decidedly uncool older people could make a difference in the lives of young people, who, in many ways, think radically different than they are. So we set about to teach grandparents, our goal is 10 million grandparents, how to cross over the bridge of the generational divides and how to build bridges rather than walls between themselves and their grandkids, and how to talk into their lives or speak into their lives the wonderful truths of Scripture in a way that’s relevant and loving and gracious to their next-generation loved ones.
Amanda:
God says there’s nothing new under the sun. And even though our grandparents may have grown up in a very different society than their grandchildren, the deep-rooted issues that we face day to day are not new. So how do you teach those grandparents to overcome the vocabulary, even, of today, the fast-moving societal vocabulary and mores, and dig into the lessons that they can really impart to their grandkids?
Bob:
Well, one of the things of course we say to grandparents is, you don’t have to be cool and hip.
Amanda:
Which is good. I’m sure they love that. Thank you.
Bob:
In fact, if you try to be cool and hip, kids have a really good BS meter. Can I say that?
Amanda:
Yeah, you could say that.
Bob:
They have a good BS meter. They know when you’re trying to be cool. Nothing more uncool than trying to be cool when you’re not cool. So just be yourself for starters, okay? Besides which you can’t keep up with the language anyway. Once you learn it, it changes. And once kids figure out that the old people are using their language and dressing the way they do, they’re going to change their styles real quickly.
So we try to go deeper, we have actually six things we tell grandparents that are critical when you talk to your kids. One, listen, don’t lecture. Listen with your heart, listen with your eyes, listen to their heart, not their words. Learn how to listen. Secondly, ask questions rather than trying to give answers right away. If you look at the Bible, Jesus almost always asked questions because he wanted to take people on a journey of self-discovery to take them deep into their thinking. He was doing heart surgery. A lot of times what we do is drive-by shooting. We just want to give a quick answer and get out. And so we teach them how to ask questions of their young people, even ideas, maybe they don’t disagree. Well, how does that work? What do you think is going to happen with that? Rather than making declarative statements about what we think about the way they think.
Amanda:
Right. And putting them on the defense.
Bob:
That’s right. Ask questions. And then, thirdly, we teach them that whatever else, don’t be judgmental. Don’t be judgmental. Don’t make disparaging comments. Bite your tongue off before you make critical comments about other people or demeaning comments. And thus us older folks grew up in an age when we felt quite free to voice our opinions about other people. But this younger generation, they’re very intolerant of intolerance. And so that’s the third thing we teach our older people. Fourthly, we teach them, you don’t have to try to win. You don’t have to close the deal. It’s not your job necessarily to lead your grandkids to Jesus. It’s your job to show the love of Jesus and to talk about Jesus. But you’re not the third member of the Trinity. You’re not the Holy Spirit. And if you try to close the deal, the first conversation, it’ll probably be your last conversation.
So just listen, ask questions, don’t be judgmental, then don’t think you have to close the deal. And then finally, love. So simple. Peter said love covers a multitude of sins. And it’s always amazing to me how the Pharisees, or how the tax collectors, how the prostitutes, the gangsters of the day, the adulterers, how they loved being with Jesus. And I don’t think Jesus ever did what they did or told dirty jokes or affirmed their behavior, but somehow they enjoyed being with him and eating with him and fellowshipping with him. Pharisees were never invited to the party. And so I often say to people, if nonbelievers are against you or they don’t want you around, you might ask the question, are you Jesus or a Pharisee? And so we’re teaching about loving those who think differently than we do. You don’t have to give up what you believe in to be kind and respectful of people who don’t believe the way you do.
Amanda:
Right. And interested, like you said, asking those questions. As the parent of two women in their early 20s, I’m absorbing what you’re saying. I know you’re speaking to grandparents, but parents can learn those same lessons, right? Listen, love, ask the question before you say, well that’s not going to turn out very well. They might find that out on their own. You may not have to tell them in so many words.
Bob:
And that’s kind of why kids really love being with their grandparents. Because as a parent, you got the enviable job. It was Will Durant who said, we get our children as barbarians at birth and we have about 18 years to civilize the barbarian. So the job of a parent is that of a coach. So we have to discipline, we have to challenge. We have to call out our kids because we’re shaping them for the future. Grandparents don’t have to play by that rule. I get to be the friend of my grandkids. And I’ve talked to a lot of young people, people that are gay or LGBT people, transgender people, other kinds of people, people who have different views about abortion or whatever with their parents.
And they say, I don’t want to go talk to my parents, because they’re just going to try to fix me. I already know what they believe and I don’t want to disappoint them, but I’m willing to talk to my grandparents because they love me the way I am. And so it’s very important that we take a Jesus approach to dealing with people. I think grandparents need to go back, and parents, and look at the gospel a little more carefully, how Jesus dealt with people. He called out the religious folks, but I don’t ever see him going after the nonreligious folks, or the people who were struggling with their faith.
Amanda:
Right. Because they were still learning. The people who think they have all the answers are the really dangerous ones to the people around them.
Bob:
Well …
Amanda:
If I can say that.
Bob:
You can, and I’m a historian and I’ll tell you the most awful things in the world have been done, in some ways, by religious folks in the name of God. And so we have to be very, very careful about that. It was Frederick Nietzsche who said, we have to be very careful in fighting dragons that we don’t become dragons.
Amanda:
Well, you’ve written so many bestsellers, including Desert Crossings, Theater of Angels, Pilgrim Chronicles. Is there a book in the works about these generational relationships?
Bob:
Well, we have a book. They can find it on our website, our website is legacyimperative.org. You don’t mind if I do a little shameless advertising?
Amanda:
No, please do. Do it.
Bob:
Legacyimperative.org. And we have a collection of books there people can look into. Our book is Reaching Digital Land. That’s the name we give to this whole generation of young people. How do we reach digital land? Which I think would be very helpful to anybody who wants to know how do I talk to the next generation of kids? What are the key issues? We also have a YouTube channel that we’re building what we call “hot-button issues.” How do we talk to kids about issues where we really have divides and we struggle as Christians? How do we talk about issues like LGBTQ issues or my body, my choice issues or even the government and what’s the Bible say about being involved in politics and all the things where we differ, particularly generationally. And so how do you talk to your kids about these things and what’s the Bible say about these things?
And so we have that we call “Toolbox.” We talk about such issues as what do I do if my adult children say that I can’t talk about Jesus to my grandchildren? How do I deal with that? Or if my children are in the far country, how do I bring them home? What can I do to help that process? So we have lots of issues that we talk about. What if somebody who has different views than I do says that unless you buy my views, you can’t be part of my life. How do you deal with that? Those are hard issues today. Amanda, I don’t think in America we’ve ever had such polarizing times to where literally people don’t talk to each other anymore when they have disagreements.
Amanda:
Right. That they become evil and the other instead of my dad who I disagree on these three issues with. It’s the end of relationships. And I know you have all these resources and it’s a deep probably multilayered answer. But if there’s somebody listening today who is saying, I have done all of that wrong, all the six steps that you laid out, I’ve done the opposite and everything and it’s over. As of right now, there’s no connection between me and my grown child or me and my grandchildren. Can you give us step one, where do they start?
Bob:
Well, I think step one is, it may sound simplistic, but I think step one as painful as it is to maybe take an Abraham approach. Remember when Abraham was told by God to go up on the mountain and put his son on an altar? I can’t imagine anybody doing that, but I think that, and God of course spared him and brought a ram to him, which is a picture of how Jesus was sacrificed instead for us. But Amanda, I think the starting is that we just have to put them in the hands of God.
And sometimes I think God wants to put us at a place where we have no other choice but to stop managing the situation and thinking that we stand between them and ruination, and we just have to give it to God. And I think God likes to put us in those spots, actually. And I don’t like God for that sometimes, but I think God does. So that’s the starting point, is to realize that God loves them infinitely more than you do. And that it may not be that you’re the one that’s going to lead them to the Lord or whatever. And you just pray, pray, pray, pray and just on your knees and really believe that God will answer your prayers. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it?
Amanda:
Well, simple isn’t always easy. Sometimes the most important things in life are simple, but nowhere near easy.
Bob:
We are so arrogant sometimes. We actually think God depends on us, and he doesn’t. He has many means at his disposal. And I’m not trying to trivialize the utter pain. My daughter spent 10 years in the far country, and my wife and I wept and wept and wept every night, and held onto each other. I know what it’s like. You get up every day with that pain in your heart and go to sleep with that pain in your heart and wondering, is God doing anything? Has God abandoned me? There were times I felt like Job on the ash heap, did God just forget about me? But I know that my child never belonged to me, always belonged to God. And God came through and brought her back to the faith of her childhood. Well, she had rearranged it a bit differently than our….You’re probably a bit different than your dad, but there was a lot of prayer time and there was a lot of waiting on the Lord. And I think that’s the essence of faith, waiting on the Lord.
Amanda:
Yeah, I love that quote, and I’ll have to look up who said it when we’re done here, maybe you know. But if we take credit for all the wins, we’ll also take credit for all the losses. And it works both ways. If we think it’s all my fault that things aren’t going well, then we will also think it’s all me; it’s my win when things go well. And of course none of that is ever true. There’s always a lot behind you when things go well. And sometimes there’s a lot that was already set in motion when things don’t go well. And I think it can be so freeing to realize the world is so much bigger than our decisions.
Bob:
I agree, Amanda. And I wrote a book called Theater of Angels. It’s a theatrical presentation, a theological presentation of Job’s time on the ash heap. And one of the amazing things to me is how Job was able to put 10 kids in the ground. I can’t imagine putting my daughter in the ground or my granddaughters, let alone 10 of my children. And that prayer that he gives, “The Lord gives the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” And the only way I can make sense of that is he really understood that his children never belonged to him in the first place. They always belonged to God.
And God gave them to him for a season to love them, to take care of them, to raise them, to steward their lives. But he understood that they never belonged to him. And when God was ready to take them home, it was his right to do that. And he praised the Lord for that. And I think of David as he cried out over Absalom, “my son, my son”: doesn’t always turn out well with our children. But they do belong to God. They belong to God. That’s why we have a responsibility to love them and to speak truth into their lives and to do it in a gracious way, but they ultimately belong to God.
Amanda:
Amen. And so do so many things in our lives that we grieve over and we stress over instead of being able to say, well God, I’ll do what I can do, but the rest is on you.
Bob:
Well, remember, he was not only standing at the graveside of his children, but he just lost everything that he had. He went from being the richest man in the world to being the poorest guy in the world, and he was about to lose his health. The only thing he didn’t lose was a wife who was really ticked off about the whole thing. And I don’t blame her, either. She watched him go through that. She lost those 10 kids too. But the point is he lost everything, but he still praised God because he knew everything he had was a gift from God. And he says it: “Naked I came into the earth and naked I leave.”
And anything I had in between, even if it was just for a season, it came from him. That’s how I want to live, Amanda. I know what it’s like to have nothing, and I know what it’s like to have everything. And I just want to be able to be content and to praise God at whatever season he puts me in. And if I can do that, I can let go and I can let God be God. And I think that’s our number-one problem with our kids, our grandkids, is we jump in the place of God and we try to play God in their lives.
“I know what it’s like to have nothing, and I know what it’s like to have everything. And I just want to be able to be content and to praise God at whatever season he puts me in. And if I can do that, I can let go and I can let God be God. And I think that’s our number-one problem with our kids, our grandkids, is we jump in the place of God and we try to play God in their lives.”
Amanda:
Yes. And instead of, like you were saying, resting, listening, asking, and loving, we get our hackles up and we say, I have to say something. I have to fix this. I have to fix their way of thinking. I have to fix their behavior, when we couldn’t do that, if we tried. We know this. We know that we can’t fix them. That’s God’s job. That’s their job. And releasing and loving. That’s the answer.
Bob:
Amen.
Amanda:
Amen. Oh my gosh, Bob, so much fun talking to you. Our first two-parter on the show, and I think you can come back and do two more. We’ll do three and four one of these days.
Bob:
Well, if you ever let me leave this sunny place called Naples and come up to Seattle, I’ll do it. And I’m looking forward to coming back to the campus. We’re hopefully coming up this next summer. And if I do, I hope you and I can have a chance to have a good cup of Seattle coffee.
Amanda:
Oh, amen. Okay. It’s a date. We’ll put that on the calendar. All right, Bob, well, let’s wind up with our famous last question we ask all of our guests. If you could have everyone in Seattle do one thing differently tomorrow that would make the world a better place, what would you have all of us do?
Bob:
Listen to each other and dialogue with each other and love each other the way Jesus loved people. And let the Holy Spirit do the work of doing whatever God wants to be done, not what we want to be done in the lives of other people.
Amanda:
Well, I think that’s the prayer we could all pray every morning. Amen. Bob, thank you so much for joining us today.
Bob:
It’s been great. And thank you for all the good work you do at my alma mater, Seattle Pacific University.
