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[waves crashing]
- I think the fear of death drives a lot of our lives.
We try to suppress it. We try to ignore it.
We try to deny it. We try to distract from it.
But the truth is, our fear of death,
as some experts say, drives all of culture.
This underlying fear of what happens when we die
drives a lot of people's ambitions.
It drives what they do and how they do it.
They want to be immortal.
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
- ♪ I'm a city on a hill, yeah ♪
♪ I'm a light in the darkness ♪
♪ I'm a trumpet blowing down my walls of fear ♪
♪ I'm filled with promise ♪
♪ I am built to overcome, yeah ♪
♪ I have joy in my sorrow ♪
♪ And my only motivation is your love ♪
♪ I'm your beloved ♪
♪ Oh, you walk anew ♪
♪ I know ♪
♪ What I was made to do ♪
♪ Will you increase my ability to be loved ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Will you increase my ability to be loved ♪
♪ Be loved by you ♪
- Your personality was changing.
- Yeah. - Over weeks.
Yeah.
- But it was small, little things that, you know,
you just kind of wonder what that's about.
But you jumped into your novel,
started becoming part of that book
that you had just finished.
- Yeah, I was writing the novel at the time,
and I kind of became one of the characters in the novel.
That's right.
Started seeing people watching the house
and kind of coming after you.
You got to a point where you would not go to a doctor.
I called your doctor. He wanted you to come in.
I couldn't get you to come in.
You were paranoid and thinking people were after you,
and then that night, you went to bed,
and thought I heard a noise in the bedroom,
and I thought, well, maybe you're just dreaming,
and I thought I better check.
And there you were,
you know, just laying there.
[soft music]
- The first thing I saw was the doctor,
and he was hovering over me.
His surgical mask was down.
And he had a concerned look on his face.
And I remember opening my eyes and kind of trying
to figure out where I was, and then hearing him say,
"You're one step away from a coma,
two steps away from dying."
And even before I was able to process that,
I fell unconscious again.
And so it was, you know, a few days
before I started to come back around
and feel like myself again.
- And then, looking back on all that we went through,
I think back at that time period,
that was where I started to really consider losing you,
and that whatever's going on, if it does take you from us,
his plan is beyond mine, and I can rest in that
and know that I'll see you again.
Yeah, aw, aw.
- But just don't go dying early, okay?
- Okay. - Couple more centuries.
- When you're on your back in the emergency room,
looking into the face of an emergency room physician
who says you're one step away from a coma,
two steps away from dying, and all of a sudden,
this becomes the most relevant thing in the world.
What happens next?
What happens if I close my eyes
and I don't open them again in this world?
Mm, um...
- I have absolutely no idea what happens after we die.
- How do you make a movie about Heaven?
That question frightened me.
I think it would take a lifetime.
I think it would take exploration
around the world and different places,
stories, and cultures.
We had 12 months condensed into 90 minutes
to make this happen.
If we could just touch Heaven for one second in this film,
I think that might be enough.
The day I got the phone call from Lee,
I wasn't expecting it,
but I knew that it was gonna change everything.
- Hey, Mani. Lee Strobel calling.
Hey, I've got a project I'm working on called
"The Case for Heaven."
- Something I've learned in my life throughout the years
is that everybody has a moment of truth.
I think something that's crucial
that we think about is,
if that moment were here, would we be ready for it?
My mother cleaned houses in Malibu.
My dad was a dishwasher when they came to this country.
I was born in an immigrant family
from Guatemala.
I was raised in South Central LA,
definitely not the nicest place
to grow up in.
Though there was all this chaos outside,
whether there were drive-bys, gangs, you know,
even fires, and things burning down during the LA Riots,
inside our house, there was this peace,
there was this joy.
And if I can claim anything to know about God,
it's the fact that he changes everything.
[soft music]
♪ ♪
- [indistinct] - Here we go.
♪ ♪
To compensate for people's fear of death,
they are trying to find some way
to live on beyond their death.
People are terrified of dying,
and that's just all there is to it.
Now, don't get me wrong, if you ask people
if they're afraid of dying, they'll say no.
In fact, that's what most people do.
The first step to dealing with the fear of death is denial.
I'm just going to ignore the fact that I'm gonna die.
Denial doesn't work without distraction.
You know, there's the old joke,
think about whatever you want for the next two minutes,
but don't think about pink elephants.
Well, everybody knows the answer to that.
The answer to not thinking about pink elephants
is to think about blue ones.
In other words, you have to think about something else.
And that's where movies, social media, sports stars,
singing stars, you know, all of this--
that's where these things come in
because it distracts us from the fact
that we're going to die.
If you look at almost everything that humans do,
they're doing it as a symbolic attempt
to live on past their deaths
because they're terrified of death.
Everyone on Earth is engaged in some sort
of a symbolic immortality project.
Build something, to write a book,
political activism is an immortality project.
I'm going to change the world.
See, in other words, I'm doing something
to make the world a better place.
Having children is a symbolic immortality project,
and that's the most common one of all.
The trouble with that is that your children
are only half you.
Their children-- your children's children
are only a quarter you.
After 20 generations,
there will only be 0.000004% you,
if there's any of you at all because, you know,
genes transfer over in blocks,
and there's regressive genes and dominant genes,
and after just a few generations,
there might not be any of you at all in your offspring.
But there's one more problem.
I've asked my classes all the time.
I'll say, "So how many of you know the first names
of your great-great-grandparents?"
And I think, in all the classes I've asked--
I didn't write it down, but I think in all the classes
that I've asked,
only three students have ever said,
"I know the first names of my great-great-grandparents."
And then, I ask this follow-up question.
I'll say, "Do you care?"
Nobody cares.
I've never had a student say, "I really wish
I knew the first names of my great-great-grandparents."
Nobody cares.
- Unfortunately, a lot of people figure,
"I'm gonna go out in a blaze of glory,
"in a blaze of gunfire.
"I'm gonna do something that will make people
"remember my name even if it means blowing up a school
or murdering somebody famous."
- The investigation into the high school massacre
is slow-moving and dangerous.
The two gunmen who went on the rampage
booby-trapped the building and even themselves.
- Mark David Chapman, who murdered John Lennon,
said that he was trying to steal his fame.
He walked past me.
I took five steps toward the street,
turned,
withdrew my Charter Arms .38,
and fired five shots into his back.
- The Columbine killers, the day before they went
on this murderous spree at that high school,
were talking about, "Which director is gonna direct
the movie about our life?"
- Witnesses say they laughed as they fired their weapons,
executing their classmates, who begged for their lives.
- Screaming after they'd shoot up something,
they'd go, "Whoo!"
Just the pleasure for them.
- Some people will commit atrocious crimes
because they want to be remembered.
That's the dark side of symbolic immortality.
What is a soul,
and why include it into your investigation?
- The soul is our spirit. It is our self.
It is the locus of our introspection,
our emotions, our desires, our thoughts.
It is the essential you.
It's our first-person perspective.
It's "I."
The key question is,
does the soul survive physical death?
When we die, our spirit,
our soul, separates from our body.
So I wanted to look at--what is the evidence
that we have a soul, first of all,
and then secondly, what evidence do we have
that it can survive our physical death?
So in other words, Jesus, on the cross, said
to the thief next to him that,
"Today, you'll be with me in paradise."
Apostle Paul said to be absent from the body
is to be present with the Lord.
So when we die, our spirit,
our soul separates from our body.
And as one philosopher said,
"I am a soul, and I have a body."
I think that's a good way to look at it.
♪ ♪
- One of the views that we find being expressed
is that you are your brain, that everything you do,
think, and say originates
and is driven by the neurons in your head.
But is that all that there is to being a human being,
or is there actually more to it?
Well, it's true that we have a brain.
That's very important, but we also have a mind,
and we have this--there's something that it is to be us.
There's something that it is like to be you
that actually neurons alone can't completely explain.
♪ ♪
I grew up in a very loving home
in the northeast of England,
and it was a setting of which kind of religious beliefs
weren't really talked about either way,
and so there wasn't any particular agenda
or belief system that was being pushed on me.
♪ ♪
Probably, I'd say, by the time I was a teenager,
I knew that I wanted to be a scientist.
I loved the sciences.
And I remember my biology teacher
handing me a book by Richard Dawkins
about this idea that we are essentially gene machines,
and that the purpose of our lives is
to be DNA carriers,
and I think I absorbed the view
that that must be the only way
of looking at life from other sources as well,
like magazines, and radio, and from other people
that I was meeting.
And you can't be a credible scientist
and believe in God at the same time,
and so I needed to find out whether I was being asked
to choose between God and a theory.
♪ ♪
Is free will an illusion?
Scientists will have their different views,
but there is one question
that really science isn't able to answer:
why can we think in the first place?
And if the forces of nature are not enough
to explain the human mind,
then maybe our explanations for the human mind lie
beyond the forces of nature.
♪ ♪
A significant part of my story is
when I was invited to a carol service
around Christmastime when I was at university,
and I was just really moved by the experience
of what was happening,
and there was more going on than just the music.
There was something else that really was moving me
on quite a deep level.
♪ ♪
What was that? What is that?
And, you know, if all that there is
to this world is physical things,
then there wasn't really a way to make sense of that.
♪ ♪
One of the go-tos of those that are trying to say,
"No, there's more to a human being than just their brain,"
is the idea that we have these experiences all the time
that are very difficult to describe purely in terms
of physical interactions and physical descriptions.
You know, one example would be coffee.
You know, here we are drinking coffee.
Imagine I were to ask you to describe to me the smell
of coffee purely in terms of physical descriptions.
You know, we might come up with the chemical structure
of caffeine, but that wouldn't
actually get us any closer to the smell of coffee.
Or we might describe what's happening physiologically
as it goes into our body and we digest it,
but that doesn't get you any closer...
- Yeah. - To the smell of coffee.
If you want to understand the smell of coffee,
you need to smell it,
and this is an example of a quale in the singular,
or qualia, in its plural.
♪ ♪
Life is full of qualia,
and these things cannot be described in physical terms.
They are in a category of their own.
And ultimately, there's the qualia
of what it is like to be you,
the experience-- the first-person experience
of being a human being.
♪ ♪
You know, maybe there's a sort of a bigger experience
that is out there.
And if physical descriptions aren't enough,
maybe the ultimate reason for that lies
beyond the physical.
And where I really kind of land with this is that,
you know, we are conscious,
we have these conscious experiences
because we're made by a god who is himself conscious
in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
and who has made a world in which that kind
of consciousness is extended into human beings.
And so we think because God does.
We have a mind because God does,
which is kind of radical, because a lot of people think
to be a Christian or to be a spiritual person
is perhaps to throw out your brain
and start believing impossible things
that have no bearing on life, but actually no.
Actually, to be a thinking person
is to live out what it means
to be made in the image of God.
♪ ♪
- A famous old recording engineer--
his name's Walter Sear.
He had a place called Sear Sound in New York City.
[cello playing]
I read something he said once,
that everything we do in here is a lie
because you've got these two speakers,
these two crappy little speakers,
and you're trying to create these giant worlds,
like you're in a big hall, or you're, you know,
in a giant silo with a drummer.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
So everything you have to do in here
is extremely calculated to create this illusion
that there's this world coming out of these speakers.
And hopefully, you feel enveloped in them.
- You're gonna have the paper in your hand for this?
- Yeah. Does it look bad if I do?
- I don't-- - I don't mind it.
I don't mind.
- This is real stuff, okay, guys?
- Yeah. - We didn't cut this.
I think I called you on the phone.
I was in Georgia.
I called you, "Hey, Lee, I have this idea."
You know, you had an id--something in your book
about how you went to a concert.
- Yeah. - You know, the experience.
And I was like,
"Hey, Lee, I want to do something at a studio."
What was your first impression?
- Well, I didn't know what to expect.
You know, entering into your thinking process...
- Yes. - Is always an adventure.
Yes.
- And so I just kind of went along for the ride.
And I think there's a couple of ways to look at it.
You know, there's a lot in the Bible about Heaven,
but a lot of it is metaphorical.
A lot of it uses imagery to convey something
that may not be figuratively accurate and so forth.
So we know a lot about Heaven,
but we don't know a lot about Heaven.
And I think ultimately, it's gonna be the kind of place
where you're gonna have to say,
you just gotta go and experience it
to really understand it.
And so today, with this whole musical experience,
which is so alien to my background,
was the kind of thing
that you just kind of had to experience.
- How different in dynamics was it actually hearing it
back through the speakers?
- It's very different because, first of all,
Bob was totally into it
and was kind of sending hand signals
through the glass to the drum player and so forth.
Yeah, yeah.
And the idea that it comes
through some pretty basic speakers,
but then through the system,
that can enrich the sound, and the product that you get
in the end is so much more vibrant
and robust than just listening to somebody play an instrument.
♪ ♪
Leslie and I, when we were newly wed,
went to a concert with the Rolling Stones
and with Ike and Tina Turner.
I remember afterwards trying to communicate to a friend
of mine what that was like.
And I'm trying to tell him about the sound,
and the ambience of the room, and the crowd,
and the songs, which songs were played.
And at the end, it was so--at the end, I said,
"Well, you just had to be there."
'cause mere words
couldn't communicate the whole experience.
♪ ♪
A lot of scientists believe that we are just our brains.
We're just a meat computer basically.
Well, there's a lot of implications of that,
and a lot of them are good.
For instance, if we're just a meat computer,
we don't really have free will.
How do you punish someone for doing something illegal
if there's no free will?
He didn't have a choice.
How do you congratulate someone does something great?
It doesn't make sense,
but a lot of scientists believe that.
And yet, we know that we are more than our brain,
that our brain can tell us, if you go to a concert,
which notes were played,
what the temperature of the room was,
and so forth, but it can't convey the experience.
We are more than a meat machine.
We are more than just our brains.
We have a spirit. We have a soul.
We have a consciousness.
It's the seat of our volition, of our emotions,
of our feelings, and so forth.
And you can't open a cell in your brain and say,
"Oh, here's Lee's emotions."
It doesn't work that way.
We are a hyphenated people.
In other words, we are a body,
but we're also a soul, a spirit.
And what's important about that is that,
if that is true,
then it would make sense that if our physical body died,
our immaterial body, that is, our spirit or our soul,
could continue to live.
Near-death experiences-- I was a skeptic about it.
Even as a Christian, I was skeptical
about near-death experiences initially
until I did the research.
One of the things that John Burke did in his research
when he wrote his book "Imagine Heaven,"
about near-death experiences is, he only interviewed people
who had nothing to gain and a lot to lose
by talking about their near-death experiences.
There's two questions, really.
One question is, are we a body and a spirit
or soul, or consciousness, and if we are,
how do we know that consciousness
survives clinical death?
And that's where we get into near-death experiences.
- That's our segue right now. - Yeah.
Which I love, because
as our conversations have developed,
and we're moving through, you know, these topics,
I think the near-death experiences is
the thing that--'cause I was gonna say,
well, how do you prove that?
Yeah.
- For me, it started when I was still an agnostic
and a skeptic.
I was an engineer for a number of years,
and that's kind of how my mind works.
God, the afterlife, all that-- I just didn't know,
and I honestly didn't care.
But my dad was dying of cancer, and someone gave him
the very first research on what's come
to be called near-death experiences.
[soft music]
When someone clinically dies, their heart stops beating,
in some cases, brain waves cease,
and yet modern medicine, or miracle, whatever,
brings them back, and they actually talk
about a life to come.
And that began a whole journey of really exploring,
and questioning, and trying to understand all of this
that has gone on for about 35 years.
These commonalities that people report,
and they report these same commonalities
around the globe--
how does that actually intersect
with what the Bible says?
♪ ♪
In a court of law, you know, if you had ten people
who witnessed an accident
and they all say exactly the same thing,
that's collusion, right?
That would be thrown out
because people would never say exactly the same thing
unless they colluded together to say the same thing.
But if you have ten people
who say slightly different things
from different perspectives, but they all overlap
to make a bigger picture, well, that's a strong case.
I mean, I've personally studied over a thousand of them,
but you have millions all over the globe.
In fact, the Gallup poll did a survey
and found 1 out of 25 Americans has had one
of these near-death experiences.
That's like 13 million Americans.
European Academy of Neuroscience recently did
a study across 35 countries,
and they found that more like one in ten Europeans
have had one of these experiences.
So these are not uncommon.
♪ ♪
- In order to show that we have a consciousness
that survives our death, we just need one authentic,
corroborated near-death experience,
and we have a lot more than one of those examples.
My favorite example is Pamela Reynolds.
Here's a 35-year-old woman
who is having a brain aneurysm,
so she had to have a highly unusual operation.
They put her under deep anesthetic.
Her body was cooled to 50 degrees,
and all of the blood was drained from her brain.
Three tests showed that
there was no measurable brain activity whatsoever.
She had devices inserted into her ears
so that all she could hear was 100 decibels of sound,
which is like a subway train going right next to you.
And then her eyes were taped shut.
And all the surgical instruments were shrouded
before the surgery began.
♪ ♪
And yet, she was conscious, she said, during that surgery.
Even though there was no measurable brain activity,
she was conscious.
She described witnessing the surgery take place.
She described going through a tunnel,
meeting dead relatives, coming back into her body.
She was able to recall specific details
about the highly unusual instruments
that were used during her surgery.
And, even more than that,
she recalls specific conversations
that took place while she was brain-dead,
while she was clinically dead.
She remembers one person saying,
"We have a problem. Her arteries are too small,"
and a male voice responding, "Go to the other side."
So she witnessed things that she had no way of knowing
unless her consciousness
somehow survived her clinical death.
[breathing]
- Another researcher studied 93 patients
who reported specific details that they encountered
during their near-death experience,
like Pamela Reynolds identifying
the surgical instruments that were used
and the conversations that were spoken.
And what she discovered is that a remarkable 92% of them
were absolutely accurate
in what they verifiably claimed.
Another 6% were largely accurate.
Well, that's almost a perfect record
of these people observing things
that they otherwise could not have observed
because they were clinically dead at the time,
and yet reporting correctly what they had seen.
- One of the commonalities of people
who have NDEs is a life review.
And because time doesn't work the same on the other side,
they often relive their entire lives.
It's like watching
a three-dimensional panoramic replay of your life,
but what they say is they're watching not only everything
they did, but their interactions with other people,
and they can experience how it felt to the other people.
So they're not just experiencing
what they thought and felt.
They're experiencing what others thought
and felt as well.
♪ ♪
When I was being interviewed on the news in New York City,
I got an email afterwards from Heidi.
She was a hospice nurse.
And she said, "Hey, I saw you on the news.
"I heard about your book. I've never read your book.
"I don't know who you are.
But that happened to me when I was 16 years old."
And she said, "I grew up in a Jewish home,
"but my father and mother-- they were agnostic atheist.
"My dad used to tell me that,
"'You're no more significant than a speck of dust,
"'and Jesus Christ was the biggest hoax
ever perpetrated on humanity.'"
♪ ♪
"When I was 16, my horse reared back, and fell on me,
"and completely crushed my pelvis and my chest,
and I died."
♪ ♪
She said, "I was up above my body about 30 feet,
"and I'm watching my sisters freak out,
"and I'm thinking,
I wish my sisters didn't have to watch me die."
She felt great, but she was sad that they had to watch that.
♪ ♪
And then she sees a light over her shoulder, she said.
And she turns, and there's Jesus.
She fully wasn't expecting Jesus.
And yet, she said, "I knew this was God.
"And he looked just like Jesus.
And I felt like I had always known him."
♪ ♪
Since she was a little girl,
she had always believed in God and had always prayed to God.
And Jesus ends up in this near-death experience
giving her a life review.
And he shows her in the life review,
when she was a little girl praying
and she would feel this sense of peace,
that he was actually the one sitting on her bedside
when she would pray.
She came back from that experience knowing
that Jesus was God, and yet she's Jewish.
And she's been able to see that the Jewish prophets
foretold all about Jesus, and so she's Jewish,
but she believes that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah
who was foretold.
♪ ♪
- And so we have a famous case of a woman
who was clinically dead, and she describes how
her soul separated from her body.
♪ ♪
She was watching them trying to resuscitate her,
and she floated up through the floors of the hospital
to the roof of the hospital.
♪ ♪
When she came back into her body,
and was telling people about this, she said,
"By the way, while I was floating up there,
"on the third-floor ledge of the hospital,
"there's a man's blue tennis shoe
"with some wearing over the little toe area,
"and it's sitting on that ledge
with the shoelace underneath the heel."
♪ ♪
Well, then they go up, and they find,
yes, here it is, exactly as she said.
♪ ♪
That's corroboration.
That is something she could not have known
if she didn't have a real out-of-body experience.
♪ ♪
- I think at first, John decided to write
about the NDEs and about Heaven
using the near-death experiences as part of it.
We knew that it was gonna get a lot of resistance.
And we knew that people would maybe think
that we were going away from Scripture,
or even some of our pastor friends
might not understand
because nobody was really taking theology of Heaven
and the near-death experiences
and showing how they can line up.
♪ ♪
You know, John actually gave a talk on this
back in the late '80s
at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
The Christian community was giving a lot
of pushback to this.
People that were sharing their near-death stories
did not get well-received.
And in many cases, they were judged
for what they had experienced.
♪ ♪
- My 35 years of research have completely changed my view
from what it was earlier on
of what the life to come is gonna be like.
What I've realized is that every good thing
that we experience on this Earth,
everything we love-- first of all, God created it,
and that's why we love it.
He created it for us to enjoy it and to love it.
But all of it is just a shadow of the real thing
that he created us to enjoy in Heaven.
So all of this life is just a shadow
of the real one we were meant to experience, relationally,
with beauty, with fun and excitement,
with work and pleasure, with all of it.
I mean, the best is yet to come.
♪ ♪
In the over a thousand near-death experiences
I've studied,
it's this incredible picture of how, when we die,
we leave our natural bodies, but we're still ourselves.
We have spiritual bodies, and not with five senses,
more like 50 senses.
It's life on steroids.
It's life beyond anything we've experienced.
The colors that people talk about
are the color spectrums far beyond Earth,
but that's what you would expect
because the color spectrum of Earth
is the color spectrum of the sun,
but the color spectrum of Heaven
is the color spectrum of God.
♪ ♪
There's this great welcoming committee
of people who have passed on before them,
who are there to welcome them.
And Jesus said, "Use your Earthly resources,
"you know, to make friends, so that when you die,
they will welcome you into eternal dwellings."
It's gonna be life and beauty not unlike Earth.
You know, there are mountains,
and flowers, and trees, and streams,
and all of that's talked about in the Book of Isaiah
and the Book of Revelation.
And that's exactly what near-death experiencers
talk about, except they experience it
in expanded dimensions of space,
more than three dimensions of space,
and more dimensions of time, just like it says in the Bible.
♪ ♪
The greatest experience on Earth is just like
a tiny taste compared to the feast
that I believe God has prepared for us,
and I can't wait to discover all these new things.
I mean, imagine a universe of billions of stars
and planets that we thought were beyond our reach,
but what if, in a thought, we can go explore them?
Endless, endless exploration.
♪ ♪
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
- I remember one day, on the fourth floor newsroom
of the "Chicago Tribune," one of the copy editors
walked all the way across the newspaper
and looked at me and said,
"Strobel, you're not the best writer in the world,
but doggone it, you're a clear writer."
And to me, that was the biggest compliment
'cause that's what I think good writing really is.
♪ ♪
This really represents to me, as you say,
the pinnacle of my journalism career.
I mean, this is back when newspapers mattered.
This is back when our daily circulation was
almost a million every day.
This was back when everybody got the newspaper.
It made a big difference.
And to know that you could write an article
that could change the city,
that could end up with people getting locked up
in prison because of crimes
that had never been exposed before,
political corruption and so forth.
You had a lot of influence back then
that newspapers really don't have today.
♪ ♪
I just felt that,
if I could get a front-page byline
in the "Chicago Tribune,"
which I had by the end of my first week at the "Tribune,"
I had a front-page byline,
that sort of established my credibility,
and it showed that I made something of myself,
that I was successful,
that I was making a difference,
that I was climbing the ladder,
that I was on the road to success.
All that was represented by that little byline
on the front page of the "Tribune."
♪ ♪
[sighs]
Everyone wants to be remembered by something, huh?
♪ ♪
Before I got into skateboarding,
I was really heavily into BMX, and bikes, and motorcycles,
obviously because I was a huge fan of Evel Knievel,
and the only way that we can emulate Evel Knievel
was on a bicycle.
You know, I used to put the card in the spokes
to try to make it sound like a motor.
I used to buy these plastic gas tanks
to put over my bike to make it look like a motorcycle.
We used to make ramps to try to jump over garbage cans,
pretend like we're jumping cars.
I chose skateboarding
because it really didn't matter how big you were,
how strong you were, how tall.
♪ ♪
No, didn't fear God at all.
I didn't believe in God, really,
you know, so at that time,
I didn't really care whether I was going to Heaven or Hell,
or even thought about it.
I had a conversation with an old teammate
from the Bones Brigade days.
His name is Lance Mountain.
He was a teammate of mine on Powell Peralta,
and he's been a devout Christian
ever since I've known him, since the late '70s.
And I remember, I was in his car,
and we were having a debate,
argument about God and about science.
And I don't really remember for sure
specifically what we were talking about,
but basically, I told straight up--I said,
"Hey, Lance, you know,
"I know you want to try to show me something about God,
"and try to make me understand, but I'm not going to,
"you know,
"even think about God or give God the time of day
"unless he reveals himself to me.
"And once he reveals himself to me,
then I'll look into it."
And sure enough, six months later,
he revealed himself, you know, to me in a big way.
♪ ♪
I just remember just having my eyes closed,
and then just hearing this voice in my head.
Call my sister-in-law Kathy,
who's married to my brother Eddie.
Out of the blue, I'm like, "Where did that come from?"
You know?
And so I did, you know,
'cause I trusted that voice in my head.
And I said, "You know what? She's gonna give me
the answers that I need."
You know, I had just gone through a divorce.
You know, I was dating.
You know, I wanted something solid again.
And I got together with this woman,
and shared a relationship with her,
and--which was built on trust,
you know, and the trust was broken months later.
I just really couldn't really understand being 40 years old
and dealing with this drama relationship.
And I'm hurt, you know? I'm sad.
I was sad.
Even after all this time, it still hurts.
But she told me--she said,
"Steven, you know,
"you've had all this success, you know.
"You're a famous skateboarder. You've done so well.
But there's something missing in your life, you know."
And I had a feeling she was gonna say
that I needed Jesus in my life
'cause I was calling her for the answers.
And so I was ready to hear it.
My heart was not a heart anymore.
And it turned out to be one
of the greatest decisions I've made in my whole life.
[soft music]
♪ ♪
Okay, yeah.
- I wrote it with two friends of mine,
Jason Ingram and Matt Bronleewe, yeah.
- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
- Yeah, When I look back at, like, Hawk Nelson songs
I was a part of writing, I feel complicated about it.
♪ A little louder, open your heart ♪
♪ It's time that we start again ♪
Sing it out!
On one hand, I'm really proud of the work that we did.
♪ Love can go, just how deep ♪
Our goal was always to really encourage people.
And that's still my goal.
So in a sense, there's a throughline there for me.
♪ He says, "I am for you," yeah ♪
♪ "I'm not against you" ♪
♪ ♪
Thank you, EO!
We love you so much!
♪ ♪
I grew up
in a very charismatic evangelical setting.
My dad's a pastor.
And he was pastoring a church in southern Ontario
for a lot of the years of my childhood.
As I was growing up,
I got really interested in music.
My musical education was very much in, like, worship teams,
and being a worship leader, and that kind of thing.
And I ended up joining this band, Hawk Nelson.
♪ ♪
♪ Here and now, I'm in the fire ♪
♪ In above my head ♪
Yeah, the idea that it could be a career
was like a dream that was, like, worth chasing,
even if it felt unlikely.
But it did become something that I did for a career
for, you know, 15, 16 years.
- I think, as I was writing that stuff,
it, for me, represented what I wanted to believe.
And when you want to believe something really deeply,
you have periods of time where you sort of can, right?
Like, you sort of can believe that this is true,
and you have experiences,
and you interpret them through that lens,
and you go, like, "Oh, yeah!
"Like, God does love me this much.
And I had this experience, and I kind of felt it."
You know, sometimes, I think there's a trope
that gets trotted out that, like, oh, well, like,
people choose not to believe in God 'cause they just want
to go do some sinnin', and, like, that was not me.
I, like--I really wanted to believe.
And the more I read and learned,
the more I just found
that it was difficult for me to believe.
So that culminated in me
finally feeling like I really needed
to say something publicly because I had been talking
about my faith publicly for so many years
that to talk about this only privately,
and to hide it publicly, felt really disingenuous to me.
So I finally wrote this post.
I posted it on Instagram May 20 of 2020.
And I said,
"I'm finding that I no longer believe in God,
and here's why."
And it was terrifying to post that
'cause I knew my life would change.
And I knew it was gonna affect my family.
I knew it was gonna affect, you know,
like, my parents, my siblings, guys I'd been in a band with.
So you know, I remember posting it,
and then, you know, I hit Post,
and then I literally put the phone down and,
like, walked away, and I was like, "Ahh!"
You know, I think I probably had a beer or two
and, like, relaxed.
You know, like, I need to chill.
But the response was really interesting.
♪ ♪
I had a lot of my Christian friends though,
who were very kind and supportive.
And while they didn't agree
with where I was at or my conclusions,
they still cared about me as a person.
And I really appreciated that.
And then I also had a ton of people
who messaged me privately,
and, like, in the first two weeks after that post,
I probably got 10,000 messages from people saying something
along the lines of, "I'm wondering some
"of the same things you're wondering,
and I thought I was the only one."
♪ ♪
You know, God--if he's real, he has chosen to make himself
hidden in such a way that we could plausibly say,
"I don't even know if God's there."
And then, with that in mind, in Christianity,
we're often told, well, now you have to make a belief
that God is there, you have to make a decision,
and you have to affirm God's existence and his--you know,
Jesus' lordship in your life.
And if you don't do that,
you're gonna burn in Hell forever.
And I just go, as a father, like,
would I make myself hidden to my son who I love dearly?
Would I hide myself from him his entire life,
and then if he denies my existence
or doesn't, like, love me enough,
or the right way, or believe the right things about me,
burn him forever?
Like, no one would look at a parent
and say, like, "That's a good parent."
And, you know, that's one of the reasons
that I just--I cannot believe in this whole structure
of way of looking at God and eternity.
It just doesn't work for me.
And if that is true, that God is not loving.
♪ ♪
I think some people have a lot of anxiety about Hell.
If we're gonna believe
that there is this eternal conscious torment
that's a punishment for not believing the right things,
then it's sort of like there's a gun to your head.
I don't believe that an all-powerful and all-loving God
is compatible with the idea of Hell in the way
that we often think about it.
I think those two things are incompatible.
- I have absolutely no idea what happens after we die.
I haven't been there.
♪ ♪
- What would you say to someone
whose loved one died,
and they don't know whether they accepted Christ?
What do you say to that?
- You know, the truth is, we don't know
what happens in those final moments
before a person dies.
We don't know how many people call out to God
and say "save me" in those final moments.
My brother was an atheist, an outspoken atheist,
virtually his entire life, and he died not long ago,
right at the beginning of the COVID crisis.
I don't know what happened in that day.
I hope he reached out to God, but I don't know.
I'll find out someday in Heaven.
♪ ♪
You know, C.S. Lewis said if there was any doctrine
of Christianity he wishes he could change or eliminate,
it would be Hell, and I get that.
It's a difficult concept.
It's much better and more fun to talk about Heaven, I think.
But there are a lot of misconceptions
about Hell that confuse people.
First of all, God does not send people to Hell.
In a sense, we send ourselves to Hell.
The Bible says explicitly that God
does not want anyone to perish.
He wants everyone to come to repentance.
He wants everyone to come to faith.
He wants everyone to experience Heaven
with him forever, but like any gift,
it's only ours when we receive it.
You know, God gave us free will.
It's like, if we're drowning,
and someone throws us a life preserver,
it's up to us whether we want to clutch it or not.
And so we have free will.
We could decide we want to live without God,
we want to ignore God, we want to reject God,
we want to live in a way
that we know God would not approve of,
so we don't want God to be part of our lives,
and we shun him during our lifetime,
and at the end of our life, God will say to us,
"You chose to be separate from me your entire life,
and now you will be separated from me for eternity in Hell."
♪ ♪
Hell is not a torture chamber.
Torture is imposed from without.
Hell is more about torment, where it comes from within.
It's a sense of regret. It's a sense a anger.
It's a sense of loss.
It's a sense of suffering that people have
because of the predicament that they find themselves in,
that they themselves have opened the door to.
♪ ♪
People think that Hell is
kind of a one-size-fits-all experience.
And yet, we know from the New Testament of the Bible
that people--their experience in Hell will be proportionate
to how they lived their life.
In other words, Adolf Hitler's experience
in Hell is not gonna be the same as my neighbor,
who may be an atheist,
who doesn't want anything to do with God,
has rejected God his whole life.
His experience in Hell and Adolf Hitler's
are gonna be quite different.
I think that matches the fairness of God.
You know, the Bible says, "Will not the judge
of all the Earth do what's right?"
And nobody after being judged by God
will be able to legitimately shake their fist at God
and say that was unfair.
We will ultimately see the fairness of God.
♪ ♪
Another misconception involves the figurative language
that the Bible uses to describe Hell.
For instance, it uses metaphors like flames and like darkness.
But those are clearly metaphors.
They're not literally true
because if they were literally true,
the flames would light up the darkness,
so that doesn't make sense.
And so I don't think that Hell is a place
of excessive thermal output, in other words.
And yet, metaphors are intended to point us to a broader truth
that we may not be able to fully comprehend yet,
and that broader truth is,
Hell is the very worst situation
that anybody could ever find themselves in.
- June 1, 1985, at Hotel De Lima,
Rue Saint-Germain, Paris, France,
my first thought was that I'd been shot.
Because it was like, right there, bang,
the most acute pain I'd ever experienced in my life.
Went to the hospital.
We went to emergency.
Two doctors examined me,
said the same thing that the doctor at the hotel said:
I had a perforation of duodenum,
and that if I didn't have surgery right away,
I would die.
But I didn't want to die because I knew
with 100% certainty that when you die,
that's it, it's over.
The screen goes black,
like in the movie theater, you know?
Says "the end," blackness, nothing.
I was 38 years old. I had a wife.
I had two kids. I had a good job.
I had a career.
I had art galleries showing my work.
I was winning prizes.
You know, I was making money.
This is not right.
This is not time for me to die.
I woke from unconsciousness,
and I was standing next to the bed,
and I felt wonderful,
better than I ever felt my whole life.
And I noticed that the big, dead lump
in the bed was me.
♪ ♪
But I couldn't accept that, because it's not--I mean,
that's impossible.
Then I heard people outside the room
calling me by name in English,
which I thought was weird because everybody
in the French hospital spoke French.
And they said, "Hurry up.
"We've been waiting for you. We know everything.
"We've been waiting and waiting,
and it's time for you to come with us."
So I assumed, since I had mentioned the doctor,
that they were gonna take me to the doctor.
So I left the light of the room and went out
into the very gray, dank hallway,
where there was this group of people
that stayed back in the darkness
away from the light of the room.
And they led me what at first I thought was the hallway,
but then we walked for miles, and miles, and miles,
and we never went up or down.
We just--they encircled me and just shepherd me
into ever-increasing darkness.
It started off with them being very officious.
Like, "This way, keep moving, hurry up."
That evolved into, "What's the matter with you?
Move, move faster. You're too slow."
That became vulgar.
And then it became clear that they were gonna have at me.
They began by kicking, punching, pulling.
Then they started biting, and ripping, and tearing.
And then they started
invading me physically.
So eventually, I was completely torn apart,
lying on the ground, unable to even move
or defend myself in any way.
I'm completely defeated,
completely depressed and despair.
And I couldn't think of any way out.
This is it forever, and ever, and ever
with these horrible people.
And I heard a voice say, "Pray to God."
And I thought, "I don't believe in God.
I don't pray."
And the voice said, "Pray to God," kind of strong.
And I thought, "I don't know how to pray.
I can't pray."
And the voice said, "Pray to God."
♪ ♪
My mind went involuntarily to me as a little boy
in a Sunday classroom singing "Jesus Loves Me."
I could see it vividly. I could hear it vividly.
But much more importantly, I could feel it vividly,
that as a little boy, when I sang "Jesus Loved Me,"
I believed that there was this really cool guy named Jesus,
and the lions, and tigers, and bears would come out
of the closet, you know, and start swarming
around my bedroom in the middle of the night.
You know, I would pray to Jesus,
and they would all flee.
♪ ♪
And I believed in him as a little boy.
That's why when I was 12, I wanted to get baptized
'cause I wanted to know him.
And when
that happened,
I decided that I needed to take a chance
'cause I didn't know what I did not.
What I didn't know is whether he would care
about me or not.
As far as I was concerned, his best option would be
to leave me there.
And I called out to him, "Jesus, please save me."
and with that, a tiny light appeared in the darkness
and got very bright, and it came upon me.
It was impossibly brilliant.
If it had been light as we experience light
in this world, it would have consumed me.
I mean, I just would have been burnt up.
But it was that bright.
Out of it emerged hands and arms,
and he reached down and touched me,
and I saw myself come back together
from the roadkill that I was.
You know, I became complete.
And much more important to me was
that he filled me with the love
that I never experienced in this world.
And his hands and arms picked me up
without any effort,
and he brought me up against himself,
and put his arms around me,
to stroke my back like a mother or father would
with their child.
And I cried out of joy into his chest,
slobbering all over him.
The people who took me into that place of darkness
were people just like me.
They were people who had rejected God,
rejected God's love,
and God gave them exactly what they wanted.
I don't believe God punishes anybody.
I believe God gives everybody exactly what they want.
The Bible says humans judge by appearances,
God judges by the heart,
and if we seek God and seek God's love,
we will find it in this world and in the next.
And if we reject God and reject God's love,
we get to go to a world where those things don't happen.
And I don't mean this as a joke.
I mean this absolutely sincerely.
Hell's not so bad.
The problem is the people that are there.
They're awful. They're really awful.
There's nothing to do there except torment one another,
so Hell is a place of continuous torment.
It's a place of complete hopelessness and despair.
- What do you make out of Howard Storm?
Like, I know he's in the book, but how did you discover him?
- Yeah. - And why him?
- Well, you know, there was a series of studies
that we've done that showed that,
of 1,400 people who had had near-death experiences,
23% had negative experiences
that ranged from distressing to frightening and terrorizing.
And his was an example of someone
who had a terrorizing experience.
- How do you go about, like, for that one,
verifying, like, its validity?
Yeah, that's a good question.
- 'Cause it's like, you hear a lot about "I went to Heaven."
Yeah.
- But very few "I went to Hell."
- Yeah, I think it's against a person's interest
to talk about having gone to Hell
because it's embarrassing.
Who wants to say, "Oh, yeah, I was in the trash bin
of the afterlife," you know.
So it's embarrassing.
It's traumatic to the degree that I think some
of them have post-traumatic stress syndrome,
and they don't want to talk about it,
they don't want to revisit it and so forth.
And in the case of Howard Storm,
here's someone who came back from that experience,
and it was so profound, it was so real to him,
that he resigned his position, his tenured professorship,
his chairmanship of the art department
at this university,
and became a pastor of a tiny church
that he continues to serve to this day.
That's some evidence that this was more
than just some loose hallucination.
There was something profound that happened to him,
something that chilled him to the bone.
- Would you say that there's more sermons about Hell
than there are Heaven or vice versa?
- I think there's a lot more sermons about Heaven
than there are Hell.
Very few pastors like to talk about Hell.
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
- So we are in Chinatown, San Francisco,
and this is where I was born.
This is the hospital, back in 1967.
This is also where Bruce Lee was born,
which is kind of cool.
And this is where my mother died 54 years ago.
♪ ♪
Yeah, my dad kind of flipped out,
and I feel like that's why he always resented me,
and I think it's because I was the one that caused her death.
♪ ♪
We never even talked about it.
Like, he just--the only time he ever talked to me was
when he was beating me, you know, just yelling at me,
maybe giving me instructions, telling me what to do.
But we didn't have conversations,
which isn't really that abnormal
in a Chinese family.
I don't know the whole story, but my mother--when she died,
you know, people blamed the hospital or whatever,
but she basically bled out.
It was something that was pretty--should be
pretty simple nowadays.
Because she died,
and I think my dad just had a hard time,
like, you know, living in the U.S., making a living,
he had me sent to Hong Kong
to grow up with my grandmothers.
♪ ♪
My name in Chinese is Chan Yang Fan,
and that last character is the same character
in San Francisco.
I'm assuming my dad just took the translation into English
and named me Francis.
So I guess, in a sense, I'm named after the city.
And it's weird 'cause my stepmom...
it says "Chin" here,
and that's what it says on my birth certificate.
But then my stepmom is Chan, and my dad is Chan.
And so I don't know.
You know, back then, everything was just a little more screwy,
so who knows who I am?
[soft music]
Death is so ugly.
And it's awful in so many ways.
Like, you know, having seven kids,
there's that fear.
Having grandkids, I have that fear.
Being married to a woman that I love,
there's fear.
Like, I don't like the thought
that that could end at any moment.
At the same time...
the whole point of the resurrection
is that I wouldn't have to fear it in a sense of,
"Oh, no, what's gonna happen next?"
In a lot of ways, it's like, that's what I anticipate.
Like, God, bring it. I'm ready to go.
I'm done with this Earth.
You know, I'll do whatever you want me to do.
I'll stay here as long as you want me to stay here.
But there's so much of me that's like,
oh, I can't wait to die.
I can't wait to get out of here.
Like, it's weird.
Like, I would love to know what it would feel like
to have a mom that gave birth to me
and loved me, and--but I'll never have that.
I'd love to have a dad right now,
and just wonder, what did he think of my life?
I know we didn't talk, you know,
the whole time you were alive, but would it have changed--
you know, of course, there's some of that curiosity.
Sometimes, I'll think about her on Mother's Day,
like, just grateful that she decided to have me
and lost her life so that I could be on this Earth.
I have no idea what would have happened
if my parents stayed alive.
♪ ♪
I don't know.
Before I left for China,
I found these old pictures of her,
and it showed the location of where she did ministry,
And it happened to be exactly where they had
set up an office for me.
And so I thought, that is crazy
that 60 years ago,
my mom was doing ministry in that exact same spot
where God was calling me now.
♪ ♪
[upbeat folk music]
♪ ♪
- What do you think your life would have been like
if you had not come to Christ,
if you had not taken on that challenge to investigate,
you know, the resurrection of Jesus?
- I've thought about that, and I don't know for sure,
but I was headed down a dark path.
♪ ♪
We were childhood sweethearts.
I mean, we dated on and off in high school,
and we enjoyed each other,
and we had a certain expectation
of what our future would be like.
And then, one day, she came up to me
and gave me the worst news that an atheist could get.
She said, "I've decided
to become a follower of Jesus."
And first word that went through my mind was divorce.
I was gonna walk out.
♪ ♪
You know, I was a narcissist.
I was a drunk.
I was self-absorbed.
I was a liar. I was a cheater.
People thought I was a great guy.
They didn't know the inside of me.
They didn't know--they didn't see me
when I was literally drunk in the snow
in an alley on Saturday night.
You know, I had all this success in journalism,
but it masked what was really going on in me.
♪ ♪
- ♪ Oh-oh-oh-oh ♪
♪ Oh-oh-oh ♪
- When you look around this world, man,
and there are choices that we make, you know,
and those choices lead to...
well, instead of saying good or bad,
I'd like to say life or death, right?
The choices that we make will usually lead
to one or the other, seldom just right
in the middle of the road, right?
Things bring us life, or they bring us death.
We make those choices all the time.
[soft music]
I think the essence of what we long for
is to know that we're loved.
While we're here on this Earth,
I think it's safe to say that we all
have some significant doubts about the fact
that we're truly loved.
But it's God's purpose to reveal that to us here.
And it's our purpose to open our hearts to it
and in turn reveal that truth to each other.
♪ ♪
[soft piano music]
♪ ♪
♪ I was there when you looked up into the night ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Looking far beyond the stars and asking why ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Although you thought you were alone ♪
♪ When you fell into the unknown ♪
♪ All the while, my love ♪
♪ You were a child of mine ♪
♪ Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh ♪
♪ ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
- How much does pain, suffering, betrayal,
hurt, questions play into writing your music?
- Pain and longing accompany each other in the way that,
when we experience that longing,
there is a sense of,
"Hey, things aren't right here in this Earth"
in the way that we know, somewhere deep down,
it's supposed to be right.
When there's injustice,
we know that somewhere there's supposed
to be a place that is just.
So the question is, where does that come from?
If it doesn't exist somewhere,
why would we long for something like that?
♪ ♪
- Eric, tell us how some of these sounds and things
that we hear can just, like, I guess,
take us to another place.
- Yeah, I mean, every artist has their own way
of kind of capturing that other place.
For me, I have really experimented
with trying to find a sound that is unfamiliar
but, at the same time, familiar.
And so I pulled this up for you, Mani,
'cause I want to do a little experiment
with you--experiment for you.
And listen to this track,
and I'm gonna play two different tracks,
and see if you know what this is.
[soft music]
♪ ♪
Okay, so do you recognize that instrument?
- Yeah, I think that's the oboe.
- So an oboe--you know, if nobody's ever heard
an oboe before, they might go, "Wow, that's, like, incredible.
That's taking me to another world."
But for most of us, we know what sound that is.
And obviously, we can make a melody with that oboe
that can take us to another place.
So close your eyes for a minute
and listen to this sound.
[soft note building]
♪ ♪
Okay, what do you hear there?
- Yeah, I have no idea what that is.
- So part of what you're hearing is,
in the beginning,
it's actually samples of outer space.
So there's sounds coming from quasars,
and the Solar System,
and planets, and things like that
that, through equipment, can actually be translated
into sound.
So I have a few of these samples.
And when you hear these samples, you're like,
"Wow, that's an unfamiliar sound."
It's not, like, every day that we walk around,
we're hearing sounds of outer space,
and planets, and stuff.
So when you take a sound like that
and then incorporate other familiar tones and textures,
and combine them all, you come out
with something that's, in some ways,
just really moving, taking you to another place.
- I think faith is--it's an interesting topic
because when I was an atheist,
I thought faith was believing something
even though you knew in your heart
it couldn't be true.
You know, I thought that's what faith was.
And then I came to learn
that Biblical faith is quite different,
and I think it's important for people
to understand that distinction.
Biblical faith is taking a step in the same direction
that the evidence is pointing, which is logical and rational.
[speaking Russian]
[soft music]
Yuri Gagarin was the cosmonaut--Russian cosmonaut.
He was the first guy into space.
And he quipped, when he was up there, he said--or later,
I can't remember, but he said basically,
"I looked around, and I didn't see God."
And yet Buzz Aldrin, who was one of the Americans
who went to the Moon, who celebrated communion
on Christmas Eve in space, affirmed that God is real.
- Sunday, July 20, 1969, around the world,
nearly a billion people watched this moment
on television as the first man from Earth prepared
to set foot upon the Moon.
- That's one small step for man.
[upbeat music]
One giant leap for mankind.
- I believe that this nation should commit itself
to achieving the goal, before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the Moon
and returning him safely to the Earth.
- And what that tells me is some people can see
the same evidence and come to different conclusions.
And you have to ask yourself, what's driving that?
What's driving that?
Do I have reasons not to believe?
Are there reasons I don't want to believe?
Are there things in my life I would have to give up
if I became a believer in God?
Are there certain moral things that I would have to give up
because they're immoral in God's sight,
and I want to keep doing them,
and so I would rather find reasons
not to believe than to believe?
So we have to try to filter out our motives
as much as we can,
and say, "I want to reach a verdict
"in the case for Heaven based on the evidence
"and not on my wishful thinking,
"or not on my preconceptions,
or not on my biases or prejudices."
I want to reach it based on, "What is the evidence?
"Is there sufficient evidence to tell me
that when I die I will continue to live on?"
♪ ♪
- Sometimes, this church is actually
what deters some folks from even finding that love.
because of their negative experience.
Right, right.
What do you say to those
that can't get this out of the way,
you know what I mean?
- That's a real problem, I think.
You know, for me, I want to strip away things
that get in the way of finding the truth.
And if someone is hurt by a church,
or they're hurt by a relationship
with a Christian who betrays them,
or who uses them, or whatever,
that's a horrible thing,
and I can understand emotionally
how that makes a person less likely to seek after God.
But then I step back and say, "Wait a minute.
"That doesn't change the truth of Christianity.
That doesn't change whether it aligns with reality."
That's the real question.
Truth is that which corresponds to reality.
[soft music]
♪ ♪
It was more than 40 years since I've been in this house.
Yeah, my whole writing career, my whole journalism career,
started here in the basement of my house.
Well, we were in the family room here,
and I had blatantly disobeyed my dad
by buying a motorcycle that he had forbidden me
from buying, and he found out,
and we had a huge blowout argument,
and he said words that I hope he didn't mean,
but told me that he didn't have enough love for me
to fill his little finger.
And I remember hearing that, and I had no response.
What do you say to that?
And so there was silence for a moment,
and then I just turned and walked out.
And that was it.
♪ ♪
I never intended to go home.
Although I remember when he died,
I was at the wake,
and a guy came up to me--two guys actually,
and said, "Are you Lee?"
And I said, "Yeah."
And they said, "Oh, man, can I shake your hand?
"Your dad never stopped talking about you.
"He was so proud of you.
"And when you'd have a byline on the front page
"of the 'Chicago Tribune,' he was so proud.
He'd show us the article."
And I was just shocked by that
because it was nothing he ever expressed to me.
♪ ♪
We never reconciled, really.
We never talked about that incident.
We never processed it. We never resolved it.
And I remember interviewing a scholar about Heaven,
and he said, you know, "When you get to Heaven--"
I said, "I believe my father is in Heaven."
And he said, "That first hour that you get to Heaven,
"you're both gonna be totally motivated
"to reconcile fully and completely,
"and you'll be able to spend eternity in Heaven in the kind
"of father-son relationship
that you never really had in this world."
♪ ♪
Just that feeling of being here in this environment,
where my entire journalism career had its scene
and began, I mean, the nostalgia
just kind of wells up inside you.
It's a great feeling to be home.
♪ ♪
Oh, man, I think I'd say,
"Keep seeking. The truth is out there."
♪ ♪
[soft piano music]
Jesus, unlike anybody else in history,
has the credentials to tell us the truth about the afterlife.
- When you explain the resurrection,
you tend to talk about these four things.
- Yeah, the four areas are, number one, his execution,
number two, the early reports that he rose from the dead,
number three, the empty tomb,
and number four, the eyewitnesses.
So the first E is for execution,
that Jesus was truly dead after being crucified.
And the evidence for this is very powerful.
We have no evidence anywhere of anyone ever surviving
a full Roman crucifixion.
Even the scientific, peer-reviewed,
secular Journal of the American Medical Association
conducted an investigation into the death of Jesus,
and their conclusion was, "Clearly, the weight
"of the historical and medical evidence indicates
"that Jesus was dead even before the wound
to his side was inflicted."
The second E stands for the word "early."
We have early reports that Jesus rose from the dead.
In other words, reports that can be dated back
very close to the events themselves.
I used to think, like a lot of skeptics,
that the resurrection was a legend.
And I knew it took time for legend to develop
in the ancient world, so I figured 100, 150 years
after the death of Jesus, stories were invented,
mythologies were spun, and that's where the idea
of the resurrection came from.
But we have report of the resurrection
of Jesus Christ,
including named eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses,
that has been dated back by scholars
to within months of his execution.
That is like a news flash from ancient history.
So I don't think you can write it off
as just being a legend.
The third E stands for "empty."
We have an empty tomb.
And the strongest evidence for this is
that even the opponents of Jesus
implicitly admitted the tomb was empty.
There was nobody in the first century
claiming that, "No, no, no, the body is still there."
Even the opponents of Jesus said,
"Oh, well, the disciples stole the body."
They were conceding the tomb is empty.
They're trying to explain how it got empty.
And yet the disciples didn't have the motive,
the means, or the opportunity to steal the body.
And then finally, the fourth E stands for "eyewitnesses."
As I said, most of what we know from ancient history
are facts based on one or maybe two sources.
And yet, for the conviction of the disciples
that they encountered the resurrected Jesus,
we have no fewer than nine ancient sources
inside and outside the New Testament,
confirming and corroborating the conviction of the disciples
that they encountered the risen Christ.
♪ ♪
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
You know, Luis Palau was not only my hero,
but he was my friend.
He was one of the greatest evangelists
of all time.
He shared his faith with a billion people.
He was very winsome, he was very warm,
and he spoke all over the world,
radio shows, and books, and so forth.
But he knew he was dying.
He had stage IV cancer
and only had a short time to live.
And I thought, you know, if I'm investigating Heaven,
wouldn't it be good to talk to someone
who's about ready to go there?
♪ ♪
That's what drew me to Oregon,
to encounter, one last time, Luis Palau.
It turned out to be the last major interview
of his life before he died.
♪ ♪
Tell me about the moment
where you heard that Luis passed.
Where were you?
- I was at home in Houston and got the news
through his family that he has passed.
And you know, I was happy for him
because he was anxious to go.
I mean, he said--he told me in the interview,
he said, "I'm ready."
And I said, "Are you afraid of death?"
He said, "No, I'm not.
"I know to be absent from the body
is to be present with the Lord."
- Is it still hard for you to see a friend go like that?
- Oh, yeah, absolutely, because there's a loss.
There's a loss of contact.
There's a loss of relationship.
You know that he's leaving behind a wife and children.
And there's a sadness to it.
I mean, even Jesus wept when Lazarus died...
Yeah.
- Even though he knew he was gonna raise him from the dead.
So it's appropriate
to mourn when a friend dies.
And he wasn't just a friend to me.
He was a hero to me.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Right, right.
- Yeah, you know, he told me about attacks
he believed were from Satan in those final days,
where, you know, Satan would whisper into his ear,
you know, "You've told thousands of people,
"millions of people, a billion people about Jesus,
"but you're not going to Heaven.
"You're gonna be one of those that God's gonna say,
'Depart from me. I didn't know you.'"
And--which, of course, is crazy,
but it was--you know, as he said to me at one point,
he said, "Satan is very good at what he does."
And the Puritans wrote about this,
that at the end, sometimes, there's these words from Satan
to make you feel uncertain
and to make you question your salvation, so forth.
And even Luis Palau felt that.
Yes.
- Uh-huh.
Wow.
♪ ♪
Even if we are confident
that we're gonna spend eternity with God,
the process of dying is not appealing.
Yeah.
- In other words, nobody wants to go through that.
And yes, there's gonna be loss,
and we're not gonna be--
Luis said, "I'm not gonna be able
to pick up the phone and call Pat," his wife,
"or call my kids."
You know, he mourned that loss.
Yeah.
But at the same time,
the idea of not just being embraced
by Jesus in Heaven,
but to meet Wesley, and Moody...
Yeah.
- And Spurgeon, and all these heroes of the faith,
and to see his father,
and to have a relationship with him...
- Yeah. - He didn't get in this world.
Because we live in a sin-stained world,
his dad died at an age where Luis was too young
to really have a full--or relationship with him.
He will have that in Heaven.
And I think, deep down,
Luis has thirsted for that his whole life.
♪ ♪
[speaking Spanish]
- And even as your father was a poor example,
and your mother left your family,
you come to the living Father.
He is the ideal Father.
And Jesus says, "Young man,
"you've got to make your own decision.
"You cannot have a thirdhand faith.
"You cannot inherit your faith from your folks
"or your grandparents.
God has no grandchildren."
Jesus Christ is relevant today to the Soviet Union.
[speaking Russian]
- As far as the east is from the west...
[speaking Russian]
- So far he removes our transgressions.
[speaking Russian]
- You will never forget this night.
[speaking Chinese]
I know I'll never forget it.
♪ No hay lugar más alto ♪
[singing Spanish]
♪ ♪
- I am sure because now I have children of my own
that for Mom and Dad to see the direction I was going,
to see my love of partying,
and--even though I was a respectful kid,
I think they knew I was moving in the wrong direction.
A lot of times, people will say things to me like,
"I know why you were such a rebellious kid,
"because your dad was heavy-handed
"or, you know, he was shoving his religion
down your throat."
And I've always really resisted that
because that's not the fact in my case.
[soft music]
♪ ♪
This place, this cemetery,
is kind of representative of one of those places,
probably everybody has something like this in life.
It sort of represents some of the worst parts,
most foolish parts of my life.
And now, you know, to have Dad buried here,
my grandparents buried here,
it's just a place of great reflection,
and it represents the gratitude of my heart
for the love of my parents.
[upbeat piano music]
♪ ♪
Humanly speaking,
I would want one more day, one more week.
I would want more time.
So when we say it was an untimely death,
not in God's economy, it wasn't.
To me, Luis lived 86 years.
We were married for 60. That's not enough.
♪ ♪
I am teaching myself to say he died.
He didn't pass. He isn't lost.
Because it's reality.
You know, the other words--lost?
He's not lost. I know where he is.
♪ ♪
- Do you remember the moment when you first saw her,
first, like, actually talked to her?
- Yeah, We were outside the train station in Chicago.
I was with a friend of mine, and she was with a guy
from my neighborhood who she had met at a dance.
And he saw me and recognized me.
"Hey, Lee," and "Yeah,"
and we came over, and we were talking,
and he introduced me to this girl.
And I thought,
"Wow, I'll have to find out how to contact her."
And...
- Did you know at 14 she would be the one?
- She went home and told her mom,
"I met the boy I'm gonna marry."
Her mom was kind of condescending.
"Oh, sure, you did," you know.
And so I think, just to prove her wrong,
she married me.
- This is the no-champagne wedding.
- That was the no-champagne wedding.
Yep, that's right.
We were so young when we got married,
they had champagne glasses,
but we couldn't drink champagne,
'cause we were too young, so they were filled with milk.
[laughs]
- What does Leslie mean to you, personally, as Lee, the guy?
- Yeah. - Not the author, not the dad.
- Yeah. - Just Lee.
- You know, we're best of friends.
You know, meeting as young as we did,
at 14, kind of growing up together in that way,
through those tumultuous high school years,
and then college, we just bonded very strongly.
And she's just my best friend.
I can't imagine life without her.
I can't imagine where I would be
if God hadn't brought her into my life.
♪ ♪
- You know, I don't remember, at any moment,
feeling like I was ready to give up.
I remember worrying that he would walk out,
that he would say he'd had enough.
I was also convinced
it was gonna be a deathbed conversion.
I didn't imagine him ever accepting Christ
until maybe on his deathbed.
♪ ♪
Oftentimes, I could sense God saying,
"Remember, you have the truth.
"He doesn't. He doesn't know.
"You're expecting him to act in a way
"he's incapable of acting.
"Hold your anger. Hold your tongue.
"Do what's right. Be patient.
I'm bigger than both of you."
- I'm unaware of ever having reached anyone for the Lord.
I see myself as a link in the chain--other than Lee.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- ♪ Let me wipe your tears away ♪
- If we accept what the near-death experiences
tell us about life reviews,
people talk about how they almost feel like
they're judging themselves, and that from Jesus,
they're getting a sense of mercy,
forgiveness, grace, and love.
And so from that perspective, I think it's not gonna be
as daunting of an experience
as maybe I otherwise thought it would be.
♪ Wipe your tears ♪
- Yeah, I remember getting the job
at the "Chicago Tribune" and wanting
to have that front-page byline the first time,
knowing my dad would open it and see it.
"That's Lee!"
And just show him that I've accomplished something,
I've become somebody.
♪ ♪
I think of the split second that our lives intersected
on a street corner in downtown Chicago.
There's no way, humanly speaking,
that we ever would have met.
It was the beginning
of this incredible relationship.
♪ ♪
She tolerated me during those years of rebellion
'cause I was angry and lashing out many times.
But she persevered. She prayed.
She prayed for me every day for two years.
My daughter, Alison-- when she was a toddler,
if she was alone in the living room,
playing with some blocks, some toys, or whatever,
and she would hear me come home from work
through the front door, her natural reaction was just
to gather her toys, and go in her room,
and shut the door.
"Was he gonna be drunk again?
"Was he gonna be yelling, and screaming,
"and kicking holes in the wall?
At least it was nice and quiet in here."
It was four or five months after I became a Christian,
and Alison had begun to see changes in me,
and so one Sunday morning,
she came up to Leslie, and she said,
"I want God to do for me what he's done for Daddy."
God changes everything.
♪ ♪
So I asked Luis, I said, "Luis, if you could send
"a text message back from Heaven,
what do you think it would say?"
And he thought for a second, and then he said,
"I think I'd say, 'Go for it.'"
♪ ♪
If we believe that Heaven is true,
that it's real,
that should affect our everyday lives,
our attitudes, our perspective,
the way we treat people, the way we spend our money,
the way we spend our time.
It should ripple through every aspect
of our lives.
At some point, we realize
that when we close our eyes in this world,
that isn't the end of our existence,
but there's another chapter to come.
♪ ♪
♪ Where did you go ♪
♪ Where I could not follow? ♪
♪ A place to call home ♪
♪ Where time can't be borrowed ♪
♪ I'm waiting for a sign ♪
♪ I'm waiting for you ♪
♪ Now we're worlds apart ♪
♪ But how could that be? ♪
♪ It was never fair for me to say goodbye ♪
♪ When I never said hello ♪
♪ I'm waiting for you ♪
♪ I hope that I'll meet you someday ♪
♪ There's something inside me that speaks to me ♪
♪ Comforts me, guides me, and shows me the way ♪
♪ While I'm caught between Heaven and Hell ♪
♪ ♪
♪ I lie awake ♪
♪ In dark, lonely nights ♪
♪ All these memories that could have been ♪
♪ These pictures, they keep me awake ♪
♪ I'm waiting for a sign ♪
♪ I'm waiting for you ♪
♪ I hope that I'll meet you someday ♪
♪ There's something inside me that speaks to me ♪
♪ Comforts me, guides me, and shows me the way ♪
♪ While I'm caught between Heaven and Hell ♪
♪ I hope that I'll meet you someday ♪
♪ There's something inside me that speaks to me ♪
♪ Comforts me, guides me, and shows me the way ♪
♪ While I'm caught between Heaven and Hell ♪
♪ ♪
♪ You, I hope that I'll meet you someday ♪
♪ There's something inside me that speaks to me ♪
♪ Comforts me, guides me, and shows me the way ♪
♪ While I'm caught between Heaven and Hell ♪
♪ I hope that I'll meet you someday ♪
♪ There's something inside me that speaks to me ♪
♪ Comforts me, guides me, and shows me the way ♪
♪ While I'm caught between Heaven and Hell ♪
♪ ♪