“I came here to die.” Speaking from hospice that is what Christian pillar James Houston, who is 99 years old, told me on our chat today – yet he is still writing and still offering wisdom to weary souls (read his “Letters From A Hospital Bed: Reflections From a 99 Year Old” here) and offers a lifetime of insight in these 45 minutes. In this interview with Dr. Houston, I had the great honor to glean wisdom on everything from spiritual health and cultivation (“We need to ask God to allow us to dream about Him each night.” “We need to remove obstacles that keep us from a love-affair with God… Let God be the last thing you think about each night, not the news or a book or a movie…”) to Trinitarian theology of participation, and to the Evangelical over-emphasis on “Systematic Theology” (As opposed to, what he suggests, a healthy “Child Theology”). His book, “Memoirs of a Joyous Exile and a Worldly Christian” is a short chronicle of his life that reads like a constellation of relationships and formation (Jim was family friends with James Torrance and the Torrance family, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones was a conversation partner, he was colleagues with J.I. Packer, he was in a small group with C.S Lewis, a co-author with Bruce Waltke, neighbors with JRR Tolkien, had his orthodoxy checked by Francis Schaeffer and his friend John Stott, is related, by marriage, to Jim and Elizabeth Elliot forming to Julie Canlis, and then the list goes on and on with other paths crossing of Carl F.H. Henry, F.F. Bruce, Malcom Muggeridge, Charles Colson, Os Guinness, Leon Morris, etc.). I’m grateful to Dr. Houston and his daughter Claire who helped this interview.

TO BUY JAMES M. HOUSTON BOOKS

Please visit the amazing curators as Regent Bookstore

Or, please visit Hearts & Minds Books. We here at the Layman’s Lounge are glad you’ve enjoyed our latest offering. We believe deeply in the Lordship of Christ over all of life and are eager to think about even how to shop to the glory of God. That might mean, we’d suggest, supporting human-scale businesses that do good work, that are in some ways consistent with our hopes to see a reformation in culture and in the habits of our public lives. To that end, we’d invite you to order any books mentioned here from our friends at Hearts & Minds, a family-owned, indie bookstore in Dallastown PA. Use the promo code LL20 (or just say you heard about them in the Lounge) and they will deduct 20% off your order. (There may be a few exceptions if books are out-of-print, self-published or rare.) Just type in what you want at the interactive, secure order form at their website: www.heartsandmindsbooks.com or send Byron an inquiry at read@heartsandmindsbooks.com. You can call them at 717-246-3333.