Podcast: Why Are We Apathetic about What Really Matters? (Uche Anizor)

April 18, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Recognizing Our Apathy

In today's episode, Uche Anizor discusses his own story of wrestling with apathy, seven deadly causes of spiritual apathy that we should all be on the lookout for, and how to take steps back toward God when we realize we’re not doing well.

Overcoming Apathy

Overcoming Apathy

Uche Anizor

In Overcoming Apathy, theology professor Uche Anizor takes a fresh look at the widespread problem of apathy and its effect on spiritual maturity, offering practical, biblical advice to break the cycle.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:52 - What Is Spiritual Apathy?

Matt Tully
Uche, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Uche Anizor
It’s great to be here.

Matt Tully
Spiritual apathy seems like one of those vices—maybe that’s not the right word for it—but it’s one of those things that we don’t often discuss, at least in my experience in the church and at least not as often as we discuss a whole host of other struggles that we often face as Christians. And yet, it strikes me that this topic is a pretty prevalent thing that we’ve all experienced in some way or another at different seasons. First, define what you would say spiritual apathy actually is. Then, why don’t you think we talk about it very much in the church?

Uche Anizor
Those are really good questions. I’m defining spiritual apathy as something that’s more than those temporary feelings of, I’m not excited about church. I’m not excited about reading my Bible, or something along those lines. It’s more of a prolonged state of just not wanting to engage in the things of God, whether it is things like reading Scripture or whatever. It’s not really having the energy, desire, motivation to engage in them. It’s a prolonged feeling of being stuck. You’re just not able to get up in the morning to face the things that God has called you to and the things that would actually bring flourishing to your life and to the lives of other people. On one level, it’s something that every Christian experiences in the sense that we all have periods of time where we just feel like we’re not loving God or pursuing God the way that we ought to. If you’re a Christian, you should probably feel that a lot of times in your life. But spiritual apathy is something a little bit more than just that feeling. It’s a long period of time when you’re stuck in that mode.

Matt Tully
Do you feel like there’s a sense in which you struggle to identify if this is apathy in that sense, or is it just, I’m having an off week and I don’t need to be overly concerned? How do you walk that line?

Uche Anizor
It’s difficult to discern it sometimes in yourself. I think it’s easy for me to discern when I’m working with other people and I’ve seen over the course of several meetings. For instance, if I’m mentoring somebody and I see over the course of several meetings that this person is giving me the same answer to: What’s the deal with church? What’s the deal with Scripture? What’s the deal with prayer? What’s the deal with whatever? It’s always the same answer: I don’t know. I’m just not really into it. I don’t know. I just don’t really want to do it. I look at that and can see that there’s something going on there. Now, it may be something more profound like depression or something along those lines, but in many cases it’s not so much clinical depression. There’s something else at play. Part of what I’m trying to do in the book is identify this particular thing. What is this particular thing? You have to be able to say, Okay, it’s not depression, it’s not the dark night of the soul; what is this thing? So, I’m just trying to call this thing apathy. It’s a spiritual blahness towards God and towards the things of God.

Matt Tully
Do you resonate with my comment before that this is maybe a topic that doesn’t seem like we discuss very often in the church? It just doesn’t raise to the level of, Let’s keep this on our mind.

Uche Anizor
We talk about it indirectly perhaps. For instance, if a preacher gets up there and he wants to give a message on evangelism he’ll say, The church is asleep on evangelism! The church doesn’t really care about engaging the lost! That’s sort of an indirect way of saying the church is apathetic toward X; it’s apathetic towards evangelism. There’s a sense in which we talk about it, but we talk about it as it pertains to particular items or particular disciplines of the Christian life. Read your Bible more. Why aren’t we reading our Bible more? We just don’t care about reading our Bible more. Apathy. Have we given serious reflection on how pervasive this is and when it does cross the line from common Christian experience to something that’s a little bit more insidious and more harmful to a Christian? I’m not sure if we have those kinds of conversations in church.

Matt Tully
I’m also struck that when we say things like, Why aren’t we more excited about evangelism? We need to be reading our Bibles more, it’s that corporate language. It’s so valuable and true as churches, and yet it can maybe be a way to distance this issue from ourselves. It’s different to say, We as a church are apathetic about our Bibles vs. I am apathetic in my Bible reading.

Uche Anizor
It is hard to own it. I see a phenomenon like this, for instance, when you have accountability groups. You often have guys (or gals) who will get together and they all share the same issue. Those are the kinds of people you want to have accountability groups with because they’re all going to say, Yeah dude, I totally get it—and actually not hold you accountable in any meaningful sense to the things that you’re either apathetic to or you’re very much engaging in. There is a sense in which we do want to distance ourselves from the reality that we may just be blah towards God and then having to do the work of, How do I get out of this negative place?

Matt Tully
That feels like that’s one of the trickiest things about this topic of apathy is that we might identify, Yes, I have this problem. This isn’t right, and yet the problem itself is working against our desire to fix the problem.

Uche Anizor
That’s exactly right. That’s why I don’t think there’s just really easy solutions. I think we get to a place of apathy slowly, so coming out of it is going to be a slower process rather than just doing a couple of quick how-to’s and then jumping out of an apathetic place.

Matt Tully
Yeah, which strikes at the heart of how we are so conditioned to think in our culture, especially as Americans, that there has to be a quick solution. If I can’t find a quick solution, or if what I try doesn’t have a quick effect, I get discouraged, I give up, it doesn’t feel like it’s worth it.

Uche Anizor
That’s something I wrestled with in writing this book. I would have loved to have been able to come up with two or three things you do, and it works for everybody. As I started to work through understanding what apathy was and all that kind of stuff, I realized no, this is going to be about forming people. The only way you can get out of whatever vice or whatever issue that seems like a prevalent, pervasive issue in your life is through a process and not just some sort of event happening and decisively changing it. God may do that, but it’s more highly likely that you’re going to have to work through a process in cooperation with God and his Spirit to become the kind of person that is not apathetic. But it’s not going to be a simple process.

08:27 - A Personal Experience with Spiritual Apathy

Matt Tully
You write in the book that you are “intimately acquainted with the topic of spiritual apathy.” Can you share a little bit about your own story of struggling with this?

Uche Anizor
I became a Christian in my late teens, went away to university, and as a brand-new Christian got involved in a campus ministry (Campus Crusade for Christ). It really transformed my life. I got mentored, I got taught how to share my faith, I was being discipled in all these different cool ways (mission trips and whatever). But one thing really struck me a few years into my involvement. I just started to feel like, I don’t share the same kind of passion that I sense the people in this room are sharing. I just felt like my passion was not there. Because that feeling persisted for so long, I just thought, Okay. My main spiritual vice is I’m an apathetic Christian. I don’t know what to do about that, but that’s just what I am. That’s what I would echo and repeat to people year after year after year.

Matt Tully
You told people that?

Uche Anizor
I told people that. I told people that my main vice as a Christian—I probably have several main vices—but the one that really sticks out to me is I’m apathetic and I can’t get out of it. I feel so much more shame about it because here I am doing campus ministry—as a student and then I was on staff with Crusade as well—and here I am trying to help other people be passionate about the lost and about the nations, but feeling like my heart just can’t get there. I wake up in the morning and feel a sense of dread in facing my day of having to go out there and share my faith. Some of that is just the typical fears of having to do evangelism, but some of that felt a little bit more problematic to me. That’s my own personal journey with it. I’ve obviously encountered it as well among the young men that I’ve worked with over the years, feeling like, Yeah, I get you. I shared this pervasive sense of blah towards God.

Matt Tully
In your experience working on a campus and then as a professor of theology and presumably interacting with a lot of young people, how common are these struggles with apathy among Christians?

Uche Anizor
Other than the typical kinds of things you hear like struggling with sexual sin and things like that, I would say this is the one thing I hear most often. I don’t want to engage with . . . —whether it’s prayer, evangelism, church, reading the Scriptures. Whatever it is, these things that as Christians we would all say, Yup! These are the most important things. These are the things that bring us close to communion with God. These are the means of grace. There’s just this resistance that we have toward it. That’s just one of the more perplexing things. I see it as pretty common.

Matt Tully
In the book you included a couple of lines from a song that you actually wrote in your journal during one of these seasons of feeling apathetic as a young person. You say in the book that it was a song that summed up your twenties in a really profound way. I wonder if you could read a couple of those lines from the book that you wrote, and then I would love to hear your thoughts on those now.

Uche Anizor
“Wake me up, I don’t know that I’m sleeping,
Wake me up ‘cause I’m dead unawares;
Wake me up ‘cause I’ve fallen asleep,
And I don’t care.

Wake me up ‘cause my life seems a duty,
Wake me up ‘cause I can’t mean a prayer;
Wake me up ‘cause I can’t see Your beauty,
And I don’t care.”

That song was trying to capture two competing realities in my life. On the one hand, I knew in my heart of hearts that God was beautiful and worthy of all my attention and devotion. I knew that, and I knew that in my heart of hearts. But I also knew in my heart of hearts that my response to those enormous realities was just woefully inadequate. But at the same time, I knew that I can’t get myself out of this. So I’m praying, God, please help me to get out of it! I’m writing this song as a way of trying to battle with this apathy, but still recognizing that I’m in need of divine grace. If it’s going to happen I really need God’s help.

Matt Tully
I think so often when we struggle with things, at least in our spiritual lives, I think some of us have grown up in church contexts where the answer was always, Believe the gospel. Trust the gospel. Your theology—you need to understand better what God has done and who you are. I guess I wonder, can you resonate with that? Is that the way you thought? It seems like you are kind of acknowledging in this song the more difficult reality that you kind of knew the right answers. It wasn’t like you didn’t know something. It’s just that your feelings weren’t there. Do you think sometimes we over-intellectualize the Christian faith and even the gospel?

Uche Anizor
I think that’s really, really insightful. I certainly felt like I knew the answer. The answer is love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. That’s the answer. The answer is Jesus loves you and in the gospel you are set free—those kinds of things. I echo those things in my book. However, I knew that there was something more. There’s a deep mystery when we start to think about how we stir our affections. How do we change our desires? There’s a mystery there. There is some work that we have to do. We cooperate with God to some degree, but there really does need to be a decisive working of God that supersedes—that transcends—even our knowledge of what’s right and what’s true about him.

Matt Tully
You dedicate your book to John Piper, who is well-known as someone who is not just built his own ministry at his church but an even broader ministry through Desiring God on this kind of idea that the Christian life is fundamentally a life of affection towards God in a real sense. Do you feel like Piper has helped to shape some of these senses, or maybe how you would address the problem of apathy that you saw in your life?

Uche Anizor
I don’t know John Piper at all. I’ve just listened to his sermons and read his books, especially in my twenties. His vision that largely draws from Jonathan Edwards has profoundly given a real shape to my life. It’s very easy to read Piper and feel like, Man, you’re putting a lot of pressure on me to be passionate and zealous all the time. But what I’ve actually found in Piper is a real sense of the goal—the highest good—really is to find our contentment and our satisfaction and our joy in who God is for us in Christ. That’s just true. However, he talks about it being a fight. That sort of fighting for joy theme that you’ll see in the last chapter of my book, it does draw from him to some degree. He’s not quoted extensively or anything like that, but the general ethos and way of approaching joy is drawing from Piper.

16:36 - Surrounded by a Culture of Apathy

Matt Tully
In the book you talk about this culture of apathy that surrounds us. What do you mean by that?

Uche Anizor
I try to present the irony I feel that pervades our culture. The irony is we’re not apathetic about everything. We’re just kind of apathetic about things that really, really matter. That’s the case in the culture broadly, and that’s the case in Christian culture. We can find ourselves super passionate about someone’s TikTok dis or what’s going on in the celebrity universe—these kinds of things that are completely trivial and completely meaningless. Our hearts can get super exercised about them and super excited about them, which is just fascinating. But when it comes to things that are truly meaningful, oftentimes (and this is not everybody, of course) we can find ourselves just yawning and feeling like these meaningful things are just passé, and we don’t want to engage in that. Secondly, when I talk about a culture of apathy, I think there’s a certain amount of cultural cache you get for basically being authentic and saying, Yeah, I find myself just kind of blah about this stuff. We can just leave it at, Yeah, I totally feel you. We’re all just kind of blah, and that’s just the way that it is. You can sort of be applauded for being authentic when authenticity is clearly not the goal; the goal is love for God. That’s the goal. I do think there is a certain amount that the culture allows for, and sometimes can even applaud, a certain amount of apathy towards things that really matter.

Matt Tully
That’s such an interesting and insightful observation about how our culture on the one hand is incredibly apathetic about important things, but on the other hand we’ve all talked a lot about in the last few years the outrage culture that exists (maybe particularly on social media). There are important conversations being had, but so often there can be this dialing in on little, tiny things—secondary issues—and then the main issue is left unaddressed. What’s behind that? Can you put on your psychologist hat a little bit and try to help us understand why you think that we—all of us, to some extent—can be so prone to be so passionate about a secondary thing while ignoring the big thing?

Uche Anizor
I don’t know. I think there could be a couple of reasons. One is that sometimes apathy is a coping mechanism. If we feel so bombarded by the meaningful—bombarded by these really astronomically large, meaningful things—a coping mechanism is to basically distance yourself from it to the point where you stop caring about it. I think that could be at play in the hearts of some people. If you listen to twenty-four hour news, oftentimes they’re talking about big things but they’re talking about it all the time. You can become numb to the meaningful when you’re constantly being bombarded by the meaningful. That could be part of it. You could also find yourself numbed to these big, meaningful things by being overly bombarded by trivial things. I think we’re constantly bombarded by trivial things. Rather than just spitting out the trivial things, we spit out everything because we’re kind of tired. Those are a couple of things that come to mind. Maybe that doesn’t answer the question.

20:30 - Causes of Apathy

Matt Tully
When it comes to this big topic of apathy but also particularly applied in our spiritual lives, how important is it to identify the cause, or the causes, of that apathy? Is there always a defined cause that we should be able to isolate and then address? Or is it sometimes that we’re not really going to know, it’s not that clear, but we still need to take steps?

Uche Anizor
I think it’s important that we identify causes—I’ll say that in the plural. I don’t think it’s going to be easy to pinpoint anything to one cause. I think life is way too complicated, our souls are way too complicated. We need to be able to identify a general range of the kinds of things that are at work causing us to feel this or that way. When it comes to apathy, in the book I identify seven causes of apathy.

Matt Tully
You call them “seven deadly causes.”

Uche Anizor
“Seven deadly causes.” I don’t see these as the exhaustive list of the only causes toward apathy, but I’m trying to generate sets of ideas, or possible causes, so that we can do the diagnostic work and say, Okay, what are the things that I most resonate with, in terms of the ways in which I think apathy is being developed in my life? Then, if I’m able to say apathy is a pervasive issue in my life because I am constantly bombarded by meaningless things—I love the trivial, I am on Instagram all the time, I am constantly checking everybody’s Twitter feed—there is a crisis of meaning in my life, or a crisis of meaningful things. I need to cultivate a sense of the meaningful again because I’ve lost that. Is there one way to do it? No, there are a number of ways you can do it, and I suggest a number of ways in my book. We need to be able to identify the causes of our illnesses if we’re ever going to be able to rectify them or heal them. Just like if you have a physical ailment, oftentimes there might be one particular cause, but more often than not there is more than one cause. The causes may be stress, but why stress? Because I haven’t gotten enough sleep. Why haven’t you gotten enough sleep? Because of anxiety. Why are you anxious? I don’t know, maybe I’m drinking too much coffee. There are a number of different things at play that might contribute to the particular illness, but you have to be able to identify at least some of the causes if you’re going to make any progress in rectifying it.

Matt Tully
I’m struck at what you said a minute ago that we are complicated. That’s something that we all kind of know intuitively, but at least for me I can sometimes deny that truth in the work I’m willing to put into diagnosing things that I’m struggling with. In the interest of even illustrating a couple of these deadly causes that you list in the book, if you think back to your own struggle with apathy—maybe in your twenties—are there two or three of those causes that you feel like were the primary things at play in your own life?

Uche Anizor
I identify doubt as one of the causes. This may seem like a no-brainer, but I’ll just try to make the connections for us. If I doubt the goodness of God, if I doubt the reality of God, if I doubt that Jesus Christ is the only way, that’s going to have a ripple effect in how I approach things like prayer and evangelism. If Jesus Christ is not the only way, or at least I’m having doubts about that, for whatever reason I’m having these doubts—they may be intellectual, they may just be emotional doubts—but for whatever reason I have these doubts, I need to address them because they’re going to get directly in the way of me wanting to engage in these very important Christian things. Doubt, for me, has been a long time, in-and-out sort of struggle throughout not just in my twenties but beyond my twenties.

Matt Tully
Can I ask a question about doubt in particular? What you just said about the importance of addressing those doubts and facing them head on and trying to resolve them to some extent, that feels like it flies in the face of a lot of the talk that we hear today even from Christians who would say, Embrace your doubts. Your doubts are a good thing because maybe they speak to the genuineness of your faith, or they are evidence that you’re not just believing what someone told you to believe. How do you think about that?

Uche Anizor
That’s a great question. There’s the temptation, in our culture of authenticity, to want to oversell that particular viewpoint and say, Doubt is a glorious thing! Dwell in your doubts and be real. While doubts are normal and lots of people deal with doubts, we don’t want to glorify doubt as if doubt is the ideal. Even when Jesus addresses Thomas’s doubt, his goal is to get Thomas away from doubting. Doubting is not the ideal state of being; belief is the ideal state of being.

Matt Tully
Would you say that doubt is the opposite of faith? Is it the lack of faith to some extent?

Uche Anizor
It sort of dawdles between unbelief and faith. It’s in between there, and that the way that I cast it in the book. It’s sort of a suspension between unbelief and faith. You’re kind of in this place where you want to believe, but you’re hindered for whatever reason—intellectual, emotional, or whatever. The doubt needs to be addressed in whatever way it can be addressed. Part of this is pinpointing what the source of my doubt is. Even at times that can be difficult. Sometimes you may need a wise counselor to help you say, No, it’s not intellectual doubt you’re dealing with. It’s something else that is going on that is maybe more deep and more profound. But you have to deal with it because doubt gets in the way of engaging with the God that you’re doubting.

Matt Tully
As you think about your own struggle, were there any other particular causes that come to mind?

Uche Anizor
There’s a cause I talk about in the book that has to do with feeling inadequate—this general feeling of feeling inadequate or being overwhelmed by my inadequacies. There are times when I’ve felt like I am inadequate to be able to make a change in this or that scenario. It could be a family scenario, it could be a ministry scenario. What happens when I feel inadequate or I feel overwhelmed by my inability to make a change, I just start to disengage. One of the things I try to say in the book is that when you disengage from something, and you continue to disengage from it, you become increasingly numb to the very thing you’re disengaging from and it spirals. I’ve seen that in my life where when I doubt that I have any real agency to make something happen—in my own spiritual life or in the lives of others—then I disengage. That contributes to a feeling of apathy toward it.

Matt Tully
My guess is that there are so many people listening right now who are just nodding along because they know exactly these feelings. I think it’s so helpful to put words and categories to some of these things that we all experience in different ways, in our spiritual lives and also in our work lives, family lives, and our broader relationships. Are there insights from the world of psychology that can help us to better understand our struggles with apathy? You mentioned depression a few minutes ago. That’s obviously not always what’s going on, but how much should we be opening up our horizon to maybe acknowledging some of these other things that could be affecting our spiritual lives?

Uche Anizor
One of the most helpful things for me as I’ve tried to process my twenties and my thirties was actually doing some counseling. In doing some counseling, I was able to sift through what was really going on in my twenties. Was it actually apathy? The conclusion I came to was no, I had mild depression. I was experiencing mild depression in my twenties. It was tied to a number of issues in my past, but I was dealing with actual depression. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t want to engage with the spiritual. It was that there was this pervasive blah over all my life that just affected the spiritual as well. What psychological categories can help us do is just think more clearly, or have a little bit more precision in our thoughts. Depression and apathy are going to overlap, but they don’t overlap entirely. Someone could be apathetic and not deal with depression. Depression has to do with a large-scale, pervasive sense of blah. It’s tied to things like suicidal ideation and those kinds of things that are not just necessarily true of apathy, but there’s a real overlap and apathy could be a symptom of depression. So, some precision is helpful because for instance if I’m really dealing with depression but apathy is a symptom, I really need to deal with the depression if I’m going to get at the apathy.

Matt Tully
I think some Christians could hear you say all that and say, Yeah, but the concern that I have with sometimes bringing in these psychological categories and concepts is that they can at times—and maybe they would say our culture’s day is a great example of that—they can be used as an excuse for a sinful pattern in our life, or just a straightforward not caring enough about God and his word because of all these other mundane things. We’re distracted by other things in our lives. And yet, we can turn to these psychological categories that maybe remove some of the burden and responsibility from us. How would you respond to that concern?

Uche Anizor
That’s really well said. I think one of the key problems with psychological categories is when we see ourselves as the category, or we allow ourselves to be defined by them: I am a depressive. I am just an apathetic person. If we do that, we lock ourselves in a static position or place rather than seeing this as something we are battling. Rather than using the language of, I am struggling or trying to be healed of apathy, depression, etc. we say, I am this. Well, if you are this, then you have no responsibility, or you have less responsibility, to not be that because it’s your identity. No one is going to tell you to lose your identity. But if someone says, I am this Christian person who legitimately loves Jesus. But I am struggling with X, then that’s the kind of language of someone who says, Okay, this doesn’t define me. I actually want to see movement in this. It may be ridiculously difficult to see movement in it, but I want to see movement in it. I think they are different. I can understand people’s anxiety with psychological categories, but categories, in my view, are just ways to group things that share a certain set of symptoms.

Matt Tully
They don’t absolve us of responsibility.

Uche Anizor
They’re not given from God to Moses on the mountaintop. They’re just human observation that might be helpful in us being able to categorize where we’re at, the symptoms that are true of us, and then dealing with those symptoms.

33:00 - An Overdiagnosis of Apathy

Matt Tully
Have you ever struggled in your life, or seen others struggle, with over-diagnosing spiritual apathy in our lives? We feel like we’re wrestling with something and trying to do something the way that we’ve always done it in our spiritual lives, and it’s just not working well for all kinds of reasons. You initially thought, Oh, I’m struggling with apathy here. And then maybe you realized, Maybe not. Maybe I just need to change how I do stuff because my life's different now. Do you know what I’m asking?

Uche Anizor
Yeah, I do. I’ve seen that. Not so much as it’s tied to apathy, but maybe if I think about it for a second it might be apathy that people diagnose themselves with. I’ve seen people get into ruts and the ruts are tied to precisely what you just said—things have changed. New rhythms have to be established. New things are going to stir your heart that didn’t stir your heart before, and things that stirred your heart before don’t stir your heart now, because you are a dynamic human being and you’re constantly changing and life circumstances rub on you and they change you so that you respond to certain things in certain ways at different times in your life. The overdiagnosis could be a problem there when we are, for lack of a better term, too harsh on ourselves. We look at ourselves as failing in this or that when, in fact, we just need to make some tweaks, and allow ourselves to make these tweaks in our spiritual practices.

Matt Tully
I feel like I’ve heard a lot of Christians share stories along the exact same story line of, In college I was in a Bible study every week and I spent forty-five minutes to an hour every morning reading my Bible with a friend. I prayed for an hour. And then they testify that as they got older and got a job, and then maybe got married and had kids, those kinds of things just haven’t been able to continue in the way that they did before. They can feel that sense of guilt and a sense of, What have I lost? I don’t feel like I’m on fire for sharing my faith on campus like I used to be. Do you think that is a common thing where we are too hard on ourselves? Or is it that we need to be realistic that we have oftentimes gotten distracted from things?

Uche Anizor
I think it’s both/and. We don’t want to let ourselves off the hook. There is a thing called youthful zeal, and youthful zeal can be good and bad. But there’s a thing called youthful zeal. When you’re younger and there’s more energy and less responsibility, you’re able to engage with these spiritual practices in a way that is far more energetic, for lack of a better term. Then you get older, you get some responsibilities, you get jobs and bills and kids and other mental burdens that are significant. Can those things wear on you? Certainly. Might there be a call to reclaim some of that youthful zeal? Yes, perhaps. But on the flip side, zeal is going to be displayed differently as a twenty-something (likely) than it’s going to look in someone that is forty-five, fifty-five, sixty-five. The inner core of the zeal maybe hasn’t changed—there’s still a love for God—but the way that we’re going to express our love for God might be different given our particular life circumstances. For instance, in my life I used to identify myself as apathetic, then realized I wasn’t apathetic. But even in those states of me being apathetic in my twenties, I would have said, I’m still going out there going after it, I’m praying passionately, I’m worshiping! At this stage in my life—at forty-five years old—I would say I’m far less apathetic than I was in my twenties, but I don’t display it in the same ways. My love for God is expressed in these more steady, faithful kinds of things rather than these bursts of exuberance. I think there has to be some latitude given for how things change when you get older. They just do. And even you change as you get older; your personality shifts as you get older. You want to allow for some of that while at the same time holding the tension of saying God is worth loving. Whatever it looks like to love God and to love him wholeheartedly, try to do that. If that looks like what it looked like in your twenties, then try to re-engage that as best as you can and cry out to the Lord for that. But if it’s not that, then try to discover what it looks like to love the Lord as a forty-five or fifty-year-old.

Matt Tully
You mentioned “bursts of exuberance,” and it makes me think of the quintessential—at least in my circles—Christian youth group experience of going to the Christian camp. They’ve got the music there, you’re there, and you give your life to the Lord (maybe for the seventh time). Or maybe a mission trip does this. You’re so excited and you’re so passionate, and then a few weeks later you’ve almost lost that zeal. It just speaks to the fact that sometimes we can have unrealistic expectations and we don’t even realize maybe the role that our emotions are playing in stuff. We need to have a little bit more realistic view of these things.

Uche Anizor
I think that’s right. God, in his kindness, knows our frame and so he knows the eighteen-year-old or twenty-year-old needs certain sets of experiences. But he’s not going to replicate those experiences in the exact same way into your thirties and your forties because the experiences are meant to launch you into the ordinary. They’re meant to be that catapult so that you actually want to walk with God in the mundane and the ordinary, everyday of your Christianity. It’s kind of like this: I’m not going to get engaged to my wife thirty times. I’m not going to get married to her thirty times. I’m going to get married to her once, and I’m going to get engaged to her once. But those experiences launch me into the good stuff, and the good stuff is the mundane. Sometimes we might be too hard on ourselves when we feel like our lives are too mundane as Christians. I think oftentimes that’s actually the place that God wants you to be—the day-to-day plod that feels less than exciting, but it’s the real stuff.

39:39 - Encouragement for the Apathetic

Matt Tully
We are so conditioned, maybe as Americans, to chase after those experiences, and we really don’t like the mundane. We don’t like the ordinary. Uche, could you speak to the person listening right now who has heard all of this and would have to confess after hearing this, Yeah, I think I am struggling with apathy. I both acknowledge that and also don’t care sometimes—what would you say to that person as a final word of encouragement?

Uche Anizor
I would say a couple of things. First, your apathy doesn’t define you. What defines you is what God has said about you and what God has done for you in Jesus Christ. That’s what defines you. Even for those who find themselves numb to God, God actually still cares. God is actually engaged with you even when you say you don’t care, and even when in your heart you don’t care. God is still engaged with you as a Christian. You can have this hope that undergirding your spiritual growth and your climb out of this pit of apathy is a God who is far more caring, far more engaged with your heart than even you might be. But then I would also say that this same God, his grace propels us to actually engage with our apathy and to do some work. But that work is, again, empowered by God’s Spirit. We are those who are loved by God and God is engaged with us, but at the same time he is saying, Work with me. I’ve given everything you need to live a godly life in Christ Jesus. So then, let’s think about what it might mean to cultivate a heart, cultivate a life that is maybe less prone to apathy. Or, if I’m currently in a state of apathy, what does it take to slowly cultivate those things that help me climb out of there? But God is with you even in trying to cultivate those virtues in your life. You’re not just doing them as someone who is trying to develop habits by their flesh. You’re doing it as someone who really is empowered by the Spirit of God.

Matt Tully
I think that as a first step in that work that we do with God and empowered by his Spirit is even identifying the problem and trying to figure out the causes, which I think you’ve helped us do hear today. And you do that so well in the book itself. Uche, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.

Uche Anizor
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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