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Prepare to take off on a thought provoking journey with Brian McLaren. Named by Time Magazine as one of the world's top 25 theologians. We're diving deep into his latest literary work, the Last Voyage, exploring what it means to navigate life with intention and ensure our contributions echo for generations to come.

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This isn't just a book, it's a guide to living a life that truly matters.

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Welcome to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Nurturing through Adversity. In this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of grandparents raising grandchildren as we navigate the complexities of legal, financial, and emotional support. I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society. Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of childrearing for children who have experienced trauma and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of kinship care.

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We'll discuss how we can change the. Course of history by rewriting our grandchildren's future, all within a supportive community that understands the unique joys and struggles.

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This podcast was made especially for you.

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Welcome to a community where your voice is heard, your your experiences are valued, and your journey is honored.

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As with all of Brian McLaren's books, his literary style quickly brings me to matters of the heart.

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The first in this science fiction trilogy is no different.

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A huge theme that leaped out to me was Legacy the Future Our Grandchildren Will Inherit. It explores the spiritual needs and moral concerns for humanity's future, addressing the fears and anxieties of an uncertain world. It also addresses the bonds, the struggles, and the unique wisdom that we as grandparents have to bring to intergenerational relationships. This is a conversation every grandparent, and frankly, every, every person shaping the future needs to hear.

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So listen in now and become part of this vital dialogue. Welcome, Brian. I'm so excited to have you back on the show, especially since today is the release of your new book, the Last Voyage. I know. Very good timing and so happy to see you. And let me just say again how glad I am that you are doing this podcast. And I'm sure all the listeners are so grateful to to have help for a group of people who a lot of people don't even know have taken on a huge labor of love. And all this support is greatly appreciated, I'm sure. Thank you. And thank you for your support as always. Your books, when I read them, always seem to relate to something that's going on in my life, and this book was no different. Your mastery with words translates very well into science fiction. They Always bring up issues of the heart for me. For listeners who might be unfamiliar with your work, can you tell us a bit about what led you to write this particular book? Sure. Well, for the over 8 billion people who've never heard of me, maybe it's close to 9 billion now.

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I started my career as a college English teacher. So literature was a big part of my life, and I thought that would be my career. I ended up working, leaving higher education to become a pastor, which some people might say is another form of higher education. Others might not feel that way, but I was a pastor for 24 years, and during that time I started writing books. My first couple books were nonfiction, but then I wrote a fiction trilogy about 25 years ago that introduced me to a lot of people and in many ways. Well, one of my mentors back when I was in graduate school was a novelist named Walker Percy. And Walker Percy had trained to be a doctor, specifically a pathologist. And then he had a life threatening disease and he never practiced medicine. He ended up becoming a novelist.

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During that time, he, he said, you know, he had spent his higher education trying to understand disease, and then when he had a disease, he had to figure out what it meant to be alive and a human being who is interested in what life really means. So that's why he became a novelist. And, and Walker Percy said that he saw novel writing as a form of, of scientific exploration. By that, he, he would put a character in a predicament and run it like an experiment to see what would happen. And, and that always has stayed with me. And so actually, nine years ago, I, I, the idea for this science fiction story began to take shape for me, and it was a way to explore issues that I was writing about in my nonfiction and issues that I was just feeling in life, you know, so, so that's how this thing evolved. Yeah. That's wonderful.

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For me, as I read your book and thought about our listeners, a huge theme that leaped out to me was legacy. Yes.

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The issues that you raised are sensitive ones for many of us.

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For some of us, ones we may not dare speak about, some that we're just not comfortable speaking about.

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Yeah. But I know that these things weigh on our hearts. Being that we care so deeply about the future that these grandchildren of ours that we're raising will inherit, especially having stepped in as primary caregivers to ensure a different path for them, a better path for them. Yes, we're aware of what hasn't worked for them in the past. We're trying to figure out their Challenges, figure out how to give them happier and healthier lives. Ultimately, we're thinking about spiritual needs and moral concerns, just as the characters in your book are in your story the Last Voyage. The characters are virtually traveling to another planet for their very survival, which echoes, I think, that immense sense of responsibility that we as grandparents have for our grandchildren and their future.

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Yes. What would you say are some of your reflections on this powerful connection between your story and the kind of legacy building we as grandparents raising grandchildren are doing? Oh, my goodness. So, Laura, first of all, I'm so appreciative of. Of the way that you are always thinking about your audience and what their needs and questions are. Of course, that's what a writer has to try to do as well. You have to think about your audience, what are their needs?

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And as you know, one of the main sort of relational dramas in the book is a relationship between a father and his daughter.

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Yeah. And. And the father, in a sense, is very disappointed in his daughter because he raised her to be kind of like him, analytic, scientific, skeptical.

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And then she developed an interest in religion and spirituality, and he's just feels like she's wasted her life. So there's this deep disappointment on that side. And then for the daughter, there's love for her, for Father, but also this deep wound that he hasn't accepted who she is and that he's continually trying to control her and make her into someone more in his image. And one of the things that I think of for grandparents who are raising their grandchildren is very often, I would imagine, there are those kinds of deep dramas in the generation in between the grandparent and the grandchildren, and this sense of something that I think all of us as parents eventually have to come to terms with, that we give ourselves children, but sometimes it's a different thing to give our children life and the freedom to make their own decisions, including sometimes decisions that break our hearts and maybe even decisions that hurt their own children. And so all of that struggle with. With legacy is, it seems to me, a drama that. That everyone has to deal with in. In one way or another. So the word legacy is the right. Is the right word. And then to think of people in the situation of grandparents raising grandchildren, then they have to make this transfer to say, okay, I have to now be concerned about one generation farther removed. And that evokes for me this shift that I think is super necessary in human beings in general at this point in history. And that's a shift from being concerned about ourselves or only being concerned about ourselves and our Children to start thinking ahead, multiple generations into the future, and to understand that all of us make or withhold a legacy that will go on long after we're gone.

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And so those are a few of the thoughts that, that come to my mind. You know, I also think a change that's happened in the world is we, many of us were raised with this assumption. We can look back now and see that this was an immature assumption or an untested assumption, but it was an assumption that all of our peers shared. And it was that each generation does better than the generation that came before, that they'll make more money, that they'll get a better education, they'll live in a better neighborhood. You know, this sense of almost inevitable improvement. And now more and more people, especially of younger generations, are waking up saying, there is no way I will ever make as much money as my parents made. There is no way I'll have as many opportunities as my parents did.

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And, and there's this global sense that, that we've reached a change in history in that way.

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And that involves, I would think, a sense of disillusionment like, and disappointment that also is part of one of the things we have to cope with as we get older in building a legacy. We have to process our own disappointments and our own.

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The dreams that we had maybe for how our older years were going to be that now are not what we expected. So all of those are issues that I think I'm trying to, to work with in the, in the book and that I hope as readers see them play out in these other characters, it will give them some space maybe to get in touch with for themselves. Yes, I can appreciate you raising those issues in the book. The spiritual needs and the morality concerns for this generation's future I think have become very complex. Yeah. One of the things that's difficult for me is how do I address that and yet stay open minded about the spiritual lessons that I'm teaching my grandchildren.

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Yeah. How can we be more inclusive of today's issues, the issues that they're dealing with, our grandkids are dealing with.

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If we want to help these kids move past their disappointment, to have hope and solutions that are real life and applicable. Oh my God. That's, you know, as you would imagine with having written a lot of nonfiction books on spirituality and theology and so on, I travel a lot to speak about my books. And so one of my favorite things when I speak is when I stop speaking and get to do question and response or question and answer with people and by far. If I were to take the last 20 years, by far the most common question I've heard around the world again and again is parents and grandparents saying, I don't like the way I was. I don't like the form of religion I was given as a child.

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And so I don't want to pass that on to my children or grandchildren. But I also feel if I don't pass on anything to them, that's a problem too. And people feel caught, you know, in this space and. And it's. It's a really important struggle to parents who are asking and grandparents who are asking that question, what do I do for my children and grandchildren? The first thing I would do is I would tell our grandchildren our own story and tell it honestly. Tell them the story of our life with religion, or tell them honestly the story of what made sense to us and what didn't make sense to us. And tell them, if we believe in God, what God is like and why we believe that and how that's worked out in our experience.

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If we have mixed feelings about organized religion, let's be honest, children can handle our mixed feelings.

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I completely agree. And there's nothing that's more important in these conversations than honesty.

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Yeah. Let me just give two quick examples. I think for us to tell our children at times when we felt the presence of love, the presence of peace, the presence of God in our lives in ways that were deeply important to us, to try to remember those stories and tell them, I think is incredibly important. And it's equally important to tell them times when we felt disillusioned and doubt and maybe we felt abandoned, and then how did we work that through? If adults are never honest with children about those struggles, when the children face those struggles in their own lives, they'll feel like I'm the first person who ever had this problem. Normal people don't have this problem.

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There's something wrong with me for having this problem, and we don't want them to feel that. That's the struggle that even Colfax father and daughter are experiencing in the first part of the trilogy. Yes, I believe that's one of the greatest walls I've had to overcome with these grandchildren sharing. Moving beyond that, the wisdom and advice that I learned, the honesty that I've had to develop in having conversations with them, difficult conversations, new conversations that I've never had before with my children or my grandchildren before, the conversations that my parents had with me, just don't apply in this generation. We need to be brutally honest with ourselves and with the kids about what works and what doesn't work, and not be afraid of the new conversations that come up.

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That's one of the things I love about your work, Brian, and why I appreciate you as a theologian.

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We're charting a new course for humanity. That's what you're speaking about in the Last voyage, addressing the anxieties we have about the challenges in this world. They're the same types of concerns that we have for these grandchildren that we're raising that have been through a lot of trauma or have special needs. You know, you make me think, Laura, of a friend who has a special needs child, and they live in North Carolina, where they went through the horrible flooding just about a year ago. And, you know, there were several waves of that flooding, and the flood was the initial problem, but then they had problems of lost electricity, lost Internet, you know, so many stores that went out of business that are not coming back their lives. The effects of that have been so far reaching.

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And he said to me, he was talking with his son the other day, I. His son is about. I think about 11.

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And his son said, dad, how many.

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Oh, what was the word he used? How many.

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How many natural disasters did you go through by the time you were 11? Right. By the time you were my age. And his father had to say, I never went through a natural disaster in my entire childhood and in my entire adulthood until the same one you went through. Right. And he realized that part of what his son was trying to process is, this isn't easy for me to go through as a kid.

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And the father was able to say, yeah, I never went through it.

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And so it is really hard. And in a certain sense, it brought them together in a different way to say, this is hard for you to go through. This is hard for me to go through, too. And, you know, there's sometimes where the best gift we can give to our children is, hey, I'm strong. I'm in control. You don't have to be afraid. You can count on me. There are other times we give younger children a gift when we say, yeah, I'm a little. I was. I was afraid to. And I'm a little. I'm still don't feel like I'm back to normal either. Absolutely. And the lessons that emerge from their stories and in the book about cultivating resilience and perseverance when the stakes are so high, we're an essential part of the traveler's journey, not dissimilar to the choices we grandparents are making when Giving up so much for the sake of a greater future for others. That's right. And you know, this is the thing I would imagine, Laura, that so many, that you and so many of the, the participants in this podcast community feel you get to a point in life where you expect life to maybe get a little bit easier. And, and then, and then suddenly it's not only like suddenly the, the stakes got, get higher than you ever would have imagined. And, and one of the things I think that's important to remember is, you know, I'm sure there's responsibility and there's duty and there's any number of dimensions to this, but at some level there's love. Love, you know, love for, for these precious kids and for them being in a situation they never asked for. And, and this is part of what we're having to realize, you know, in the background of this book, the Last Voyage is the, is realities of climate change and other global issues that are there that nobody asked for. They, they, you know, we, we didn't realize what the trouble that we were making for so long and, and now here we are and we have to cope with it. And you address what some of the long term results of that ignorance is.

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Yeah. I can't wait to see where you take us after the first trilogy. I'm curious, can we expect further exploration of the fact that society often values different generations or defines purpose based, particularly for those who may not fit a singular productivity based mold for say the older generation, our generation, or for neurodiverse youth, people with handicaps.

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Yeah. So let me talk a little bit about. So the first in the trilogy is called the Last Voyage and then this, and it takes us through some people being recruited for a last voyage to Mars. We can tell, tell folks that much. It starts with them being recruited and then trained and then we get halfway through. The voyage to get to Mars would probably take about nine months. So it's a nine month voyage. Nine months is sort of an interesting number, isn't it? Yes. So we get halfway through the voyage. The second book begins with the landing on, on Mars and, and their, their first year joining this, this community who's been there for some time.

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And in a certain sense the team that formed during those nine months now has to integrate with a larger community that is the, the title is the Great Rift. Of course, the Great Rift refers to if you know anything about Mars. There's this huge chasm like imagine the Grand Canyon on steroids that is like a scar across the whole land mass of the planet. And this is where they're settled. But that great rift suggests a great rift between the people as well. And so they find themselves in that conflict. And how are they going to face it and deal with it, especially with the need for. They. These are all young people, almost all young people who've been recruited to go to Mars. And eventually the idea is they need to reproduce there. And they have kept postponing it because they have so many problems to solve. And then comes the point where they say, if we don't start having babies soon, you know, other problems are going to set in. And so here's this thing that is very real to us. How do we raise children in tumultuous times? How do we bring children into a world that has huge challenges? So that's the second novel, the third novel, Will. Will, fast forward 30 years to where a new generation has grown up there. And maybe all I'll say about that is what. What's part of the dramatic center of that third novel will be that the people on Mars reestablish contact with people on. With some people on Earth. And now they have 30 years of history to. To.

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Maybe that's all I should say about that. That's exciting. Thanks for sharing that little tidbit with us, Brian, as this is the first book in a trilogy, what core message or enduring feeling do you hope readers will carry with them after finishing this book?

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Yes, well, let me answer that in two ways, Laura. One as a message and one as person. In terms of a message, I think one of our challenges is more and more of us are feeling that we are in. We're in. And we are entering a difficult patch now for folks, for grandparents raising grandchildren here, you know, there's a. This is true in one very, very practical way.

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But I think all of us are also aware that the whole. Our whole planet, our whole civilization is. Is in a difficult.

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And what I hope they will feel in many ways, this is why I wrote the book, not for myself, just to process these complex feelings that we're dealing with in these times. So I hope in watching characters work out some of these dramas that will feel some space for ourselves to let these things work out. Psychologists tell us that in our dreams we create stories where we work out our tensions of our daily life. And I have a feeling that novels at their best work kind of like waking dreams, where we work out some of those tensions. So I hope that will.

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That's the message that people will take, is that I have some space to work out some of these struggles.

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But the. The first volume begins and ends with this character named Gabriella, who is, I think, I hope, is a lovable and fascinating and intriguing character.

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And one of the qualities that Gabriela has is this kind of incredible resilience. And she's the person who, when everyone else is running out of steam, she is able to dig deep, dig deep down and find some reservoirs of energy and resilience and hope. And I hope that people will feel that their inner Gabriela will have a little bit of encouragement and activation.

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And I might add that she has a great sense of humor while she's. Doing it, which is one of the things we all need, isn't it? Well, it's been certainly valuable for me.

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Yes. Well, Brian, I must say your extraordinary writing skills translated seamlessly into the genre. Every character held a very vibrant thread in the relevant design of the story, which is an amazing accomplishment. It speaks volumes about you as a writer. I was enthralled and the book is very quick reading, I want to say, for the listeners. I highly recommend it. Well, actually, Laura, let's just say probably for a lot of folks who are in this stage in life, it's hard to imagine getting time to do anything that is relaxing or refreshing or involves silence and solitude, but hopefully folks will find a way. Maybe it might require asking a favor of someone else to give you a break to get some time to read, but I think it's worth it when we get that chance. I agree. Thank you so much for this conversation, Brian, and for releasing such a thought provoking book. It captured so many of my deepest concerns and I was utterly captivated and looking forward to the next in the trilogy.

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Well, thank you and let me just say once again, not only to you, thanks for this good work you're doing, but to all of the members of this podcast family. Thank you for the beautiful and I know sometimes draining and difficult, but so important and I hope deeply rewarding at times to work that you're doing for.

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For future generations. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Brian, and I'm sure our listeners thank you. When can we expect the second installment and will the full trilogy be available on Kindle?

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So yes, it should be available in Kindle already and other online reading. And an audiobook should be available any day now if it isn't available already.

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So I always find that's a good way read fiction is to hear it. And. And volume two should be out in about a year and then volume three, hopefully a little less than a year after that.

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Brian, where can the listeners connect with you further about your work?

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Sure. Well, my website is just My name, Brian McLaren, B R I A N M C L A R e n brian mclaren.net and there's links there to buy the book from. You know, I'm, I'm a huge fan of independent booksellers and so. But there's links to all the places they can buy the book. It's available anywhere. I'll also put that information in the show notes as well. Great. Thank you.

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You're welcome. What kind of future do we truly want for our children and grandchildren? What fears and concerns do we need to address and what tools can we equip them with to cope and thrive? What's working and what's not for both our generation and theirs, these are the real crucial conversations that need to happen. Our grandchildren are this world's future. How do we best prepare them to make it a better one?

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Next time we're going to be tackling a crucial topic with psychologist Gloria van der horst, who has 50 years of experience. We'll explore how traditional emotional conditioning affects our children, particularly boys, leading to what Gloria calls an emotional dessert.

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Discover the subtle ways our culture can limit emotional expression and more importantly, learn how we as grandparents can foster emotional wholeness and healthy self expression for all our grandchildren. Tune in for vital insights on building a foundation of emotional well being for the children you love.

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Thank you for tuning in to grandparents Raising grandchildren.

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Nurturing through adversity. Remember, you are not alone. Together we can find strength and hope. In the face of adversity.

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Peace be with you. And I pray that you find some time this week to listen to your. Inner wisdom amongst the noise and the. Pandemonium of this world.