In this episode, they explore the vulnerability of waiting and the struggle between wanting quick fixes and trusting in a bigger story. Both Dan and Derek remind us that hope grows in the soil of deep, honest relationships—connections that help us imagine a future filled with restoration and belonging. Advent, they suggest, is a “haunting” season, one that challenges us to sit with the tension of longing and trust. It’s a time to nurture patience, imagination, and faith—even when the path forward feels uncertain. Join them as they wrestle with the beauty and complexity of waiting with hope.
Listener Resources:
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About Our Guests:
Dr. Dan Allender has pioneered a unique and innovative approach to trauma and abuse therapy over the past 30 years. After receiving his Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, Dr. Allender earned his PhD in Counseling Psychology from Michigan State University. He previously taught in the Biblical Counseling department of Grace Theological Seminary and the MA in Biblical Counseling program at Colorado Christian University in Denver. In 1997, Dan and a cadre of others founded The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology, in order to train therapists, pastors, artists, and leaders to more effectively serve in the context of the 21st century. Dan served as President of The Seattle School from 2002-2009. Dan continues to serve as Professor of Counseling Psychology at The Seattle School. He travels and speaks extensively to present his unique perspective on sexual abuse recovery, love and forgiveness, intimacy and marriage, worship, and other related topics. Dan is also the author of several groundbreaking books, and he hosts The Allender Center’s weekly podcast, with more than 1 million downloads since 2014.
Dr. J. Derek McNeil was named the fourth president of The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology in 2019. Since joining the leadership team at The Seattle School in 2010 as Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. McNeil has been integral to our achievement of regional accreditation, the reimagining of our common curriculum, and securing millions in grant funding. Dr. McNeil has a PhD in Counseling Psychology from Northwestern University and an MDiv from Fuller Theological Seminary. Prior to his tenure at The Seattle School, Dr. McNeil served as faculty in the PsyD program at Wheaton College Graduate School for over 15 years. Dr. McNeil has worked as a clinician in private practice, a diversity advisor, an organizational consultant, and an administrator. His research, writing, and speaking have focused on issues of ethnic and racial socialization, the role of forgiveness in peacemaking, the identity development of African-American males, leadership in living systems, and resilience. He has written chapters in The Black Family: Past, Present, and Future (1991), Men to Men: Voices of African American Males (1996), Why Psychology Needs Theology (2005), This Side of Heaven: Race Ethnicity and Christian Faith (2007), Reluctant Integration (2010), and Roadmap to Reconciliation: Moving Communities into Unity, Wholeness and Justice (2016).
Episode Transcript:
Derek: Hello friends. Today, Dr. Allender and I will be spending time talking about Advent and the season of waiting. And our topic is hope. And we’ve been talking a little bit before of course, and we were talking about just how difficult is it is in these times to hold onto hope. And I had confessed that I was struggling with a bit of cynicism, with a bit of hard to hold on to what felt hopeful and had moved into a little bit of kind of hostility towards hope, if you will. And just the challenge in a period of waiting how hard it is to in some ways, hold on. And I’m saying using the word, hold on for a reason. Hold on to hope, hold on to hope. And then we started talking a little bit. Dan wanted to ask me some questions about my dog and I’ll just share. A couple months ago we lost a dog we had for 15 years. And I had mentioned that I still have ghosts of her around. She still, I’m waiting for her to turn the corner. I’m waiting for her to come down the steps. And in some moments she reminds me I’m waiting for something, I’m looking for something, I’m holding out for something. And the joy that she brought to us for those fifteen and a half years, there’s still some part of me that misses that and that sense of, I’ll call it hope. She was full of energy and always greeted us. It has become a challenge for me to greet my wife when she comes to the door in that same way I can’t jump and leap and bounce and she misses that clearly I’m not adequate to do that. But both of us, I think miss that sense of the energy that hope brings, the energy that possibilities bring. And so I’ll just in a strange way begin our conversation about advent around waiting and waiting for a sense of hope and possibility.
Dan: Derek, thank you for inviting me into this conversation. But when I heard that a beloved presence in your home, and again, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve chatted over Zoom where that lovely pup was either on your lap or near you. So the reality of waiting in the sense of waiting for what has been a presence in both your lives, a goodness. And yet in that the word that really struck me is the word haunted. And we are, when we experience loss and do not have the return of what our heart most desires, there is a haunting. And that’s, between the word, this season opens up, particularly in this unique political season, opens up a lot of struggle for me with fear, which oftentimes gets metabolized because fear itself feels so vulnerable, it’s so easy to move to irritation if not outright anger and maybe even moments of rage. And then because it’s so powerful to feel anger and yet so impotent because it usually moves nowhere well, it leaves me in many ways feeling that sense of despair. And so between what you just put words to struggle with cynicism, struggle with haunting, how do you see that as not just our current reality, but the reality of waiting for what advent points to, and that’s the advent of the return of Jesus.
Derek: Yeah. Yes. It’s interesting. I realize when you were talking and asking, kind of formulating, sometimes I forget that Jesus is returning and that’s what’s hard to hold onto at times. And that is very much shaped by the conditions that I see. So we talked a little bit about the political environment, and I don’t think I focus as much on candidates as I focus on our fragmentation or I focus on our polarization or I see how far it is that we see the same world than each other does. And there is a certain despairing that comes with that. And I think the way to manage that despair where I’ve chosen to manage that despair or struggled with managing despair is not kind of a Pollyanna-ish sort of optimism, but is in fact I’ve struggled with the reality of it and it feels like it’s hard to hold hope, or a cynicism. And so the haunting quality, and I think when I think about Bella, which is our little dog, the haunting quality, there’s some part of me that’s still hoping and some part of me is saying, stop hoping it’s not going to happen. And so I’m haunted by the hope it’s still there. And then I am disabused, abused of that. I’m abused of that by in some ways facing into what I see. So the sort of optimism being kind of what we see, I’m seeing some things that hurt and that frighten me and that leave me feeling like, will this ever change? This keeps coming back if you will.
Dan: You have memories. And those memories are in many ways so full, so rich, and they are all around your house, all around your own body. The walks that I know of. The only thing I could be confident about when I ask you if you’re exercising is that that beloved dog was going to get you out of the house. So even for me, I don’t think I ever met Bella, but I saw her. And the reality is there’s grief for me, for you because even I hold memory of her and her presence. You know, Gabriel Marcel, a brilliant Christian philosopher theologian, spoke to me the core of what I understand hope to be, and that is he called hope: a memory of the future. So we hold the experience of the past, we hold experiences of hope fulfilled and the sweetness of that passage in Proverbs 13:12, “hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is the very tree of life.” So our memories sometimes have that sense of the tree of life desires having been fulfilled. So I think of Jesus’ coming essentially what we celebrate at Advent, I have great joy, great, a sense of yes, my faith feels without much doubt there. But the moment I then go from the memory of the past to the memory of the future, that’s where I find my own heart struggling. So I come to advent with, I’m so glad you came. When are you going to return? What more needs to occur in the decimation and degradation of this earth and all in it before you return? So now I’m in this juxtaposition between innocence, I do believe, and yet cynicism at some level. And the essential question of is he really going to return? And now both collide particularly as I said, in a insane era as well as the very era of advent. So for you, how do you connect innocence and despair, if not cynicism?
Derek: Well, I’ll go back a little bit before I respond to that. I love the sort of image of memory of the future, and it has that sense of we need things to draw us out of the present into the future. We need an imagination for the future. And what Christ is offering us in this sort of, I’m going to return, I promise I’ll be back, is the sense of something that pulls us out of the fragmentation of the now into the wholeness of the future, into the promise of what will be come happen. And it is, you’re right. I think when the memory of the past says it’s not possible because we can’t hope in that way, we can’t risk it. It feels too painful to be disappointed again. We need then that imagination that draws us into something more, into something more that holds us into a future. And so I love that notion, and I mean even in terms of conversation, it helps me with my, oh, that’s not going to happen quality. Oh, that’s not going to occur. And we were talking earlier about this sense of innocence and this sort of hunger, I think very much in the sort of narrative of the garden, this sense of what is lost is lost, is innocence lost, this sort of hunger that Christ will return us to shalom, a place where innocence is restored, shalom is restored, and there is a clashing both in some folk push me one direction and some folk push me in another. And the question for me as you were talking, because I think this is happening for me, even as we’re talking, you’re nudging me towards the imagination and I need to be nudged towards the imagination and we need to do that for each other, to remind each other of the story of our future, the story that is written and not quite yet, the story that is emerging, the story that’s coming with an end point in a hope and trust and faith in God, and that I will need that nudging. I will need that pulling into the future because of sometimes the past and the current feels so hard to manage and negotiate.
Dan: Yes. Yeah, the intersection of being able to go, I can fully because of the presence of Jesus fully engage that I long to be innocent, more innocent. And even if it’s a second innocence, an innocence that has gone through something of the tumult of despair and cynicism, the fact that I believe that, I believe he came, that he came as the phenomenal child, baby vulnerable, needing the milk from his mother needing care and diapering everything that has been spoken about, the nature of the raw vulnerability of Jesus. Yet within that, there is a holding ability on his part to hold with me a sense of I don’t wait well. And in that I don’t wait well for a light, for a stop sign. Again, I’m not particularly thrilled with my level of immaturity, but if I can’t wait that well for something that insignificant, how will I wait well for another week, month, year, decade century for the return that I long for most when the infinite promise of the restoration of shalom will be full. So we are, I think as we enter into this season, we are in a bind. We are in this inner play of ambivalence of something so deeply satisfying. It is a tree of life but also deferred. It’s on the horizon and it’s asking a lot of us,
Derek: It is.
Dan: To actually enter it rather than commercialize it or rather than fight over Starbucks didn’t put on the cup this year the symbolism of Jesus. So when we make this idiotic and a silly cultural war, it’s just another way that we transpose our anxiety into a kind of level of anger and irritation to keep us from this haunting. This is a haunting season, and just even the way you put words to that for me allows me to go, I feel haunted and I don’t have to be terrified, nor in some sense radically critical or shamed for feeling the ambivalence itself.
Derek: It’s interesting, again, the feelings that have even in the midst of this conversation, gone from a struggle with why are we talking about hope anyway to, oh gee, I can almost see it and I think I want to highlight in this conversation the necessity of each other. Even as you’re talking, you really are encouraging me as you’re talking and you’re encouraging my imagination and you’re encouraging me to reach further, I also have some sense of how difficult it is when you have been wounded and betrayed to trust the future and to trust that you won’t be betrayed again. It’s hard to not believe it won’t happen again. The disappointment, the wounding, the wounding to my core won’t happen again. And all I can do is protect myself. And so in some ways I see the anger as an attempt to protect myself at my core from what’s going to hurt and not just hurt, but so disorient my sense of self and my sense of who I am and to whom I belong to. And I think part of the other thing that stood out for me as you’re talking is the challenge of the finite and the infinite. And we have to find the infinite in the finite, in the now in this, and how is God speaking through us in the midst of, which to me is part of the dilemma of Christian struggling with the current state of affairs. I don’t mean that we wouldn’t struggle, but that we would find solutions that are finite solutions in the current state of affairs. And so our pursuit of the infinite in the finite is also challenged. I would rather the bread today, I would rather in some ways you give me something and not wait for something that God would give me. I would rather, in some ways you catch me and keep me protected and safe than in some ways to risk more for the reign of God in the earth. And so it erodes our ability in that sense too, to not eat bread, not consume today to in some ways take my goodies now get all and get right this minute, and our ability in some ways to feel protected and part of something longer to belong to something more.
Dan: From one standpoint, I think you’re echoing brilliantly what Paul says in Romans 8:24. It’s been a passage that, I’ll go back to the word haunting. It’s haunted me for a long time, “but who hopes for what they already have? But hope that is seen is no hope at all. But if we hope for what we yet have, we wait for it patiently.” And in that sense, Paul feels like he’s dangling something of the reality that once you have something, a hope is essentially utterly foreign to it. We desire something as material as a new couch, a new car, you anticipate, you plan, you save, you begin looking. There is always, I mean in so many ways, I always anticipate a trip more than the actual experience usually of it. Yet when you finally have it, hope is just essentially not a category. But what we don’t have, this is what has certainly messed with me on many levels. What we don’t have, we wait for it patiently. And I’m going, Are you sure Paul? Does that really fit your experience? And I think it’s so disruptive for me that it cast me back to that question of what am I missing about the nature of the hope of his return, his advent, his second advent, but it’s still advent. What is it about that that I’m not getting that allows me to be able to hold this tension, this ambivalence, but also to hold it with quiet anticipation and a patience to allow that cynicism, to allow that despair to be in so many ways washed away like a flood, taking lumber down the river. So I’d just love for you to put words to how do you see the reality of his patience growing in you or what you think is required for us to be able to enter this advent season with far more hope and therefore far more patience?
Derek: It’s interesting. My answer, to me at least my initial answer is we need each other. I mean, this is in some ways a reality of this conversation, at least the reality of the conversation for me. And we haven’t seen each other for a little bit. And it’s like, Hey, we need to catch up. And the catching up is not just simply bantering about what happened. There is in each of us a searching for hope in each other and in the connection. And so I want to at least begin the answer to what do I do? I think there’s something necessary about fellowship or connection or intimate connections, honest connections, struggling connections. Even in some ways, my confession of being struggling with cynicism is my attempt to bring myself anew to a conversation and to say, Hey, me too. I’m struggling with hope even though I’m talking about hope and I’m hoping for hope. So I don’t want us to dismiss what in some ways inherently what it means to be human. And that is to be in relationship, that is to be connected. And I think then in that connection, you remind me of the memory of the future that I’m going to come back to, that you’re helping me to feel, not just simply see, but feel and sense that God is, God is i’ll, just simply say, God is. And that’s a statement not of this current moment but future. And I know I need that I need to have an imagination for something beyond. I think the other piece is the sense of belonging to God, a sense that I am linked to something larger than me and that I will struggle with the imagination. I will struggle to hold on sometimes the season of waiting, Christ coming and Christmas, Thanksgiving, et cetera, can be some of the most depressing times for people because there’s no, they lose or they’re reminded they don’t belong. They’re reminded that there is not some place that they’re connected and linked and tied to, or the conflicts in tension, even though they may sit with they don’t belong. And so I’m reminded that the relationships in my life become important to remember and hold onto and remind me again of a future hope and possibility. But I’m increasingly in moments like this, not dependent on my own sort of willpower to get it done. I’ve appreciated whatever resilience personally I have, but I’m reminded that resilience pales in comparison to be with people who can actually help me hold the dream, can help me hold the hope.
Dan: The passage in Romans 8:24, what I didn’t read were the verses before or starting around verse 17 that begins this process of talking about how the earth groans and then how we groan inwardly. And then later on in that chapter how the spirit of God groans within us with words that we cannot hear yet are spoken before the face of the Father and the son on our behalf. And so I think even as we began talking before we came into the actual podcast about Bella’s departure, the grief and the haunting, I think whenever we share any portion of grief on behalf of one another, there is that owning of both the longing but also the sense of the anticipation of the longing being fulfilled. And again, I don’t know how to put it better than I’m ping ponging between the settling of grief on your behalf and the fellowship together of grief and also the desire for you, particularly with regard to a beloved presence of God, that her departure really does sting and only increases something of your own desire for the restoration of all things. So when we hold grief together, but also desire together, there is something that it incubates, at least it’s the embryonic movement toward hope. And I find desire itself is in many ways the antithesis of cynicism. To desire… The cynic essentially says, I will let nothing cause me the vulnerability of being disappointed again as you put so well. So that reality of letting desire through grief grow, I’m finding to be the ground, to be able to enter into the weeks ahead of anticipating the moment that we celebrate the arrival, the coming.
Derek: And there is a growing sense as you’re talking of finding in the grief, a sort of gratitude that starts small but grows, even the hurt of it can bring a gratitude. I’m alive and my liveness wants to link and connect and be in communion with God and communion with others. And that sense of small mustard seed gratitude, I know it has to be exercised, it has to be strengthened, it has to be practiced, if you will. But I can feel in the grief as a way of avoiding despair because I think the gratitude helps me to avoid despair. That in that there is a sense of transformation, emergence something new that I don’t think I could have seen. And so in a way, Bella’s leaving us and the necessity of her leaving us to actually see something different in my relationships with my children and my wife, and it is initially with grief, the grief of even each other’s absence. We haven’t been with each other because Bella could be in the middle in a certain type of way. And our sharing of grief actually brings a new sort of gratitude for her and for each other. And I do think there is in this sort of waiting, it’s not only a waiting for Christ, it’s a waiting to be transformed. It’s a waiting to be brought new. It’s a waiting to become, if you will, in some ways that could only occur without the pain and the grief.
Dan: Yes, well, even the term mustard seed, if you have, but the faith of a mustard seed, you could take this mulberry tree and throw it into the sea and plant it. And the implication is you could create reversal where no plant can grow in the sea. This can grow if you have even the teeniest bit of faith. So I think it’s back to this season is meant to create some degree of haunting, but in that the imagination of desire, not for the I’m all for a nice gift, but the gift is, as you have put it, so well, the restoration of all things, the return of Bella and all that we all have lost the return of Bella and all that our hearts desire, all that’s at play with regard to what we are entering into with regard to advent.
Derek: And I would say that is a good way for us to talk and speak and think and hope and wait for Christ returning.
Dan: Well, my friend, may it be a remarkably haunting, delightful, and truly merry Christmas to you.
Derek: And I’ll say the same to you. And my prayer for you in this is a sense of newness, a sense of even transformed when I thought I couldn’t birth a baby anymore, a sense of hope and possibility. And so thank you for our playing, our continued play.
Dan: What an honor. Thank you.
