Person kneeling in prayer on a quiet beach, symbolizing faith, hope, and reflection.

Mike Hutchinson explores why people rely on faith during life's hardest moments, examining the biblical foundations of faith alongside honest conversations about suffering, mental illness, infertility, and hope.

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When life falls apart, people often reach for something bigger than themselves. But why?

Mike Hutchinson looks at why faith becomes an anchor during hardship, beginning with what the Bible says about faith before moving into deeply personal stories of bipolar disorder, infertility, adoption, anger, and unanswered questions.

Rather than offering easy answers, he examines how faith, action, and resilience intersect when life doesn't go according to plan and why suffering has always been part of the human experience.

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What It Means to Be Human Through a Christian Worldview

Mike Hutchinson: Being human means being made in the image of God. It means being fallen and fallible on this side of Eden where we live. It means having incredible resilience. It means having incredible compassion. It means the ability to have a great deal of hope.

It also means having the capacity for an indescribable evil, as I think history amply proves. But it also means that we have an unbelievable potential for some of the most amazing acts of kindness and compassion that you can imagine. So that's what being human means.

Brandi Fleck: Welcome to the Human Amplified podcast, where we believe transforming ourselves can positively transform society.

Your host, Brandi Fleck, has the honor of exploring the human condition with real people who bravely share their personal stories of adversity, healing, joy, and more.

If you're seeking empowerment, strength, and inspiration, listen in to engage and explore tough topics that help us humanize one another, understand ourselves better, spread love, and connect.

Welcome back this week to the Human Amplified podcast. I'm your host, Brandi Fleck.

If you're just tuning in for the first time, hello! We recommend giving Episode 1 and Episode 36 a listen to get a feel for the range of topics on the show.

If you're a regular, that is so, so awesome. Thank you so much for listening.

Black-and-white portrait of a smiling man wearing glasses, a checkered shirt, and a vest.

Our guest, Mike Hutchinson, affectionately known as Hutch, is a student of Christian Reformed theology and host of the True Presbyterian podcast. He lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with his wife, by way of South Carolina. He's been through seminary and is studying to become ordained later this year.

Last week we heard Part One of a two-part series where our guest, Hutch, really gave us a scholarly foundation for understanding faith. If you missed it, go back and listen when you get a chance, as there is historical and theological context around some of the concepts we discuss in Part Two today.

So this week, in Part Two, we discuss the biblical support for faith and how that plays into the definition of faith, why people rely on faith during hard times, whether the Puritans were really sexually repressed, loving your neighbor, and then we get personal. Hutch opens up about being human himself, suffering from bipolar disorder, when he's had faith and when he hasn't had faith, and how infertility impacts himself and his marriage. He even briefly touches on suicide, adoption, and rage.

But Hutch also opens up about a time in his life when he only had faith to rely on.

From this episode, you'll learn how to have faith that suffering is a normal part of the human condition. It's okay to be human. You'll learn about the relationship between faith and action, and you'll also get motivation to keep trying in life, even when faith is in short supply.

Mike Hutchinson: It's really difficult to escape the spiritual. You can't get away from it. It's always there, and it's always lurking in the background.

Biblical Support for Faith in the Bible

Brandi Fleck: Okay, what is the biblical support for faith? I know you mentioned some a little bit earlier, but let's see what else you can say there.

Mike Hutchinson: There are, just by my count, roughly 227 particular passages of Scripture just in the New Testament that I could go to here.

I don't think your listeners really want me to do that unless they want to get a full-tilt sermon, and this isn't the medium for that, and that's not what they came here for, so I'm not going to preach.

But we can go to Matthew 8:10, where you have the Roman soldier that goes to Jesus and says, "I have this servant that's sick, and I'm very close to him. I know that if you do nothing more than say the word, he will be healed."

Jesus calls his disciples to him and says, "All right, let's go. We can go to this man's house. We'll go and heal his servant."

And the man says, "No, no. I don't need you to go to my house. Just say the word because, like you, I am a man who has authority. If I say to my servant, 'Go here and do that,' he goes there and does that."

Jesus' response to this is, "He marveled and said to those who followed him, 'Truly I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found this sort of faith.'"

So it's this absolute trust in that passage that Christ can do what he says he can do, that all he has to do is speak the word.

You could go to other passages. The friends of a paralytic in Matthew Chapter 9 bring him to Jesus, lying on this bed, and Jesus sees their faith in bringing their paralyzed friend to him. Seeing their faith, he then says to the paralytic, "Take heart, my son. Your sins are forgiven."

That leads into this great theological debate that occurs in the rest of Matthew Chapter 9. Like, who is this man who dares to say, "Your sins are forgiven," when only God can say that? And that kind of flows out of this passage for the rest of Matthew Chapter 9.

But there, faith is something that's active. It does something. Faith brings, or faith motivates, these people to bring this paralyzed man to the one who can heal him and who forgives their sins.

There's the famous narrative of the woman that has a hemorrhage. Jesus is traveling between places, and there's this woman who's in the crowd. She knows that if she can just get to Jesus, she'll be healed.

She can't quite make it through the press of the crowd, so she says, "If I can just get my hands on the hem of his cloak, that will do the trick," so to speak.

For folks that are listening to this that may share my Christian faith, no, I'm not describing Jesus as a magician that does tricks. Don't send me nasty grams to my email, okay? I'm speaking colloquially here.

She grabs the hem of his garment, and Jesus turns around and says, "Who touched me?" for he felt power go out of him.

His disciples look at him like he's crazy. "What do you mean, 'Who touched you?' Do you not see the thousands of people that are pressed up against you? How dare you ask this question? You're nuts."

This woman falls at Jesus' feet and says, "It was me."

His response to her is, "Daughter, go and be well, for your faith has made you whole."

So there, it's this absolute, certain trust that if you can just get to Jesus, then the issue, in this case the issue of blood, can be solved.

We can see it again in multiple other places. When Peter deals with the paralytic that he and John heal on their way into the temple in Acts Chapter 3, they heal this man who has crippled legs, and he leaps up and begins running and leaping through the temple, praising God very loudly.

This crowd rushes together, and they recognize him as the man that was sitting by the Beautiful Gate, that had sat there for years begging for money because he was unable to care for himself. They're trying to figure out, "How did this happen?"

Peter stands up and preaches this sermon and says, "Men and brothers, why do you look at this as though it's some sort of shocking event? It's by faith in the name of Christ that this man has been made strong, whom you see and know. The faith that is through Jesus has given this man this renewed and perfect health in the presence of you all."

So there we see that faith has an object, right? Faith isn't just sort of, "I believe." It's something that you believe in, and biblically the object of faith is Christ.

We could also go to places like Romans Chapter 3, Ephesians Chapter 2, Galatians Chapters 2 and 3, Colossians Chapter 3. There are all of these places where we can see that faith is spoken of as the instrument that takes hold of Christ for our justification. So there are texts upon texts that we can go to here.

Brandi Fleck: Okay. Well, thank you for that.

We're going to shift gears just a little bit. Just generally, how does someone have faith?

What Faith Is According to the Bible

Mike Hutchinson: Well, the answer to that question is Ephesians Chapter 2.

Brandi Fleck: Okay. Maybe we're not switching gears.

Mike Hutchinson: No, not entirely.

Again, keeping in mind that I approach this from a historic Christian perspective, that's really the only way that I can answer this question and be consistent with my own stated beliefs.

So, Ephesians Chapter 2, verses 8 and 9: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God."

If you were looking at that text in Greek, when it says that you have been saved by grace through faith, "faith" is an instrumental term. Then it says, "This is the gift of God."

The demonstrative pronoun there in Greek is a neuter pronoun, which matters because the preceding two nouns there, grace and faith, are both feminine. The way that you would refer back to both of them in Greek is by using a neuter noun to encompass both of them.

So the answer to "How does someone have faith?" is right there. It is a gift of God.

Faith isn't something you can just gin up. It would be really easy if you could go with a monkey grinder and just make faith pop out whenever you want it. Having faith can be a real struggle.

Brandi Fleck: Gotcha. Ultimately, faith is God's gift.

Mike Hutchinson: Yeah. Having faith really can be a struggle sometimes.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah. Tell me about it.

Why do you think so many people cite faith as helping them through their tough times?

Mike Hutchinson: Another good question.

For those of us that would consider ourselves to be people who are inclined to faith, so speaking here broader than simply Christians, anyone that considers themselves a person of faith, for most of us, faith tends to be the anchor that holds when everything else fails.

Let's be clear. Speaking more narrowly from my own Christian worldview, the Bible is actually really clear and very honest about the human condition, about what we face in life, and about the fact that, let's be fair, suffering is normal.

That's actually hard, believe it or not, for a lot of Christians to hear because we've got this... I'm probably going to offend somebody now, so let me just warn you.

Brandi Fleck: Okay.

Why Faith Helps People Through Hard Times

Mike Hutchinson: We've got this sort of happy-clappy evangelicalism that's out there. In some ways, it's first cousins to moralistic therapeutic deism. You know, "God just wants you to be happy."

I tell you, if that's what you believe, that God just wants you to be happy, what are you going to do when your wife has a miscarriage? What are you going to do when your 16-year-old grandson gets in a car after school with a friend who just bought a brand-new Camaro and is leaving Indian Trail High School just outside of Charlotte, and his friend stomps on the gas on their way down a back road, loses control of the car, flies into an embankment at 110 miles an hour, and kills them both?

God just wants you to be happy? Where's your faith now?

The reality is that suffering is normal.

You can go to your local evangelical church, and you can sing your happy-clappy 7-Eleven chorus. You know, it's got seven words that you repeat 11 times, and there's no depth to it, and there's nowhere for you to put your anchor.

But then you go and you read the Book of Job, and Job is just one tragedy after another in Job's life. He loses everything that he owns.

In that particular time period in the ancient Near East, the measure of your wealth would have been your cattle, your livestock, camels, sheep, goats, so on and so forth. He loses all of that. Then his house gets laid out by a whirlwind, and then all of his children are killed.

The whole rest of the Book of Job is Job trying to struggle with this question.

There's this moment in Job where Job's response to all of this is to say, "Though he slay me, yet I know that my Redeemer lives and will walk upon the earth."

That's that faith. That's that anchor that's just dug in.

The reality is that the vast majority of what passes for Christianity right now can't deal with suffering. It doesn't know how to because we don't know how to deal with suffering.

Let's be fair. You and I live in an age where suffering, in the way that even our grandparents and great-grandparents did, is totally foreign to us. We don't know anybody who's in an iron lung with polio.

Brandi Fleck: That's true.

Mike Hutchinson: Go further back. Go into the 17th century.

There's this misconception that the Puritans in England and Scotland were really sexually hung up and repressed. I would like to counter that accusation by pointing out that, on average, they had 13 to 14 kids. They couldn't have been that sexually repressed.

Brandi Fleck: That's true.

Mike Hutchinson: But they also came from a time when it was really common to lose six or seven kids in infancy.

The Puritans have a lot to say about suffering and about how we approach suffering. My pastor, Dr. Brian Cosby, did his PhD at the Australian College of Theology on the theology of John Flavel, who was an English Puritan. He's written a popular book on the subject called Suffering and Sovereignty that is so helpful, and not just because he's my pastor. It would be good either way.

Again, if you're talking about suffering, let's get honest for a second. This is Psalm 88. I promise you nobody sang this in church last Sunday.

Here we go.

"Lord God, who delivers me, by day I cry out, and at night I pray before you. Listen to my prayer. Pay attention to my cry for help. For my life is filled with troubles, and I am ready to enter Sheol. They treat me like those who descend into the grave. I am a helpless man, adrift among the dead, like corpses lying in the grave whom you remember no more and who are cut off from your power.

"You have placed me in the lowest regions of the pit, in the darkest places, in the watery depths. Your anger bears down on me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves. You cause those who know me to keep their distance. You make me an appalling sight to them. I am trapped, and I cannot get free. My eyes grow weak because of oppression.

"I call out to you, O Lord, all day long. I spread out my hands in prayer to you. Do you accomplish amazing things for the dead? Will the departed spirits rise up and give you thanks? Is your loyal love proclaimed in the grave, or your faithfulness from the place of the dead? Are your amazing deeds experienced in the darkness, or your deliverance in the land of oblivion?

"As for me, I cry out to you, O Lord. In the morning my prayer confronts you. O God, why do you reject me and pay no attention to me? I am oppressed and have..."

Mike Hutchinson: ...been on the verge of death since my youth. I have been subjected to horrors, and I'm numb with pain. Your anger overwhelms me. Your terrors destroy me. They surround me like water all day long. You have caused my friends and neighbors to keep their distance. Darkness is my only companion.

That's not a happy-clappy song for worship on Sunday morning if what you're looking for is "God just wants you to be happy." But I'll tell you this: it's honest.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah.

Mike Hutchinson: That is about as honest a statement of the human condition as you can imagine. Speaking as somebody who's bipolar, who's on medication, who has gone through those catastrophic depressions where it's all you can do to blink, that takes every bit of energy you have. Yeah, Psalm 88, that one's right up my alley. Psalm 44 is much the same thing.

The Christian Perspective on Suffering

Brandi Fleck: So suffering is normal in our human condition. Do you think it's possible for us, through faith, to get rid of suffering?

Mike Hutchinson: Yeah. We would speak of that as a sort of general faith. So generally speaking, could we have faith that, as humans, we're able to come together and triumph over some of these things? I think we can, for some. I think there will be some that will forever remain outside of our grasp.

I think, though, that my immediate concern, at least, is not with humanity necessarily coming together to try and fix all of the world's problems. I'm more concerned with walking out of my front door and loving my neighbor. That's something I can do, right?

I don't have a PhD in virology, so if you're looking for me to fix coronavirus, you have knocked on the wrong door. That's true for most of us.

But loving my neighbor, helping my neighbor, just being a generally kind person, I think that's something we could all do. Except for the sociopaths. They're out there doing their own thing, right?

But yeah, I think that's possible. I don't think we'll get rid of it all, like I said, but I think we could make some headway in some areas.

Brandi Fleck: Okay. So now I want to ask a few more personal questions. Do you rely on faith constantly in your own life, in good times and in bad? How often would you say you rely on faith?

Mike Hutchinson: Well, if I were the stereotypical good Christian and gave the good Christian answer to this, I would say every day and all the time. But sadly, I have not yet been made perfectly holy. I still live here in this world where I fail on a regular basis.

There are a lot of times where I try to do things in my own strength that I have no business doing in my own strength. There are certain areas where you really need to be relying on God and upon Jesus Christ for these things to come about, to happen the way that you want to.

You just kind of forget to pray, put your head down, do the work yourself, and then you stand back shocked when it all doesn't work out the way that you wanted it to.

But I do rely on faith a great deal. That's not to say that I don't rely on it at all.

Every day there's going to be something that comes up that either challenges your faith or challenges you to strengthen your faith and to grow in grace. You have to meet those challenges when they come.

Should I approach every day, moment to moment, in faith? Absolutely. That's what I'm called to do.

Am I able to do that in my own power? No. There is this remnant of sin within me, and I have to fight it every day.

Every time I start to feel like I'm making progress or growth in grace, that's usually the moment where I wind up in a really stupid argument with my wife and think to myself, "Wow, you have not yet grown in the gentleness and Christlikeness that you thought you had. So keep plugging, buddy."

Brandi Fleck: Okay. Well, that was very honest. Thank you.

Have there been times in your life when faith was in short supply? Can you describe an example for us?

Mike Hutchinson: There have been a lot of times where faith was in short supply, some of them a little personal for this podcast. But yeah, there have been some times where faith was in short supply, without question.

Brandi Fleck: Okay.

Mike Hutchinson: Sometimes you find yourself backed into a corner, or maybe you painted yourself there. I suppose it depends on who you ask, right? Whether you got backed in or whether you put yourself there.

You can't see any way out or any way forward, and that's the moment where faith can wind up in really short supply because now what do you do?

Here's a great example, and I hope she won't fuss at me for sharing this. I don't think she will.

My wife has endometriosis, and she suffers with excruciating pain every time her cycle comes around. As a result of that, we have been unable to have children, despite the fact that we desperately want them. I would love to have a house full of ankle-biters running around right now.

But what's become really obvious in the last five years is that's just not going to happen for us.

There are some days where faith is mighty low and where all I want to do is just scream at God for an hour. Fortunately, he's pretty big, and he can handle that. We find examples of that in the Psalms, and so that's what I do.

But yeah, there have been plenty of occasions in my own life when faith was in short supply.

I didn't have any idea that I was going to be able to get into seminary. I never did an undergraduate degree. I taught myself just about everything that I know. Graduated from high school, joined the Army, took my own education on my own shoulders.

I was 29 years old when I started seminary. Went straight into a master's program. I'm writing a thesis right now and really hopeful that I'll be able to go on and do a PhD, but I don't know how that's going to happen because I sure don't have that money in the bank.

So yeah, faith is in short supply. Faith is in short supply most days.

Brandi Fleck: Okay. Well, conversely, do you have any examples in your own life when you only had faith to rely on? What was the outcome?

Mike Hutchinson: Getting out of the restaurant business.

I had no idea how I was going to do that. As I said at the beginning of the episode, I had been really successful in the restaurant business. I was good at it, good enough that I built a reputation as the guy that you called when your restaurant wasn't performing well to come fix it.

I had built a track record of turning restaurants around pretty quickly. The way to do that is drastic, and most restaurant owners aren't willing to do it. But if it gets bad enough that you called me, you were in really bad straits.

I was making good money. I was making enough that when the market crashed in 2008, I was able to help my parents keep up their house payment and pay all of my own bills and some of theirs.

Brandi Fleck: Mm-hmm.

Mike Hutchinson: And now I'm going to go to seminary full-time? I'm going to give up that money? I've been working since I was 14 and a half years old. I don't know how to not have a job.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah.

Mike Hutchinson: I'm going to stop all of that and go to seminary?

Brandi Fleck: Yeah.

Mike Hutchinson: Sure. Okay, whatever. But okay, if this is legitimately what the Lord has called me to do, then he's going to make a way for us to do it.

Trisha quit her job. I quit my job. We got married. We moved to Greenville. I started seminary.

Six or seven weeks later, she got a job with a human resources company making better money than I did in the restaurant business.

Brandi Fleck: Awesome.

Mike Hutchinson: You could not have predicted that. No background in human resources. No experience. No nothing. Gets hired on at a company.

I will say this publicly just as much as I say it privately: she is killing it. Just absolutely killing it at her job. She's crushing it every day.

Brandi Fleck: Awesome.

Mike Hutchinson: Again, all I had to go on there was, "All right, I've got to give up this money, and I don't know what I'm going to do, but all I've got is faith. So let's roll the dice and see what comes up."

It turned out okay. Supposedly. I suppose some of that might remain to be seen, but it's...

Mike Hutchinson: ...turned out okay so far.

Brandi Fleck: Good, good.

Living With Bipolar Disorder, Infertility, and Faith

All right. If someone close to you was going through a hard time, or maybe not even going through a hard time but just needed advice, what advice would you give them if coming from a lens of faith?

Mike Hutchinson: The first thing would be this: take stock of reality.

Okay, so you're going through a really rough time. All too often, when we find ourselves in a place where things aren't going well, we tend to get so focused on what's not going well that we miss what is.

Sometimes the first thing that you need to do is get your eyes off the problem. That is not easy to do, especially when you're emotionally bound up in it. You have to put a certain distance between you and the problem and go, "Okay, I need to take stock of this."

This is the problem, and all of this is not the problem.

All things being equal, there's a lot more that isn't the problem than is. Sometimes you've got to get a little bit of space from it and say, "Okay, how big is this problem really?" and assess the situation.

The second thing that I would tell people is you've got to own the problem. You can't just go, "Oh, this problem is out there." No, you've got to make that problem yours.

Okay, so I've got this that's in front of me that I'm struggling with. What am I going to do about it now?

For me, that was bipolar disorder. There was a point in my early twenties where I was just off the rails. The terrible thing about mental illness is that it's mental. You can't think your way out of it.

In that situation, I had to rely on a man who was the best friend I have on the planet to kind of get in my ear and go, "Hutch, you need to do something about this because this isn't going to end well."

Then, when I wasn't catastrophically depressed or wildly manic, when I was in that brief clear period between those two swings, that was the moment that I was finally able to go, "Okay, I've got to do something about this. Marshall's right."

If you're dealing with something like bipolar disorder or with a major depressive episode or those sorts of things, first you need to own it. You can't do anything until you admit that it's there.

Then once you've owned it, now do something about it. Go see a doctor. Go see a psychiatrist. Go get some counseling. Get on your medication. Once you're on your medication, by God, stay on it.

I get it. The medication sucks. There are no two ways about that. On the other hand, for me, bipolar disease is no different from heart disease or high blood pressure. On a long enough timeline, it drops my survival rate to zero. Eventually the disease kills me.

I know that because when I was 22, I had figured out the perfect way to kill myself. It would have been absolutely successful, no question.

So that's one thing: own it first, then deal with it.

Once you've done that and you've taken the step that you need to start dealing with whatever this problem is, celebrate every tiny victory that you get.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah.

Mike Hutchinson: I get it. The problem's massive, and maybe that little bitty victory that you made doesn't seem like much at that particular point in time. But you know what they say about how you eat an elephant, right?

Do it one bite at a time.

Brandi Fleck: Mm.

Mike Hutchinson: So celebrate every small victory you get. That's a start.

Brandi Fleck: I'm thinking back to the three words that you defined faith with earlier in the episode. Since I'm not a theologian, I'm having trouble remembering them.

Mike Hutchinson: No, no, that's fine. It's notitia. Notitia is knowledge. Assensus is assent. Then there is fiducia, which is resting or surrender.

Brandi Fleck: Resting, okay. So I'm thinking, when you're giving your advice, there's a responsibility on a person to get through an issue by taking action in some way.

Is faith action-based? You have that resting portion. You have the knowing part where you have to own it. Where does the action come in?

Mike Hutchinson: The action flows out of faith.

Brandi Fleck: Ah, okay.

Mike Hutchinson: So faith is the basis for the action you take.

I have a lot of stuff in my backstory. Part of a piece of that is that I was adopted when I was six weeks old. In 1980, nobody was being diagnosed with this stuff, but had they, I would have been diagnosed with an attachment disorder.

A big part of my life growing up was trying to shut the door on as much emotion as I could and trying to be rational as much as possible because there were a lot of snakes in that bag that I didn't want to deal with.

In fairness, I am still probably the most emotionally closed-off person that you will probably meet. But the one emotion that I've always got access to, day in, day out, moment to moment, is sheer, unmitigated rage. It's always there at my fingertips, and it doesn't take much for me to find it. Not much at all.

So how do I deal with that?

Well, the first thing is I have an absolute faith, unquestioning, that the God who began a good work in me will bring it to completion.

That means that every day, one of the things that I'm having to do constantly is, when I get myself in a situation where it's like, "Okay, I can feel that temperature gauge redlining," the first thing I've got to do is, "Yes, I rely on God to bring me through this to the end, but there's a responsibility that's on me too."

The first responsibility is for me to take a deep breath and get a hold of that thing before it gets out of control because, once again, I'm a veteran. The Army spent a whole bunch of money teaching me to distribute violence very efficiently.

As a guy who did go off the handle in 1999 and in 2000 and dodged jail time by the skin of his teeth, I don't ever want that to happen again.

I know what it looks like when that thing gets loose. The very first thing that I have to do is, "Okay, Lord, I trust that you're making me better at this, and now I've got to deal with it too."

There's this relationship between faith and action that takes place in my own life.

Brandi Fleck: Gotcha.

All right. Well, this is really powerful stuff. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you think is important to say?

Mike Hutchinson: Yeah. I can think of at least two things.

One is that people are going to listen to this and go, "This guy wants to be a pastor. He's talking about being a guy that has rage problems and everything else."

Yeah, I am.

Supporting Pastors and Understanding the Weight of Ministry

The first thing that I'd want you to know is your pastor is human.

Brandi Fleck: Mm-hmm.

Mike Hutchinson: He is no different than you. He's just been called to a different job. His vocation is different from yours.

Growing out of that is to have a great deal of compassion for your pastor because that guy deals with stuff day in and day out that you know nothing about, and you can't know because it's his job to keep those secrets forever.

He doesn't even get to go home and share those with his wife.

Brandi Fleck: You can't.

Mike Hutchinson: You've got people walking into your pastor's office on the worst day of their life and spilling their guts to him about all sorts of things.

You've got the wife that comes in to talk to the pastor about the fact that her husband's been cheating on her. Or you've got the husband who does the same.

Or here's the one that nobody wants to talk about. You've got the husband that comes in to talk to the pastor because his wife has been beating him senseless.

Nobody wants to talk about men as victims of domestic violence.

Brandi Fleck: Yeah.

Mike Hutchinson: I am here to tell you it is vastly more prevalent than anyone thinks. It is way more prevalent.

Brandi Fleck: I believe that.

Mike Hutchinson: Your pastor can't go home and tell his wife, "Baby, Johnny's wife is smacking him in the head with a frying pan."

He has a responsibility to call the police, which he needs to do if he's a mandatory reporter under the law.

But even then, that puts the pastor in a tough spot because, in the vast majority of states, they operate under the Duluth Model, which means that no matter what happened, he gets arrested because he's automatically considered the aggressor under their guidelines, not under the law. Guidelines are way more vicious than laws are.

I have a very good friend in my home state. People are going to think I'm kidding here. I'm not.

A very good friend in my home state whose wife was dealing with major mental issues. She was physically attacking him. It was so bad that when she would start, he would cut on all the lights outside the house and go stand outside so that if the neighbors called the cops, when they looked out the window they'd see him standing outside and know that he wasn't the one doing it.

When the cops showed up, the sheriff's deputy told him, "When she starts doing this, the smartest thing you can do is get in your car and leave because if she breaks so much as a fingernail, we will take you straight to jail. It doesn't matter if you're standing here bleeding. It doesn't matter if you've been beaten so bad your eyes are swollen shut. We're going to take you to jail."

Your pastor hears about this stuff, and he's got to carry that weight.

Okay, so that would be the main thing that I'd tell you: have a great deal of compassion for the very human pastors that you meet and interact with.

Brandi Fleck: Okay. Well, I also want to ask you, please let our listeners know, where can they find you? Where's your podcast? What's your website? What's all that stuff?

Mike Hutchinson: The podcast is titled The True Presbyterian. You can find it in Apple Podcasts, iTunes, basically anywhere that you can think of. I'm pretty sure I'm in Spotify and Overcast and Castbox and all of the other services.

The idea was that I wanted to try to introduce people to the Reformed faith in a way that was really easy.

Yeah, you can go and buy John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion, but you're going to have to wade through about a thousand pages to do that.

When I drive or I'm out and about or I do anything else, I listen to podcasts. There was no one out there doing a sort of educational podcast to say, "Okay, let me introduce you to the basics of Reformed theology."

That's what Season One has been all about. I've brought in the smartest guys that I could get. At any rate, I know there are some smarter guys out there. No offense, guests. You were all very smart.

But I brought in the smartest guys that I could find, and so far it's gone incredibly well.

I've appeared on some other outside podcasts, and I've done some special episodes for folks who are recovering from spiritually abusive backgrounds and fundamentalism and that sort of thing to try and help them. I've dealt with some other cultural stuff too that would, depending on which end of the political spectrum you're on, make some people mad.

But I figure as long as I've got people on the left and the right shooting at me, I'm probably doing everything I should be doing. As long as I'm taking fire from both sides, I feel like I'm in the right spot.

The Hope of Christianity and Eternal Life

I would end the podcast, though, with this. If you're facing suffering, if that's what you're dealing with, suffering shouldn't surprise you.

It's 1 Peter, Chapter 4, verse 12:

"Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes to test you, as though something strange were happening to you."

Now, Peter's writing that to a Christian church that's facing legitimate persecution. People are dying for their faith.

But more generally speaking, that's true for everybody, right? Don't be surprised when suffering comes. This was bound to happen. Don't be shocked by it. It is, in fact, completely normal.

Real life isn't Instagram. Real life isn't Facebook. #Blessed. Real life isn't any of that.

Whatever problem there is that's out there, whatever problem there is that's plaguing you, it might never go away. But you can learn to live with it.

I'm not saying that's easy by any stretch of the imagination. It's not. It's hard. It's dirty. It sucks. But it can be done. You can learn to live with it.

But for the Christian, our hope is that these afflictions are temporary because our hope is that when we die, because we have been united to Christ by faith, which is what we've been talking about this whole episode, that just as he was resurrected and now dwells at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, so we too will be resurrected to life, the fullness of life that we never get to experience here.

But the flip side of that, the other side of that, and yes, this is going to sound horribly exclusive and judgmental, and feel free to send me whatever email you want to send me at thetruepresbyterian@gmail.com. Don't send your complaints about this to Brandi. This is not her fault.

But the other side of that is that I absolutely believe, unquestionably, that those who die apart from Christ will face the wrath that is to come.

I don't say that because I think I'm better than you. I don't say that because I think that I'm any better off than you are.The only difference between me and you is the fact that God called me to himself.

Maybe, just maybe, you're listening to this and we're talking about faith, and you're thinking, "I want to investigate this more."

Okay. Well, investigate it more. Go find a solid church. Talk to the pastor. Do what I did. Ask him about this Jesus guy and why any of this really matters.

Here's what I'll tell you: all of those who repent and believe upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ will be saved because the promise is to you and to your children.

Brandi Fleck: All right, Hutch. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for really delving into some personal topics there. I know that might not be easy.

I want to say best of luck on your journey to ordination. You're doing really great work, and thank you.

Mike Hutchinson: Yeah. I'll take all the prayers I can get at this point because these ordination exams are going to try and kill me before this is over with.

All right. Thank you very much for inviting me to come on the show. I had an absolute blast.

Brandi Fleck: There you have it. I hope you enjoyed this episode.