The Deep Places with Ross Douthat🩺

🐘NYT Columnist Battles Chronic Lyme Disease. Finds Healing & Hope.🐘

🐘Saving Elephants Podcast:

Interview with Ross Douthat, the New York Times columnist, about his new book, The Deep Places, and finding his way through Chronic Lyme Disease to hope and healing.🎙️♿️

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat joins Josh Lewis to talk about his recent memoir The Deep Places. His book tells of his recent journey in battling chronic Lyme disease and his reflections on illness, discovery, and hope. Deep Places is an incredible read. Ross brings deep insights into what living with a chronic illness disability is like and how to find healing in a world that isn’t friendly to the unconventional. ✍️

Ross’ story begins before the illness in which he was attempting to build the life he’d always dreamed of. “At that moment in my life I only really believed in upside…I wrote my share of words on the problem of evil…usually making the case that much of American Christianity offers people the wrong answers, encouraging them to believe that actually bad things shouldn’t happen if you’re good, that the American Dream should be yours if you just stay in God’s good graces and follow the paths that He’s marked out.”😮‍💨

“I had a similar critique of the secular meritocracy in which I had been educated: that because it asked its climbers to work so hard and jump so high, it encouraged an idea that we had somehow earned all our privileges, that our SAT scores and extracurricular accomplishments meant that we genuinely deserved to rule.”

“But despite these critiques, there was still a sense in which I believed exactly these ideas myself—or at least for myself—as I passed through college into adulthood, achieved the career as a writer that I wanted, won the wife I wanted, the job I wanted, the kids I wanted, and now the house and country life I wanted, too.”

Yet life had other plans for Ross as he’s spent the past six years battling an invisible enemy that’s robbed much of the life he’d built. His book offers profound insights into what we can make of our sufferings and how to keep hope in hopeless situations.💊💡

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