Amazing Grace

I was delighted to read in the Spring 2020 issue of the Wheaton College magazine that writer and public speaker Philip Yancey had received the Distinguished Service to Society Award from the Illinois college’s Alumni Association. The association was honoring him for his extraordinary leadership as an author best known for his “honesty and curiosity.”

  In an interview with Ciera Horton McElroy, Yancey explained that his years at Wheaton  had provided the necessary space for inquiry—including answers to questions he had longed to ask.

  McElroy noted that Yancey’s books had sold more than 15 million copies and had been translated into 40 languages—books confirming that he “knows firsthand the meaning of suffering, doubt, fear, and grace.”

  Yancey, who graduated with a master’s degree from Wheaton in 1972, is probably most readily recognized as the author of What's So Amazing About Grace? (Zondervan, 1997). And grace was an integral part of my own association with him during several meetings at Christian conferences and during face-to-face conversations at those events.

  Later, each time I reviewed one of his books, he would drop me a postcard with a handwritten message of thanks on it.

      One card I came across just as I started to write this column was actually scribbled in the midst of a twelve-city promotional tour. “I’m exhausted,” he wrote, “but your encouragement gives me new energy and hope.” (Note the typical frankness and modesty.)

  Soon he provided me with an update: “No longer do I have to bristle through life, racking up points to prove myself. I find that my role is to be a mirror, to brightly reflect the image of God through me.”

  Yancey readily affirmed that, for him, prayer continued to play a key part in the creative process: “Prayer, not just in relation to my writing but to my life in general, is a process of handing worries, anxieties, angers, over to God. Putting them in His hands, and freeing me to be much more the kind of spokesman I think He wants me to be.”

  No wonder McElroy rounds off the magazine’s celebratory portrait with the observation that an attitude of giving-back is central to Yancey’s work and platform: “He is constantly thinking about ways in which  he can best be a steward of what God has given him.”

  And that’s something I’m happy to confirm.