Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
How are you feeling today? A bit better, not 100%. But... Yeah, not as bad as I've had when I've had bad days. Yeah. I'd say sort of about 80% today. Cool. That's my best mate, Ben. Ben Shaw. Ben Shaw.
And we chatted to him way back in season two. I guess that's episode 13. It's Cancer was the title of that episode. And I interviewed him and his wife, Karen, in their London flat as they grappled with the news of cancer. And I spoke to them after the quite dramatic surgery where they took out his jaw. A lot's happened since then.
Last time we chatted we were at your place in London. Yeah. You'd just had surgery for this horrible cancer in your jaw. Yeah. And now you're at my place in Sydney. Yeah. And a lot of stuff's happened in between. Can you bear just giving us an overview of what's happened? I was in Argentina and Uruguay having a holiday.
and I couldn't look through the camera. I do some photography as a hobby, and I couldn't look through the camera lens properly. My left eye wouldn't close. I always looked through the lens with my right eye, and my left eye just wouldn't close properly. And I came back to London and got an optometrist to look at me. They diagnosed me with Bell's palsy, but I contacted my surgical team,
who said you better come into the cancer ward as soon as possible and they diagnosed sadly another tumor in roughly the same place in my jaw, in my cheek, down near my back cheek, behind the mandible of the jaw. And I went through radiotherapy and then immunotherapy and none of those worked.
And then the last choice really is chemotherapy. And I could have that in England, I could have that in Australia. And given the choice, we want to come back to Australia and be amongst our closest friends. We've got a lot of people we love in London, we lived there 16 years. But our closest and dearest friends like yourself want to be around you guys and face chemotherapy here in Australia.
So what was it like when the professor in London said the immunotherapy had not worked? Do you remember? Yeah, I remember getting really sad there. Karen being my wife was really sad. It was very sobering. I'm not afraid of the other side of death, but I'm afraid of this side of death. I'm afraid of getting...
worse and being full of pain and maybe going deaf to my left ear and blind in my left eye. I'm worried all about that. The tumor is growing near my skull so I don't know what it's going to do to my brain. I was scared. I still am. But now we've come here and we're fighting my tumor with chemotherapy.
Ben is an incredible trooper. He has a very high pain threshold. So when he has pain spikes and we have to give him morphine, he'll say it's just pain level four, which would be a lot higher for most of us. So he really struggles on with such dignity and strength. He still gets dressed every day, puts his RM Williams on or his
adidas roams if listeners remember those uh those shoes and um he does the best he can and uh some days that's pretty darn good he keeps up with friends around the world through email he plays his guitar a lot he set up his uh his pa rig and guitars in his room um we watch movies together
Netflix. He carries around a syringe driver that slowly releases very meticulous elements, amounts of morphine and various other lollies. And his left face is...
He's quite embarrassed about his left face. He's a very handsome man, if any of you have seen photos of him. But the left side of his face is disfigured as the cancer grows inside and out. And his left eye has been sewn shut as a precaution because it was beginning to play up.
Ben plays his guitar as much as he can at the moment. In fact, you can hear him in the background in the other room. And here's something he's been writing and recording over the last few weeks. ♪
You somehow wrote a book through this whole thing over the last couple of years. So just tell me, what is the book? I mean, it's not, hey, I'm a pastor who got cancer. It's nothing like that, which would have been the temptation for a lot of different sorts of people. But what is the book? The book is called Seven Reasons to Reconsider Christianity. For many years, I saw...
um, and met with non-Christians, uh, including members of my own family who had very shallow reasons for not believing in what the Bible had to say. Um,
or for rejecting Christianity for other reasons. Most of them had very shallow reasons for rejecting Christianity. And I want them to reconsider. And so I wrote this book. Now, this book, you know, it's infant stages. It came to me, well, many years ago in some ways, but certainly before I had cancer. And I thought I'd turn it into a course.
And the course would be exactly that, reasons to consider Christianity. And then it evolved into a book. And it was going to be six sort of Wednesday nights, come over to my place, have a meal, have a glass of wine, and then hear a talk from me, six talks in a row. But yeah, then it evolved into a book, a sort of another reason, and hence seven reasons to reconsider Christianity.
There's just one paragraph pretty much toward the very end of the book. I mean, that says, you know, I'm looking down the barrel of something pretty awful here. So it's incredibly underplayed. It's very you. I can't help thinking that I would have opened up with it and milked it for all it's worth, but you and I are very different. I guess I want to ask, you know,
Going through what you're going through, whether it's caused you to reconsider your Christian faith, to pinch the title. Yeah, yeah. It certainly has. Well, I was quite happy not to put it in at all, the fact that I was facing death with cancer.
But my wife said, you've got to put that in the book. And I'm sure the publisher did too. And the publisher, yeah. They probably wouldn't have gone the other way. They said, there's got to be a chapter, even if it's a mini chapter, at the end of the book, which it is. And some of the people I gave the book to in its earliest stages and who recommended the book, who appear in the sort of first...
part of the book, they said to me over the phone, rang me and said, look, I really think you should have your mini chapter about your cancer at the start of the book. I was in two minds about it. I don't really know whether it's going to be better at the start or the end. I think it's way more powerful the way you've done it, honestly. Yeah. Because the book...
stands on its own. I mean, A, it's not your first book. You know how to write a book. And B, it's really like the 30 years of your ministry reaching diverse people in a book. I'm glad that the reader doesn't know the significance of it really till the end. And, you know, as probably the only person who's seen you preach in an Aboriginal community,
in a maximum security jail, universities, pubs, schools, street corners, schools, Wimbledon Common, Wimbledon Theatre. I mean, you know. Yeah.
When I read this book, I thought, oh my goodness, this is Ben Shaw's greatest hits. And so did all the people that have written all over it. I mean, Amy Orr Ewing, Rico Tice, Rebecca Manley-Pippett, Philip Jensen, and on and on. I've said similar things. Anyway, I don't want this to be an ad. I said I didn't want this to be an ad, and here I've just made it an ad. But I guess my question is, has this experience of cancer... Yes.
and that it really doesn't seem to be getting better, dented your Christian faith? When I was diagnosed with cancer, and as I've had bad news along the way about it, I did reconsider Christianity. Do I really believe this? And I can confidently say, yes, I do, even more so. I honestly believe it's true, it's real,
I have total confidence in what will happen to me when I die, after I die, and what will happen to all Christians. I am deeply, even more confident in these things. You've mentioned some of your fears, not death, but getting to the point of death. But are you finding any joy? Oh, yeah. The times were high.
I even forget I have this. I completely, you know, I just, I'm in the middle of a dinner party like we had the other night and I completely forget how I look, how I sound, that I have cancer and I have heaps of joy. And I'm 53. It's not like I'm dying at a very young age. I thank God, I thank friends, I thank my family that I've had such a good 53 years.
That brings me a lot of joy. Having traveled the world in over, I think it's 45 countries I've visited now, I've had a very good, fun life. And that brings me a lot of joy. And I'm very thankful to God for that. And we've had a couple of mini private concerts. Yeah, playing music together. Awesome. It's been a real joy. Yeah.
Do you think we could play, my listeners, one of the hymns that we play together a lot? I would love that. And I survey the wondrous cross On which the Prince of Glory died My richest gain I count with love And pork and tan On all my pride Forbidden
You are reading a lot of Psalms. Yeah. And it's one of the privileges to sort of, you know, read with you and Karen. What's your favorite? It used to be Psalm 73. And I think that's because I just thought it had a great story about it.
And then it was at times Psalm 23, which is everyone's favourite, and then for a while it was Psalm 22. Yeah. My God, my God, why? But where have you landed? I've landed at Psalm 55, I think. Okay. Yeah. Are you willing to read that for us? Sure. I didn't prepare you for any of what I'm asking you. Yeah, I would love to. There's a Bible. I'm pretty sure you know your way around one of those. And as you're finding it...
What do you like about it? Why have you been drawn to this one? There have been a number of verses that really resonate with me. Well, let me just read the first couple of paragraphs to verse 14. Listen to my prayer, O God. Do not ignore my plea. Hear me and answer me.
my thoughts trouble me and i am distraught because of what my enemy is saying because of the threats of the wicked for they bring down suffering on me and assail me in their anger my heart is in anguish within me the terrors of death have fallen on me fear and trembling have beset me horror
has overwhelmed me. I said, oh, that I had the wings of a dove. I would fly away and be at rest. The whole nature of my home, pretty far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul.
Cool man. Thanks. Thank you. I'm really glad you got to hear from Ben again. He's been one of the biggest influences in my life since we were 12.
and perhaps never more so than in these recent days. Buff and I have been focusing a lot on Ben and Karen as they live with us in these precious days. And that's meant that we've had to delay the launch of Season 4 of Undeceptions just a little bit longer. But the team is hard at work behind the scenes on some amazing full-length episodes online.
on religious liberty, mental health, abortion and much more. Until then, I hope you enjoy these Undeceptions singles, which we'll put out each week in the lead up to the new season. See ya. You've been listening to the Eternity Podcast Network.