November 23, 2025 • 28 mins
When Dan Nichols and his wife Joy discovered at their 20-week ultrasound that their unborn son had hypoplastic left heart syndrome, their world was turned upside down. What followed was a journey through three open-heart surgeries before kindergarten, two terrifying moments when baby Landon flatlined, and a profound deepening of faith that continues to shape Dan's ministry today. In this powerful conversation, Dan opens up about wrestling with God in hospital, rejecting the prosperity gospel's false promises, and learning to trust God's heart when you can't trace His hand.
Beyond his personal story, Dan shares his passion for church unity through Northeast Collaborative, a regional network bringing pastors and denominations together in the most unchurched corner of America. He discusses his Making Scripture Simple book series designed to help children engage deeply with God's Word, and reflects on how suffering has transformed him into a more empathetic leader. Whether you're walking through your own valley or simply want to hear an honest conversation about faith, doubt, and God's unfailing presence, this episode will encourage and challenge you.
WEBLINKS Dan and Joy’s Website Northeast Collaborative Dents in the Darkness Podcast
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Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Hello, I'm so pleased to welcome you to today's episode.
Hundreds more inspiring episodes are now at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:29):
Please share Bleeding Daylight with people you know so they can be inspired too.
It's hard enough facing our own struggles, but how do you deal with knowing that the life of someone you love is hanging in the balance?
Today's guest has walked that path and so much more.
I'll introduce you in just a moment.
(00:59):
I'm so excited to have Dan Nichols joining me today.
Dan is the lead pastor of Grace Christian Fellowship in Cortland, New York.
But what really shapes Dan's heart for ministry is his journey as a dad.
His oldest son, Landon, has survived three open-heart surgeries before reaching kindergarten, and that experience has profoundly shaped how Dan leads and loves.
(01:23):
He's also a husband to Joy, church planter, author and podcaster.
Dan, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thanks for having me on.
Glad to be here.
We've all heard people say that their greatest wish for their children is that they would be happy and healthy.
So can you tell me about the time you found out that Landon's health wasn't what it should be?
(01:44):
Yeah, we were 20 weeks into the pregnancy, brand new parents-to-be, and we had just found out that we were having a boy, and we were so excited.
We really wanted a boy.
I had sent that news out on social media, and then the doctor comes in and says, hey, we found something.
One of the nurses was very experienced.
She'd been doing this for decades, and she caught something that he said would potentially threaten his life.
(02:11):
They sent us to kind of the minor leagues, so to speak, and they offered to have us explore options, which meant abortion and we let the doctor know that wasn't on the table.
We had pre-decided that wasn't going to be an option.
So then they sent us down to Philadelphia, and the good news was they said babies who have this heart condition, HLHS, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, basically he was missing the bottom left chamber of his heart.
(02:36):
They were saving, at that time in 2015, 90% of these babies' lives, which is incredible.
We went on a journey.
He had three open heart surgeries before kindergarten, and now Landon is 10 years old.
It's pretty amazing.
It is an amazing story, and I guess that throws into the mix a whole range of things.
You're expecting this beautiful baby boy.
(02:59):
As you say, you've just told everyone, hey, this is happening.
I guess immediately you're then sending messages out to that same group of people and saying, hey, we need prayer at this time.
How did that go for the people around you?
Yeah, we had a great support system.
Not only our biological families, but our spiritual family in the local church, and I would encourage anyone listening, if you're not connected to a healthy expression of Christ's church, a local church where people love and support you, I would highly recommend you do that, because we found it to be a game changer for us.
(03:32):
People were reaching out, not only with prayers, but tangible help.
What do you need financially?
What do you need emotionally?
What do you need relationally?
What do you need spiritually?
All those things.
We had quite a support system.
Actually, Joy's brother started a Facebook page called Help Landon Fight HLHS.
We didn't know that he had started it, and then all of a sudden it just took off and went crazy.
We had at least thousands if not tens of thousands of people praying and supporting, and now he's 10 years old, and I go across the country to different places, and I still run into people who are like, I've been praying for Landon for 10 years, and they heard about his story way back when.
(04:09):
This would be a good thing of social media.
A lot of times we're really down on social media.
I think this is one of the reasons why social media can be a good thing.
As you approached each of those surgeries at such a young age, can you talk to me about that mix of knowing that you serve a God who answers prayer, and at the same time the uncertainty of going into those surgeries?
(04:32):
Yeah.
Well, Landon actually flatlined on us twice.
So after his first surgery, we had two instances of thinking that he was going to be with Jesus.
It was terrifying, still very traumatic for us.
And the way that we relay the story now is not, hey, we had tens of thousands of people praying, and so it all worked out, and now he's healthy.
(04:53):
That's not how that works.
God's not a divine vending machine.
He's not like, put in your religion quarter and you get the candy bar.
That's not how this works.
God has been gracious and merciful.
We have lots of friends whose kids did not make it for various conditions, not just HLHS, and not even heart conditions, but other things.
We just tell people we're grateful for God's grace and mercy.
(05:16):
We're glad that Landon has had 10 years of life.
But I remember someone online asking me very sincerely, hey, I'm glad that you have your faith, but what if Landon hadn't made it?
And they weren't trying to be snarky.
I think they were genuinely seeking.
And I said, look, I can't answer because I haven't experienced it.
My hope would be that I would still cling to Jesus, because at the end of the day, in Scripture, someone responds to Jesus and says, hey, to who else are we going to turn?
(05:45):
Where else are we going to go?
You hold the words of life.
We don't know how long Landon will live.
His prognosis looks really good.
But at the end of the day, I believe that any stage of life or length of life is a gift from God in the first place.
He's the one who decides how long we have.
And at the end of the day, I think we should just be thankful and grateful.
(06:06):
One of the things we tell our boys, both Landon and Declan, his younger brother, is to focus on what we do get and forget what we don't get.
Focus on what you do get and forget what you don't get.
And that can be for really small things or larger things.
You mentioned that you've known people who haven't had the same outcomes that you've had, where they lost a child.
(06:28):
How do you wrestle with that, knowing that God is a good God, and yet there doesn't seem to be a consistency that people would yearn for?
How do you wrestle with that?
Well, first of all, we know that death is not natural.
Death comes because of our disconnection from God and because of sin.
So we all experience the messiness and brokenness of this world in different ways.
(06:51):
Yeah, I mean, we have wrestled with that whole survivor's guilt thing.
Why us?
Why would Landon have such a great journey and so many others don't?
That has been a very real struggle.
But I've just found whenever we want concrete answers to things that are beyond our comprehension, God hasn't given us the total answers in terms of the why.
He's given us an answer in terms of the who.
(07:13):
Where I live in the United States, there are so many inherent blessings that I have simply because I was born in the United States.
Other people born in so many other third world countries or developing nations, I just went to El Salvador for a week.
Seeing what they have to face and what they experience, God, why them?
Why do they have to experience all this trauma from gang activity and things?
(07:35):
I've never had to experience that.
Psalm 131 says that I don't lift my eyes too high for things that are beyond my comprehension.
I have to trust that God does know what He's doing even when it doesn't make sense.
We have to trust His heart when we can't trace His hand.
That's kind of where I'm at on it.
(07:56):
I don't pretend to have answers to it.
I just know that there's nowhere else that I've turned to that's going to have the answers that can provide the peace that I have seen people who've walked through great suffering.
I mean, countless stories.
Corrie Ten Boom would be one.
She made it through the Holocaust, and God gave her everything she needed to make it through the Holocaust.
(08:17):
Why her?
I don't know, but she turned to Christ and she got what she needed.
You touched on the Psalms there.
One of the things I do love about so many of the Psalms is there's a rawness, there's an honesty with God, where you see the different Psalmists who are calling out to God, I feel abandoned, I feel it's just all falling apart.
(08:39):
Do you think we've, in some cases, lost the ability to wrestle with God?
Respectfully, but wrestling with God in that way?
I was in the middle of the atrium after Landon's second flatlining, not audibly screaming because I didn't want to wake up the other patients, but internally, I'm like, what the hell?
God, this place, the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, was filled with beautiful, wonderful people.
(09:04):
You would think if we ran the universe, all the really bad people, their families should get all these terrible diseases, all the horrible people who are doing evil, and yet, here I am as a pastor and someone who loves God, and then all these other people we're meeting, they're all amazing people too.
It's like, God, why?
What is going on?
(09:25):
This makes no sense, and I don't want this for my son.
I don't want it for me, for my wife, or anything, and I was angry, and yet, I think the key in that, that I found, was that God could handle that.
God's love was big enough to handle exactly what we see in the Psalms or in Job, this sheer humanness of, hey, I'm in the middle of this valley of the shadow of death, and I need you.
(09:53):
I need something.
I have found in our journey, God is big enough to handle the wrestling.
He's big enough to handle the doubts.
He's big enough and strong enough and loving enough to care for us in the middle of our frailty, and that has made all the difference in my life, and not away from us, but He came near in Jesus, and that's why I'm so sold on Jesus.
(10:15):
God proved, hey, I am with you and for you, and that was something Joy, my wife, and I constantly repeated to each other.
God is with us and for us.
God is with us and for us, and when He flatlined twice, I remember sending out messages, if Landon dies tonight, I will still cling to that promise that God is with us and for us.
I hope that we don't have to experience that while he's a child or an adult, but if we do, I hope that our faith will stay strong.
(10:42):
You mentioned your very natural response in the hospital there of, why us?
We've done all the right things.
There are other people that haven't, and they prosper, and again, you talk about the Psalms, and there is that in the Psalms.
You look at Psalm 73, and it's like, hey, they're doing fine.
I shouldn't have even followed you, and yet that seems to be a different style of the prosperity gospel that we get sold on, that if I do the right thing, it's almost a faith by works.
(11:13):
We get sucked into that, don't we, rather than the fact that God has never promised us an easy life, that we know that this is a broken world, as you mentioned, that sin has corrupted what should have happened.
Do you think for those of us who haven't been through the deep waters that you have, that we need to come to terms with the fact that it's not a do the right thing and God will give you everything kind of gospel?
(11:41):
No, it isn't.
In fact, for my doctoral studies, I have a doctor of ministry degree.
My final project was on biblical encouragement, which I believe is a spiritual discipline, and one of the things I was doing was contrasting it with things like the power of positive thinking movement, which when I studied it out, I traced it back to this thing called New Thought, which actually came from Christian science, and it's crazy when you study all that out.
(12:05):
The flow of thought is, I can control reality with my own thoughts or my own right actions.
If I think the right things or I do the right things, I get to be God.
That's essentially what that whole stream is.
I'm obviously making it a little simplistic, but that is so not how the universe works, and we have to come to grips with the fact that someone else is in control, and it isn't me, and the gospel is not do the right things and you get what you want.
(12:35):
The gospel is, there is an all-powerful, good, and loving God who, for reasons beyond our understanding, has allowed sin to be reality, and we get to experience His grace and His mercy if we look to Him and trust that He actually is who He says He is.
The good thing is, none of us get what's fair.
(12:58):
If we got what was fair, we wouldn't have anything good, and God is the only reason that we can even know that something is good.
We could go on that train for a long time, but yes, the prosperity gospel is one of the most toxic things, and we have, especially in America, and I'm sure globally too, in many nations, it's spread where there is a real cancer or a virus of this thinking that I check the boxes and God owes me.
(13:27):
That is not what the good news of Jesus is.
We know that even in the midst of struggles, in the midst of illness, in the midst of all those sorts of things that can disrupt our lives, life still goes on, and for you it has continued, and I'm wondering how it has shaped your ministry, because there are other things that you have stepped into, part of being a collaborative, a regional church network.
(13:53):
You've planted a church.
You're running a podcast.
How do you think the events surrounding Landon's illness have shaped your ministry?
I've definitely become much more empathetic than I was before it happened.
I can see others better.
I feel like I'm much more curious about others' pain and suffering.
(14:16):
I'm a very driven leader, high achiever type.
This journey with our son has not taken that away from me.
I still have that.
For instance, currently God has me leading a 225-year-old church, which is very different than church planning, in central New York, half an hour south of Syracuse, where we have the best chocolate milk in the world.
(14:37):
So if anyone out there loves chocolate milk, we got the best.
It's so good.
Anyway, this morning we were in between service.
Second service had actually gone into the service quite a bunch, and I knew I needed to go up and preach, but a guy in our church—it's not a small church, but someone had written and let me know that he just got diagnosed potentially with cancer.
(15:00):
I saw that he was helping with the coffee station, and I knew we were only two songs away from me going up to preach, but this is how it's changed me.
I knew it was more important to go and talk and pray with him and cut it really close to not making it on stage at the right time, just so he knew that he was seen, he was loved, and that we're going to walk this out with him.
(15:26):
I may not be able to do it as much as other people in the church, but at least he would know that.
That's at least one way it has changed me.
Oftentimes there has been accusations at the church generally that there are so many different denominations, so many people doing their own thing, and yet we see this growing sense of unity.
I'd love to hear about the heart behind this regional church network that you're running and what brought it together.
(15:53):
In the United States, it's very palpable and very real.
Lots of local churches compete rather than view each other as teammates, and it breaks the heart of God.
When you see Jesus's prayer in John 17, his prayer was that we would be one as the Father, Son, and Spirit are one.
I mean, big deal to God should be a big deal to us.
(16:15):
We have not done a very good job of that in the States, but our generation, I've noticed the millennial generation is getting really hungry for collaboration.
For instance, we do cohorts, so we get pastors together.
We do a lot of things, marriage retreat, leadership summit, all kinds of things, but these cohorts are really important to just get pastors together to hear their stories, because when you hear people's stories, you actually understand them better, and instead of demonizing from a distance, you get to come closer in community.
(16:45):
So two pastors were at this one cohort.
They had pastored in the same city for 30 years each, the same 30 years together.
Then they had turned their churches over to other people.
They happened to come to our cohort.
They knew of each other that entire time, but at our cohort, after 30 years, they looked at each other and they said, man, wouldn't it have been great if we had gotten coffee?
(17:10):
Wouldn't it have been great if we had become friends?
They were both lamenting the fact that they had missed out on a capital K kingdom opportunity for them to be collaborators rather than ministry leaders at a distance.
We're breaking down those barriers.
Northeast Collaborative empowers pastors to lead and launch healthy churches in the northeast corner of America, which is the most unchurched, unreached post-Christian corner, and we do that through collaboration and bringing churches and leaders together and helping them be healthy for the long haul.
(17:41):
One of the things that I've had the honor of doing in various ministry positions I've been in
over the years is visiting a whole range of different churches, and once I've started to
see the different traditions of the Christian church, those people who certainly hold to the
Orthodox belief in Christ, but express it differently to see liturgical churches,
(18:05):
Pentecostal churches, a whole range of different churches.
You start to see a beauty in the different ways that people worship and come to Jesus.
Is that part of what's happening there as people start to discuss those differences and start to see them for what they are, that they're just a different way of reaching out to Jesus and of serving their community?
(18:31):
Yes.
So we are multi-denominational, and it's a beautiful thing.
It's like a diamond.
When you turn a diamond over, there's different facets and different ways that you can see the beauty of a diamond when you keep turning it over.
That's kind of what I think the body of Christ should be like because different streams have different strengths.
We have different denominational tribes, so to speak, that when we don't see it as tribal, but we see it as one part of a larger body, we need each other, and especially in leadership styles too.
(19:00):
I mean, the apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers.
Unfortunately, I feel like the American church kind of took the shepherd teachers and said, that's all we want, and then the apostles, prophets, and evangelists all went and started parachurch ministries because the local church kicked them out.
So we're trying to say, hey, what if we had all five together?
That'd be really great.
Yes, multi-denominational is beautiful.
(19:20):
What we don't think is healthy is ecumenicalism where we throw truth out of the window and just say, believe whatever you want.
Jesus didn't leave room for that.
So yes, we do have a core orthodoxy and even some practical things that help unify us, but multi-denominational because I think the splintering and the reasons people have divided through the years down through church history, when you study it, the reason we have thousands of denominations is really our own human selfishness.
(19:46):
It's not really what God designed it to be.
And you've mentioned there the thing that scares people about the idea of unity is often that, ah, but do they believe the same central truths?
And as you say, you can't just throw truth out the window.
You need to say, we need to believe in the centrality of Christ, who he is, and there are some core beliefs.
(20:11):
That's the thing that sometimes has been missing with that ecumenical movement.
So how do we ensure that we stay on the right side of that, that we are meeting with brothers and sisters in Christ?
There are things that we say we're willing to die for and then things that we leave in our open hand.
Things that you're willing to die for would be like the deity of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, biblical authority, that the Bible isn't just a helpful, moral, religious book.
(20:39):
It is actually God's word, and we need to trust it and submit to it.
So there's some core things there we're willing to die for.
Then there's things that we're willing to defend, secondary issues that we should know why we believe what we believe, because practically and functionally, they make sense and they have to make sense when you're on a team.
And then the third ring would be discuss.
(21:01):
We try to say, hey, for our network, Christian is helpful, so we use the Apostles' Creed for that.
We also say that we are biblicists and we align with something called the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy view decades ago that was created.
And then we say missional, and we align with the missional manifesto that comes from leaders like Tim Keller and others.
(21:21):
And then we say we are conservative Protestant.
Now the word conservative, that can mean a lot of different things to different people.
That doesn't mean politically conservative.
We simply mean having a view of the Bible that leans with a non-progressive liberal theological view of the Bible.
I want to take a slight turn now and talk about your authorship, because you've authored a couple of books that are for students.
(21:47):
Tell me about those.
Yeah.
So my oldest son, Landon, as we've been discussing when he was eight, he looked up at my wife, Joy, and he said, Mom, you know what I think the hardest thing in the world is?
And again, he's a pastor's kid.
She's like, what?
He goes, following Jesus.
She's like, why do you think that?
He goes, because so many people don't follow Jesus.
(22:08):
At school, he's discovering that like very few people claim to be Jesus followers, and yet it's like a big deal in our house.
So he's kind of like, what's going on here?
So that began a journey with us of diving into his own faith, and he's wrestled with it for two years now.
Actually, this past Wednesday was the moment the Holy Spirit just brought him to that point where he said, man, I need Jesus.
(22:30):
And after two years of wrestling, he accepted the Lord as his Savior.
It was really awesome.
Amazing.
We could talk about that for a long time, but man, that was a powerful thing this past week.
But these books, Making Scripture Simple, basically, I was like, how would I explain the Bible to my eight-year-old son, Landon, in a way that makes sense to him?
And I noticed that pretty much most of what's out there for kids is conceptual.
(22:54):
It's very much summary and all that stuff, and that's fine, but these are actually verse-by-verse paraphrases for kids who can read, but they're not ready for adult translations yet.
So it's called Making Scripture Simple, and I've got Philippians done, Colossians and Philemon together, because they were written to the same church, but even trying to have other helpful things in there.
(23:15):
So with Colossians and Philemon, I've got a little insert about why is slavery in the Bible?
Because I started to recognize, Landon, even between ages eight and ten, he's asking some of the deepest questions that you would not believe kids at his age would be asking.
How would I explain that very important question?
Why is slavery in the Bible to an eight-year-old and things like that?
First, second, third John and Jude are coming out December on time for Christmas.
(23:39):
I've put all four of those together, and then Galatians will be the next one coming out for Easter 2026.
One of the things that has always, I guess, bemused me is that we have young people around that age and a little bit older who, when they're at school, they will sit in lessons and they will be taught for long periods of time.
(24:02):
And yet when they turn up at church, we figure somehow we have to entertain them, that they're not going to sit still and hear real teaching.
That has always been one of those strange things.
And you think, why is it that at church we feel we have to entertain them when these kids are already used to sitting in classrooms, learning some hard stuff, questioning the way the world works.
(24:30):
And yet we don't seem to be doing that as much in church.
And it seems that these books are starting to fill that gap.
I'm hoping that they do.
If you talk to an avid Harry Potter lover, for instance, they're going to know all the jargon, all the insider language.
That's just one example.
If you really care about something, even in a secular sense, you can learn jargon, you can learn vocabulary, you can learn concepts very, very quickly.
(25:00):
I think we've done the church a disservice by assuming no one's going to be that in love with Jesus.
If you are in love with Jesus, you're going to care what Jesus cares about.
When he says his word is a gift to us, we need to not only just learn it, but enjoy it.
And understand it more than an intellectual thing, but make it a heart posture of, wow, I can't believe God loves me enough to actually give me the guidance and direction and clarity I need to be fully human the way that he designed me.
(25:33):
That is amazing.
I want that for people at any age, in any stage of life, but especially as the father of two young boys, just starting to see that gap and going, man, if making scripture simple could be helpful.
Now, as far as the entertainment factor, there are some coloring pages in it.
So there's a little bit of fun mixed in, but you're right.
We've settled for making consumers rather than making disciples.
(25:58):
That's part of why I think not only is making scripture simple helpful for kid men programs in local churches, but it's also, I would say even more geared towards parents of children in their homes doing home-based discipleship, which is really what God designed.
And when you look in scripture, that's really the whole thing.
And Dan, I certainly couldn't let you go without touching on your own podcast, Dents in the Darkness.
(26:24):
Tell me a little about that.
Yeah.
So it's an extension of Northeast Collaborative.
I mentioned we have a lot of tributaries of ministry.
We have over 50 episodes now.
Turned it over to my teammate, Mike Schooley, but our friend Tim Adira from WRJN Radio in Northeast Pennsylvania, he is an incredible Christian DJ who has produced it.
And we've had some incredible episodes in interviewing pastors in the field, but also experts in other fields, talking with ministry leaders about the raw realities of leadership, especially in Northeast America.
(26:56):
But then authors like Nancy Piercy and her book Love Thy Body, which is a must read if you haven't read it, so many others that we've had.
But yeah, you can check it out, necollaborative.com, necollaborative.com.
Just click on the Dents in the Darkness podcast tab, or you can just search Dents, D-E-N-T-S, in the darkness, like Hulk smash Dents, right?
(27:20):
Hulk smash Dents in the darkness on any of those streaming platforms.
Dan, I'm going to make sure that there are links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily, get hold of the books, direct to the podcast, and so that they can listen to some of that as well.
But it has been an absolute delight to talk to you today, to hear some of your story, quite a varied story, and to know that God isn't finished with what you're doing yet, and to know that there's still some great things to come in your ministry, in your family.
(27:55):
So thank you for your time.
It's great to have had you here on Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you, Rodney.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Hello, I'm so pleased to welcome you to today's episode.
Hundreds more inspiring episodes are now at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:29):
Please share Bleeding Daylight with people you know so they can be inspired too.
It's hard enough facing our own struggles, but how do you deal with knowing that the life of someone you love is hanging in the balance?
Today's guest has walked that path and so much more.
I'll introduce you in just a moment.
(00:59):
I'm so excited to have Dan Nichols joining me today.
Dan is the lead pastor of Grace Christian Fellowship in Cortland, New York.
But what really shapes Dan's heart for ministry is his journey as a dad.
His oldest son, Landon, has survived three open-heart surgeries before reaching kindergarten, and that experience has profoundly shaped how Dan leads and loves.
(01:23):
He's also a husband to Joy, church planter, author and podcaster.
Dan, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
Thanks for having me on.
Glad to be here.
We've all heard people say that their greatest wish for their children is that they would be happy and healthy.
So can you tell me about the time you found out that Landon's health wasn't what it should be?
(01:44):
Yeah, we were 20 weeks into the pregnancy, brand new parents-to-be, and we had just found out that we were having a boy, and we were so excited.
We really wanted a boy.
I had sent that news out on social media, and then the doctor comes in and says, hey, we found something.
One of the nurses was very experienced.
She'd been doing this for decades, and she caught something that he said would potentially threaten his life.
(02:11):
They sent us to kind of the minor leagues, so to speak, and they offered to have us explore options, which meant abortion and we let the doctor know that wasn't on the table.
We had pre-decided that wasn't going to be an option.
So then they sent us down to Philadelphia, and the good news was they said babies who have this heart condition, HLHS, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, basically he was missing the bottom left chamber of his heart.
(02:36):
They were saving, at that time in 2015, 90% of these babies' lives, which is incredible.
We went on a journey.
He had three open heart surgeries before kindergarten, and now Landon is 10 years old.
It's pretty amazing.
It is an amazing story, and I guess that throws into the mix a whole range of things.
You're expecting this beautiful baby boy.
(02:59):
As you say, you've just told everyone, hey, this is happening.
I guess immediately you're then sending messages out to that same group of people and saying, hey, we need prayer at this time.
How did that go for the people around you?
Yeah, we had a great support system.
Not only our biological families, but our spiritual family in the local church, and I would encourage anyone listening, if you're not connected to a healthy expression of Christ's church, a local church where people love and support you, I would highly recommend you do that, because we found it to be a game changer for us.
(03:32):
People were reaching out, not only with prayers, but tangible help.
What do you need financially?
What do you need emotionally?
What do you need relationally?
What do you need spiritually?
All those things.
We had quite a support system.
Actually, Joy's brother started a Facebook page called Help Landon Fight HLHS.
We didn't know that he had started it, and then all of a sudden it just took off and went crazy.
We had at least thousands if not tens of thousands of people praying and supporting, and now he's 10 years old, and I go across the country to different places, and I still run into people who are like, I've been praying for Landon for 10 years, and they heard about his story way back when.
(04:09):
This would be a good thing of social media.
A lot of times we're really down on social media.
I think this is one of the reasons why social media can be a good thing.
As you approached each of those surgeries at such a young age, can you talk to me about that mix of knowing that you serve a God who answers prayer, and at the same time the uncertainty of going into those surgeries?
(04:32):
Yeah.
Well, Landon actually flatlined on us twice.
So after his first surgery, we had two instances of thinking that he was going to be with Jesus.
It was terrifying, still very traumatic for us.
And the way that we relay the story now is not, hey, we had tens of thousands of people praying, and so it all worked out, and now he's healthy.
(04:53):
That's not how that works.
God's not a divine vending machine.
He's not like, put in your religion quarter and you get the candy bar.
That's not how this works.
God has been gracious and merciful.
We have lots of friends whose kids did not make it for various conditions, not just HLHS, and not even heart conditions, but other things.
We just tell people we're grateful for God's grace and mercy.
(05:16):
We're glad that Landon has had 10 years of life.
But I remember someone online asking me very sincerely, hey, I'm glad that you have your faith, but what if Landon hadn't made it?
And they weren't trying to be snarky.
I think they were genuinely seeking.
And I said, look, I can't answer because I haven't experienced it.
My hope would be that I would still cling to Jesus, because at the end of the day, in Scripture, someone responds to Jesus and says, hey, to who else are we going to turn?
(05:45):
Where else are we going to go?
You hold the words of life.
We don't know how long Landon will live.
His prognosis looks really good.
But at the end of the day, I believe that any stage of life or length of life is a gift from God in the first place.
He's the one who decides how long we have.
And at the end of the day, I think we should just be thankful and grateful.
(06:06):
One of the things we tell our boys, both Landon and Declan, his younger brother, is to focus on what we do get and forget what we don't get.
Focus on what you do get and forget what you don't get.
And that can be for really small things or larger things.
You mentioned that you've known people who haven't had the same outcomes that you've had, where they lost a child.
(06:28):
How do you wrestle with that, knowing that God is a good God, and yet there doesn't seem to be a consistency that people would yearn for?
How do you wrestle with that?
Well, first of all, we know that death is not natural.
Death comes because of our disconnection from God and because of sin.
So we all experience the messiness and brokenness of this world in different ways.
(06:51):
Yeah, I mean, we have wrestled with that whole survivor's guilt thing.
Why us?
Why would Landon have such a great journey and so many others don't?
That has been a very real struggle.
But I've just found whenever we want concrete answers to things that are beyond our comprehension, God hasn't given us the total answers in terms of the why.
He's given us an answer in terms of the who.
(07:13):
Where I live in the United States, there are so many inherent blessings that I have simply because I was born in the United States.
Other people born in so many other third world countries or developing nations, I just went to El Salvador for a week.
Seeing what they have to face and what they experience, God, why them?
Why do they have to experience all this trauma from gang activity and things?
(07:35):
I've never had to experience that.
Psalm 131 says that I don't lift my eyes too high for things that are beyond my comprehension.
I have to trust that God does know what He's doing even when it doesn't make sense.
We have to trust His heart when we can't trace His hand.
That's kind of where I'm at on it.
(07:56):
I don't pretend to have answers to it.
I just know that there's nowhere else that I've turned to that's going to have the answers that can provide the peace that I have seen people who've walked through great suffering.
I mean, countless stories.
Corrie Ten Boom would be one.
She made it through the Holocaust, and God gave her everything she needed to make it through the Holocaust.
(08:17):
Why her?
I don't know, but she turned to Christ and she got what she needed.
You touched on the Psalms there.
One of the things I do love about so many of the Psalms is there's a rawness, there's an honesty with God, where you see the different Psalmists who are calling out to God, I feel abandoned, I feel it's just all falling apart.
(08:39):
Do you think we've, in some cases, lost the ability to wrestle with God?
Respectfully, but wrestling with God in that way?
I was in the middle of the atrium after Landon's second flatlining, not audibly screaming because I didn't want to wake up the other patients, but internally, I'm like, what the hell?
God, this place, the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, was filled with beautiful, wonderful people.
(09:04):
You would think if we ran the universe, all the really bad people, their families should get all these terrible diseases, all the horrible people who are doing evil, and yet, here I am as a pastor and someone who loves God, and then all these other people we're meeting, they're all amazing people too.
It's like, God, why?
What is going on?
(09:25):
This makes no sense, and I don't want this for my son.
I don't want it for me, for my wife, or anything, and I was angry, and yet, I think the key in that, that I found, was that God could handle that.
God's love was big enough to handle exactly what we see in the Psalms or in Job, this sheer humanness of, hey, I'm in the middle of this valley of the shadow of death, and I need you.
(09:53):
I need something.
I have found in our journey, God is big enough to handle the wrestling.
He's big enough to handle the doubts.
He's big enough and strong enough and loving enough to care for us in the middle of our frailty, and that has made all the difference in my life, and not away from us, but He came near in Jesus, and that's why I'm so sold on Jesus.
(10:15):
God proved, hey, I am with you and for you, and that was something Joy, my wife, and I constantly repeated to each other.
God is with us and for us.
God is with us and for us, and when He flatlined twice, I remember sending out messages, if Landon dies tonight, I will still cling to that promise that God is with us and for us.
I hope that we don't have to experience that while he's a child or an adult, but if we do, I hope that our faith will stay strong.
(10:42):
You mentioned your very natural response in the hospital there of, why us?
We've done all the right things.
There are other people that haven't, and they prosper, and again, you talk about the Psalms, and there is that in the Psalms.
You look at Psalm 73, and it's like, hey, they're doing fine.
I shouldn't have even followed you, and yet that seems to be a different style of the prosperity gospel that we get sold on, that if I do the right thing, it's almost a faith by works.
(11:13):
We get sucked into that, don't we, rather than the fact that God has never promised us an easy life, that we know that this is a broken world, as you mentioned, that sin has corrupted what should have happened.
Do you think for those of us who haven't been through the deep waters that you have, that we need to come to terms with the fact that it's not a do the right thing and God will give you everything kind of gospel?
(11:41):
No, it isn't.
In fact, for my doctoral studies, I have a doctor of ministry degree.
My final project was on biblical encouragement, which I believe is a spiritual discipline, and one of the things I was doing was contrasting it with things like the power of positive thinking movement, which when I studied it out, I traced it back to this thing called New Thought, which actually came from Christian science, and it's crazy when you study all that out.
(12:05):
The flow of thought is, I can control reality with my own thoughts or my own right actions.
If I think the right things or I do the right things, I get to be God.
That's essentially what that whole stream is.
I'm obviously making it a little simplistic, but that is so not how the universe works, and we have to come to grips with the fact that someone else is in control, and it isn't me, and the gospel is not do the right things and you get what you want.
(12:35):
The gospel is, there is an all-powerful, good, and loving God who, for reasons beyond our understanding, has allowed sin to be reality, and we get to experience His grace and His mercy if we look to Him and trust that He actually is who He says He is.
The good thing is, none of us get what's fair.
(12:58):
If we got what was fair, we wouldn't have anything good, and God is the only reason that we can even know that something is good.
We could go on that train for a long time, but yes, the prosperity gospel is one of the most toxic things, and we have, especially in America, and I'm sure globally too, in many nations, it's spread where there is a real cancer or a virus of this thinking that I check the boxes and God owes me.
(13:27):
That is not what the good news of Jesus is.
We know that even in the midst of struggles, in the midst of illness, in the midst of all those sorts of things that can disrupt our lives, life still goes on, and for you it has continued, and I'm wondering how it has shaped your ministry, because there are other things that you have stepped into, part of being a collaborative, a regional church network.
(13:53):
You've planted a church.
You're running a podcast.
How do you think the events surrounding Landon's illness have shaped your ministry?
I've definitely become much more empathetic than I was before it happened.
I can see others better.
I feel like I'm much more curious about others' pain and suffering.
(14:16):
I'm a very driven leader, high achiever type.
This journey with our son has not taken that away from me.
I still have that.
For instance, currently God has me leading a 225-year-old church, which is very different than church planning, in central New York, half an hour south of Syracuse, where we have the best chocolate milk in the world.
(14:37):
So if anyone out there loves chocolate milk, we got the best.
It's so good.
Anyway, this morning we were in between service.
Second service had actually gone into the service quite a bunch, and I knew I needed to go up and preach, but a guy in our church—it's not a small church, but someone had written and let me know that he just got diagnosed potentially with cancer.
(15:00):
I saw that he was helping with the coffee station, and I knew we were only two songs away from me going up to preach, but this is how it's changed me.
I knew it was more important to go and talk and pray with him and cut it really close to not making it on stage at the right time, just so he knew that he was seen, he was loved, and that we're going to walk this out with him.
(15:26):
I may not be able to do it as much as other people in the church, but at least he would know that.
That's at least one way it has changed me.
Oftentimes there has been accusations at the church generally that there are so many different denominations, so many people doing their own thing, and yet we see this growing sense of unity.
I'd love to hear about the heart behind this regional church network that you're running and what brought it together.
(15:53):
In the United States, it's very palpable and very real.
Lots of local churches compete rather than view each other as teammates, and it breaks the heart of God.
When you see Jesus's prayer in John 17, his prayer was that we would be one as the Father, Son, and Spirit are one.
I mean, big deal to God should be a big deal to us.
(16:15):
We have not done a very good job of that in the States, but our generation, I've noticed the millennial generation is getting really hungry for collaboration.
For instance, we do cohorts, so we get pastors together.
We do a lot of things, marriage retreat, leadership summit, all kinds of things, but these cohorts are really important to just get pastors together to hear their stories, because when you hear people's stories, you actually understand them better, and instead of demonizing from a distance, you get to come closer in community.
(16:45):
So two pastors were at this one cohort.
They had pastored in the same city for 30 years each, the same 30 years together.
Then they had turned their churches over to other people.
They happened to come to our cohort.
They knew of each other that entire time, but at our cohort, after 30 years, they looked at each other and they said, man, wouldn't it have been great if we had gotten coffee?
(17:10):
Wouldn't it have been great if we had become friends?
They were both lamenting the fact that they had missed out on a capital K kingdom opportunity for them to be collaborators rather than ministry leaders at a distance.
We're breaking down those barriers.
Northeast Collaborative empowers pastors to lead and launch healthy churches in the northeast corner of America, which is the most unchurched, unreached post-Christian corner, and we do that through collaboration and bringing churches and leaders together and helping them be healthy for the long haul.
(17:41):
One of the things that I've had the honor of doing in various ministry positions I've been in
over the years is visiting a whole range of different churches, and once I've started to
see the different traditions of the Christian church, those people who certainly hold to the
Orthodox belief in Christ, but express it differently to see liturgical churches,
(18:05):
Pentecostal churches, a whole range of different churches.
You start to see a beauty in the different ways that people worship and come to Jesus.
Is that part of what's happening there as people start to discuss those differences and start to see them for what they are, that they're just a different way of reaching out to Jesus and of serving their community?
(18:31):
Yes.
So we are multi-denominational, and it's a beautiful thing.
It's like a diamond.
When you turn a diamond over, there's different facets and different ways that you can see the beauty of a diamond when you keep turning it over.
That's kind of what I think the body of Christ should be like because different streams have different strengths.
We have different denominational tribes, so to speak, that when we don't see it as tribal, but we see it as one part of a larger body, we need each other, and especially in leadership styles too.
(19:00):
I mean, the apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers.
Unfortunately, I feel like the American church kind of took the shepherd teachers and said, that's all we want, and then the apostles, prophets, and evangelists all went and started parachurch ministries because the local church kicked them out.
So we're trying to say, hey, what if we had all five together?
That'd be really great.
Yes, multi-denominational is beautiful.
(19:20):
What we don't think is healthy is ecumenicalism where we throw truth out of the window and just say, believe whatever you want.
Jesus didn't leave room for that.
So yes, we do have a core orthodoxy and even some practical things that help unify us, but multi-denominational because I think the splintering and the reasons people have divided through the years down through church history, when you study it, the reason we have thousands of denominations is really our own human selfishness.
(19:46):
It's not really what God designed it to be.
And you've mentioned there the thing that scares people about the idea of unity is often that, ah, but do they believe the same central truths?
And as you say, you can't just throw truth out the window.
You need to say, we need to believe in the centrality of Christ, who he is, and there are some core beliefs.
(20:11):
That's the thing that sometimes has been missing with that ecumenical movement.
So how do we ensure that we stay on the right side of that, that we are meeting with brothers and sisters in Christ?
There are things that we say we're willing to die for and then things that we leave in our open hand.
Things that you're willing to die for would be like the deity of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus, biblical authority, that the Bible isn't just a helpful, moral, religious book.
(20:39):
It is actually God's word, and we need to trust it and submit to it.
So there's some core things there we're willing to die for.
Then there's things that we're willing to defend, secondary issues that we should know why we believe what we believe, because practically and functionally, they make sense and they have to make sense when you're on a team.
And then the third ring would be discuss.
(21:01):
We try to say, hey, for our network, Christian is helpful, so we use the Apostles' Creed for that.
We also say that we are biblicists and we align with something called the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy view decades ago that was created.
And then we say missional, and we align with the missional manifesto that comes from leaders like Tim Keller and others.
(21:21):
And then we say we are conservative Protestant.
Now the word conservative, that can mean a lot of different things to different people.
That doesn't mean politically conservative.
We simply mean having a view of the Bible that leans with a non-progressive liberal theological view of the Bible.
I want to take a slight turn now and talk about your authorship, because you've authored a couple of books that are for students.
(21:47):
Tell me about those.
Yeah.
So my oldest son, Landon, as we've been discussing when he was eight, he looked up at my wife, Joy, and he said, Mom, you know what I think the hardest thing in the world is?
And again, he's a pastor's kid.
She's like, what?
He goes, following Jesus.
She's like, why do you think that?
He goes, because so many people don't follow Jesus.
(22:08):
At school, he's discovering that like very few people claim to be Jesus followers, and yet it's like a big deal in our house.
So he's kind of like, what's going on here?
So that began a journey with us of diving into his own faith, and he's wrestled with it for two years now.
Actually, this past Wednesday was the moment the Holy Spirit just brought him to that point where he said, man, I need Jesus.
(22:30):
And after two years of wrestling, he accepted the Lord as his Savior.
It was really awesome.
Amazing.
We could talk about that for a long time, but man, that was a powerful thing this past week.
But these books, Making Scripture Simple, basically, I was like, how would I explain the Bible to my eight-year-old son, Landon, in a way that makes sense to him?
And I noticed that pretty much most of what's out there for kids is conceptual.
(22:54):
It's very much summary and all that stuff, and that's fine, but these are actually verse-by-verse paraphrases for kids who can read, but they're not ready for adult translations yet.
So it's called Making Scripture Simple, and I've got Philippians done, Colossians and Philemon together, because they were written to the same church, but even trying to have other helpful things in there.
(23:15):
So with Colossians and Philemon, I've got a little insert about why is slavery in the Bible?
Because I started to recognize, Landon, even between ages eight and ten, he's asking some of the deepest questions that you would not believe kids at his age would be asking.
How would I explain that very important question?
Why is slavery in the Bible to an eight-year-old and things like that?
First, second, third John and Jude are coming out December on time for Christmas.
(23:39):
I've put all four of those together, and then Galatians will be the next one coming out for Easter 2026.
One of the things that has always, I guess, bemused me is that we have young people around that age and a little bit older who, when they're at school, they will sit in lessons and they will be taught for long periods of time.
(24:02):
And yet when they turn up at church, we figure somehow we have to entertain them, that they're not going to sit still and hear real teaching.
That has always been one of those strange things.
And you think, why is it that at church we feel we have to entertain them when these kids are already used to sitting in classrooms, learning some hard stuff, questioning the way the world works.
(24:30):
And yet we don't seem to be doing that as much in church.
And it seems that these books are starting to fill that gap.
I'm hoping that they do.
If you talk to an avid Harry Potter lover, for instance, they're going to know all the jargon, all the insider language.
That's just one example.
If you really care about something, even in a secular sense, you can learn jargon, you can learn vocabulary, you can learn concepts very, very quickly.
(25:00):
I think we've done the church a disservice by assuming no one's going to be that in love with Jesus.
If you are in love with Jesus, you're going to care what Jesus cares about.
When he says his word is a gift to us, we need to not only just learn it, but enjoy it.
And understand it more than an intellectual thing, but make it a heart posture of, wow, I can't believe God loves me enough to actually give me the guidance and direction and clarity I need to be fully human the way that he designed me.
(25:33):
That is amazing.
I want that for people at any age, in any stage of life, but especially as the father of two young boys, just starting to see that gap and going, man, if making scripture simple could be helpful.
Now, as far as the entertainment factor, there are some coloring pages in it.
So there's a little bit of fun mixed in, but you're right.
We've settled for making consumers rather than making disciples.
(25:58):
That's part of why I think not only is making scripture simple helpful for kid men programs in local churches, but it's also, I would say even more geared towards parents of children in their homes doing home-based discipleship, which is really what God designed.
And when you look in scripture, that's really the whole thing.
And Dan, I certainly couldn't let you go without touching on your own podcast, Dents in the Darkness.
(26:24):
Tell me a little about that.
Yeah.
So it's an extension of Northeast Collaborative.
I mentioned we have a lot of tributaries of ministry.
We have over 50 episodes now.
Turned it over to my teammate, Mike Schooley, but our friend Tim Adira from WRJN Radio in Northeast Pennsylvania, he is an incredible Christian DJ who has produced it.
And we've had some incredible episodes in interviewing pastors in the field, but also experts in other fields, talking with ministry leaders about the raw realities of leadership, especially in Northeast America.
(26:56):
But then authors like Nancy Piercy and her book Love Thy Body, which is a must read if you haven't read it, so many others that we've had.
But yeah, you can check it out, necollaborative.com, necollaborative.com.
Just click on the Dents in the Darkness podcast tab, or you can just search Dents, D-E-N-T-S, in the darkness, like Hulk smash Dents, right?
(27:20):
Hulk smash Dents in the darkness on any of those streaming platforms.
Dan, I'm going to make sure that there are links in the show notes at bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find you easily, get hold of the books, direct to the podcast, and so that they can listen to some of that as well.
But it has been an absolute delight to talk to you today, to hear some of your story, quite a varied story, and to know that God isn't finished with what you're doing yet, and to know that there's still some great things to come in your ministry, in your family.
(27:55):
So thank you for your time.
It's great to have had you here on Bleeding Daylight.
Thank you, Rodney.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
Please help us to more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net
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