An Interview with Larry Craig

An Interview with Larry Craig

by Leon Shernoff

Larry Craig is the meat manager at the 55th St. store. When he told me he had a book coming out, I asked if I could interview him about it for the Evergreen. His book is about Christian healing, and we had an interesting discussion about it.

Leon: Larry, before I read your book, I anticipated that it would make the claim that Christian healing existed. But really it seems to me that it does something rather different: it starts out assuming that Christian healing exists and then moves on to exhort people to use it in everyday life, and to use it as part of an evangelical ministry based on healing and miracles, in the style of Jesus and the original apostles, rather than the more text-based evangelicism that is the norm today.

Larry: Well, really what it does is make the case for healing as part of modern life. The modern church acknowledges the existence of Christian healing, but so often it treats it as an historical event, not something that happens much today. It doesn’t know how to handle healing today. If God won’t heal you when you are sick, what will He do for you?  He says that He will meet your needs, and if that is not a need, then what is?

Here we have this thousand-page book telling us about God, and if we don’t know if God wants us sick or well, alive or dead, then we don’t really know anything about Him at all.  We have taken so much of the miraculous in the Bible and relegated it to “special circumstances” that we don’t know anymore what God will do today.

Leon: How did you get into religious writing? After all, this isn’t something that most people expect from their meat manager.

Larry: I wanted to continue my Biblical studies when I got married, but my wife insisted that I get a job.  I got into meat, which back then was a good union job: it had insurance, vacations and so on.   I started a church on the side, and unfortunately I followed advice I got from some people and quit my meat job to run the church full-time. But that didn’t work out. Jewel wouldn’t take me back fulltime– I was working for Jewel at the time – but that wasn’t such a big deal. The industry was already downsizing, and I would have been laid off shortly anyway.

But religion was always my passion, not meat. I always wanted to be in the ministry, but for different reasons it didn’t happen.  Writing can allow me to help people in a way that can be even more lasting than actually being in the ministry.

Leon: I see that you’ve got two other books in the works. Can you tell me something about them?

Larry: I have a contract with my publisher for one other book, but the one I really wanted to write is on the Lord’s Prayer. I think I have some important things to say about it, things that other people don’t seem to get. People who’ve been saying the Lord’s Prayer for their whole life may be wondering why on earth we’d need another book on it. But there are some very simple things about it that seem very obvious to me and have changed my life. But when I read books about it, or attend classes, it’s like: they just don’t see it.

Leon: Can you give us a sneak preview of that book?

Larry: All right. Let’s look at two very basic points. The disciples come to Jesus and say “teach us to pray.” So: they think that prayer is something that needs to be taught. And Jesus agrees with them, you need to learn how to pray.

The first point is that one of things you are supposed to ask for is your daily bread.  If we don’t ask for it everyday, will we still get it?  In America, that may not seem to be much of a problem.  But we are told to ask God everyday for our daily needs.  If we don’t get whatever those may be, can we blame God, if He told us to ask for them?

I think Jesus is drawing on the story of the manna in the wilderness in the Bible, where everyday the people had to go out and gather their food for the day.  If you didn’t gather it, you didn’t get it. If you tried to store it up for the next day, it wouldn’t keep. The point here is that you need to do this everyday. It’s like manna – what you need is always available, but you won’t get it if you don’t do the daily work.

The fact is, most people don’t pray every day for their daily needs. And if you don’t get your daily bread, was that God’s will? Not if you didn’t pray for it.

The second point is where it says “deliver us from evil.” We’ve already established that you need to pray this prayer everyday. There are all sorts of books out on why bad things happen to good people?  Here Jesus is telling people to pray for deliverance from evil everyday before it happens.

Since I started praying this everyday, it’s been like night and day in my own life. Sometimes bad things still happen, but I look at it like a sports team: you’re going to lose a few games. Look at the Bulls, when they had that season where they won 70 games: it’s better than any other team in history, but they still lost a few.

Leon: So healing is one of the things that you pray for?

Larry: I don’t usually pray for healing, but that’s another subject.  The problem so many people have with healing is: how long do you wait before you decide if it’s working or not? If you don’t know if God wants to heal you, how will you know when or if He is answering your prayer.  That’s why it’s important to know God’s will ahead of time. All sorts of people came to Jesus in the Bible, and He healed every one of them. There’s no case where he said, “Sorry, it’s God’s will that you not be healed.”

God says, “Call on me; I will deliver you!” Those are His words. God has committed himself to healing His followers. It’s like a birthright. In general, if I have a  problem – an earache, a headache – I command it to be gone in Jesus’ name, and it goes. It’s like when Paul was bitten by a scorpion and just shook it off into the fire. He didn’t pray for the scorpion’s bite not to affect him.

The last third of my book gives a course for healing. There are different approaches, but asking is not usually one of them. If you ask, it suggests that the answer could be no.

The book on healing isn’t actually the book I wanted to start out with. I actually didn’t want to be associated with this issue and possibly locked into it, because there are so many other things that I wanted to share. I’ve done a lot of teaching in churches, and there are lots of other issues I want to write about. But healing is fundamental.

There’s always a gap between God and our understanding of God. We give him the benefit of the doubt if we don’t understand what’s going on. But healing is a basic part of the Bible.  If that has changed, then what else has changed?  If we can’t understand that correctly, what’s the point trying to understand anything else in the Bible? We might as well put it back on the shelf and forget about it.

Leon: So what’s your third book about?

Larry: That’s the second one I’m writing now for the same publishing company. It’s about how the experiences of the Israelites in the Old Testament can form a guide for daily life today. It’s like a map, really: you can place your life in their history and it will tell you how you got there, where you are going, and what to expect next.  What is the thing you need to learn in life now? I’ve taught this as a class three or four times now, each time in more depth.

It’s like when the Israelites were in Egypt and they were promised this land of milk and honey; but when they got there, it was filled with giants. It’s like a cruel joke: you have this tantalizing promise, but when you get there, the land was occupied by an unconquerable enemy. This conflict, between the promise and the apparent reality is a tremendous model of life, especially life with God – how do you respond to it? The Israelites, except for Joshua and Caleb, responded with fear, and God said, okay, you’ll wander in the desert for forty years until you all die, and it’s your children who will inherit it. God wants and expects us to believe in His word, and then we will overcome these sorts of obstacles, to face the enemy, to face the impossible. It’s like when the disciples saw Jesus walking on the water, and Peter could walk on the water as long as he kept his eyes on Jesus. But when he was distracted by the wind and waves, then he started to sink.

Leon: One last question, Larry: what’s the name of your book?

Larry: It’s called The Importance of Healing.