MARSHA DUCILLE: Why did you write Living Amazed in this season of your life?
JAMES ROBISON: After 73 years on this earth, I’ve observed the amazing grace that God freely offers. I feel like my life is a miracle story in the sense that, in today’s world, I would not have been born. I would have been aborted because of the circumstances of my mother’s pregnancy. She had a forced sexual relationship when she was 40. But a doctor said no to the abortion, and I was allowed to be born. So, I am able to identify with people who feel overlooked, unimportant, and not chosen. God has not overlooked any of us. I want to inspire people — no matter who they are — no matter how inadequate or unqualified they feel. They, too, are designed by God and destined for a Kingdom-life that’s amazing.
MD: Betty, from the onset of your relationship with James, even when you were teenagers in high school, you were a strong presence in his life. You were an amazing force. In Living Amazed, James tells an account of you working behind the scenes to get him appointed as youth pastor.
BETTY ROBISON: Yes, I did! He was a young man who was very bashful. He lived a lot of his life in his own world and making his own joy. He was very much a loner. […] We would have youth revivals at our church, and someone (normally one of the young people) would be the youth pastor that week. So, I got some of our friends, and I asked them to help me get James nominated — because I wanted him to be involved in what was going on at the church. He wasn’t real happy with it at first, but God had a plan! I look back and I think, “What a plan it was” because that was the moment when God transformed James’s life and called him into ministry. I saw the transformation before my eyes.
