J. Warner Wallace: Case Files: Murder and Meaning

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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J. Warner Wallace: Case Files: Murder and Meaning

April 5, 2025

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose welcome J. Warner Wallace to discuss his new graphic novel, co-authored with his son Jimmy, entitled "Case Files: Murder and Meaning". The book tells the story of police detectives trying to catch a dangerous serial killer. We discuss how the story raises questions about human value, morality, identity, and meaning - creating an opportunity for deeper conversations with a wider audience.

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Show notes and transcript: https://winteryknight.com/2025/04/05/knight-and-rose-show-61-j-warner-wallace-case-files-murder-and-meaning

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight & Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose.

Welcome, Rose. So today, we're delighted to welcome a guest onto the show, J. Warner Wallace. J. Warner Wallace is a Dateline featured cold case homicide detective, an author, and a speaker.

He is also a senior fellow at the Colson Center for Christian worldview and an adjunct professor of apologetics at Talbot School of Theology, which is part of Biola University. And he's also a professor of apologetics at Gateway Seminary and Southern Evangelical Seminary as well. Welcome back to the Knight & Rose Show, Jim.

Hey, thanks so much for having me. I'm toggling back and forth with you as I talk to you on my mute button, because I know that my granddaughter, Emma, in the background is going to be making a little bit of noise occasionally. So hopefully, you won't be too disturbed by that.

We actually love that noise in our house, but I totally get it when you're trying to podcast. No, absolutely. My pastor is always saying, we love children.

We love those kinds of interruptions. I felt the same way when I had a house church for six years that had about 50 people who would attend weekly, and we had no affinity groups. So if you came with your kids, you had to really embrace that, because if you didn't embrace it, you'd be pretty unhappy pretty quickly, because you'd be standing before a group teaching something, and their kids would be on the floor in front of you playing with Duplos, and that you just have to kind of walk around them in order to do this.

It's a different kind of church for sure. I think it probably was pretty similar to how the first century church probably looked. Yeah, I'm sure it was.

Yeah. Well, we're excited to have you back on the show. And you have a bit of a different type of project here this time.

Just by way of introduction, would you just kind of briefly tell us about your new book? What type of book is it? Who's the target audience? That sort of thing. Just briefly. Yeah, it is definitely different, right? So I started moving away really from the evidential case four kinds of books about three books ago.

I think that I've written Cold Case Christianity and God's Crime Scene and Forensic Faith, and that trilogy really kind of emptied out the process, almost all of it, that I went through to become a Christian, and I added to that when Zondervan asked me to write Person of Interest. And that really, Person of Interest started to toggle. I even told Zondervan at the time, we did Person of Interest, that, hey, I'll write this Jesus book, because I've already written a Jesus book, you know, Cold Case Christianity.

But they wanted one also, and they're a different publisher. So I said, okay, I'll do it, but only if I can really focus on why Jesus still matters in a world that rejects the Bible. And that became the subtitle for the book.

So I wanted to show not just what's the evidence for Christianity, but what about Christianity makes it good and beautiful and necessary? Because that's, I think, the rising question that this generation has, not just is it true, because they've kind of qualified what true means anyway. They want to know, is it good? And I think that's where we turn toward in the next book after that, which is The Truth in True Crime. It really makes an apologetic for Christianity from the basis of its goodness.

It describes how humans could flourish. It describes us the way that we really are. But this book is really now taking another step.

And we always thought that at some point we're going to step into fiction and just try to, again, try to find another way to bite the apple. And there's lots of ways to do this, and we need to do it from every angle. Because I think there's a sense in which apologetics writers are more rational than they are emotional and experiential.

If you had to kind of draw them on that spectrum line, most people would probably locate them down toward the more detached kind of reasoning creatures that don't allow themselves to just experience something without testing every little thing. So I think that there's that spectrum. And what brings us back toward the center is our love of the arts and how can we engage ourselves in the arts, engage in it in a way that embraces an apologetic worldview, an apologetic approach to Christianity.

But it really steps into narratives and storytelling. So this book is fiction, and it's in the form of a graphic novel. So it's entirely visual.

That shouldn't probably surprise many people. I didn't get to draw this book, and I'm glad I didn't because I don't have the, although I draw all the illustrations in my own books, they're not comic books. And graphic novels are, in a sense, the most robust form of comic book you're ever going to find.

And the people who do comic book art are just unbelievable. And so we, my son and I, my son's the one who really had the idea. And he's always been a comic book fan.

I mean, he's got a collection of comic books in his garage, if he was here with us today, except that they're having their second child today. If he was here with us today, he would be you'd see his background as just a big stack of cardboard boxes filled with hundreds and hundreds of comic books. Wow.

So I think that helped us to do this graphic novel because oh, undoubtedly, yeah, our audience is is going to be slightly different. But look, the audience we're seeking now in this fictional graphic novel is not an audience that would probably ever pick up an apologetics book. Right.

And so we want to be able to describe some small aspect of the Christian worldview by way of a narrative to people who are Christian. You're going to love it because it's going to help you to kind of support your views in a popular culture. But if you're not a Christian, we hope that it'll open up conversations and just start you thinking about, well, how do we ground these things that we take for granted? Like this first book is about the value of human life.

Like, how do we, and you see this all the time that in homicide investigations, you often get a view of human value that skewed. It's based on what the culture thinks is valuable today as we're talking someone who's probably being murdered somewhere in the nation. And that that murder is it may or may not even make the local news.

It may not even make the local live media press broadcast. It might not. But of course, if the right person gets killed today, then it's going to be all over the national headlines.

Well, what is that? Why does that happen? Because it seems like even in the news, we know that some people we think of more valuably than we think of other people. And you see this and how their their murders are broadcast. Well, is that true? And if it isn't true, how would we ground human value? Right.

That would help us to understand that it turns out the person who's who you might not think much of whose murder is just as valuable as the person you think is a celebrity when they're murdered. And that's one of the things that if you start to think deeply about how we determine someone's value, it will lead you back to some form of transcendent grounding. You're going to have to ground your view in something more than the opinion of the press about who's valuable enough to report on.

So we wanted to explore that in this book a little bit. So we just have a story of a serial killer who is increasing the his targets once a week. So you've got to move fast because he's who's moving fast.

And each target becomes, at least from the view of the culture, like a more, more influential target, somebody who's better known in the culture. And the question then becomes, well, why would you if you're ignoring the first ones, because you don't think they're that important. Why all of a sudden are you jumping into an investigation? Like what's making the third one more important than the first one? And that's the kind of thing that we're trying to examine only to uncover how you properly ground human value.

Yeah, this makes me think of like C.S. Lewis books and how he talks about every single person you've ever met is immortal, you know, and Christianity teaches that every person that you've met has to be treated a certain in a way that doesn't take them away from God because every person is made for a relationship with God. And so you have to be careful how you teach them. Well, how are you going to get that out there to people to consider? And so I, you know, answering the question, the book definitely does an incredible job of raising that topic and also other topics as well.

You know, I remember that you and I were talking at a conference this past fall about how when we publish apologetics books, nonfiction books on apologetics, the same people read it as read every other apologetics book. And so how do we break out of that circle? And, you know, you had some thoughts and some ideas that I thought were great. And this really does that this is so this is not going to be picked up by necessarily just the typical reader of nonfiction apologetics.

This is it's so entertaining. It's fun. It reaches, I think, I think it's going to reach a much broader age range, to be honest.

I know you call it an adult graphic novel, but WK and I have talked about how we we would give it to almost anyone 12 and older without a second thought. It's so fun and it doesn't compromise on the entertainment value. So what we see a lot of times in movies, what we've seen over the last 20 or 30 years, I think, is this this compromise on the entertainment value, the quality of the film, the quality of the creativity of the art in exchange for this attempt at in your face preaching.

And this is the opposite of that. This is high quality entertainment with subtle questions that are raised through the story, not by anything in your face, but by questions that these very realistic characters are asking. Well, and that was something we did very intentionally, right? We knew I've been a part of Christian movies.

So I understand the tension between wanting to make sure you've got this chance, you've got an audience sitting in a theater, you've got this chance. Well, I get it. We don't want to waste that opportunity.

But Jimmy and I decided early on. So Jimmy is, you know, he's 36. He's in the profession, you know, 13, 14 years.

I can't remember how many years he's been on the job now. And he's been a detective for most of that time. And so he he was one of those people who helped kind of craft.

This is why I think it reaches younger people, because he's not we're not reporting on how law enforcement was in my generation. We're reporting about how law enforcement is in Jimmy's generation. And it's so he's got a very contemporary view of the kinds of conversation, not like they've changed that much.

But when you hear the dialogue in this comic, this graphic novel, you're going to it's very much what we hear each other saying with our partners. You know, there's a lot of there's some sarcasm in it. There's kind of some that the main character is a guy named Murph.

And Murph is definitely a compilation of a couple of guys that we've known for years, that we could basically just channel them in order to have a conversation with them in a graphic novel, because we know exactly what they would say if we said something, you know, whatever it may be, we know exactly how they would have responded. And so this is how Murph responds. But this the idea here, though, is that that, yeah, we want to make sure that we talk about things that are tangent to the Christian worldview.

And it only makes sense under a Christian worldview. But we don't want like, you might read this book three quarters of the way through before you even get a sense. Is this a Christian book? Like, is this a book that is making a case for Christian? And we don't want it to be that obvious.

Now, we do have a character who's Christian in the book, but he's a minor character. And he comes in. And to be honest, we kind of wanted to see him as he's a patrol sergeant and patrol sergeants.

If you're in detectives, detectives typically think of themselves as being in a different category of law enforcement, right, than patrol. So and we know that that's just the nature of what it is to be a detective, you can be a little bit arrogant sometimes. And so we kind of put that in here.

So there's a lot of stuff in here that the publisher was really good. This is so what happened was, we, I've done six, seven books with David C. Cook, my first publisher, before I went to Zondervan. And with Cook, they purchased this comic book company called Corvus Comics, who are still out there now.

They only had they were under only under the David C. Cook kind of umbrella for a short time. And but when they purchased that comic book company, we saw it, we saw a press release. And we're like, oh, this is a chance for us to do what Jimmy's always wanted to do.

You cannot write the scripts for these things. Like, I basically sit with Jimmy and we we craft the story, we craft the characters. But but the page by page script writing, that's Jimmy doing that, because that's just his gift.

And he's written. Also, you have to be an avid reader of a genre before you want to put your foot in it. And so since he's such an avid reader, he kind of understands how to script it.

So we've got a chance to do this in a window. We don't know how long we're going to have an opportunity to do graphic novels. We have another one we're writing right now.

And again, we're just going to explore a different aspect of the Christian worldview with each one of these. But we also know we're playing the long game. In other words, these characters will reappear again and again and again and again.

Well, well, will anyone eventually get saved? Maybe, maybe not. That's just the way the world is. That's the way the real life is.

So we're not going to land the plane smoothly. We're not going to have everyone's not going to get saved at the end of the story. But those kinds of things is not that's not how life really works, especially amongst glass half empty detectives who are cynical and sarcastic to begin with.

So I think we have to be realistic about that in these narratives. But I do think that this is going to be a conversation starter. It's kind of a gateway book.

If you give it to somebody who's not a believer. And by the way, when the pre-order is over because it publishes in April, when the pre-order is over and we're actually publishing the book in the launch, we have a conversation guide that comes along with the book and we want people to kind of see it as an opportunity to have these conversations. So that's kind of going to reach an entirely different audience because it's written by somebody.

Jimmy is really the primary writer on the book. And so because of that, that's why he's got first billing on the book. It's kind of his brainchild.

And I love that because he's doing all the stuff that I did as a detective. He's just doing it a generation after me. So he knows the updated version.

So, you know, when I was a detective, I was writing search warrants for things like phone tolls. Okay. There was no social media that you were writing search warrants for.

So they could, you know, social media is tracking your locations, your mapping devices on your phones or tracking your locations. That's all available to law enforcement. But when I was a detective, that wasn't really even available yet, at least not to the depth that it is today.

So he has a kind of a better bird's eye view of how to work a case in this generation with all this digital media. We're going to see a lot of that in future books, I'm sure, as we run them. Right.

Yeah. I also noticed, you know, some of the updated mention of things like Tinder and Swipe Right or Swipe Left. I don't know the difference.

Yeah. And Sims. Yeah.

We were laughing so hard as we were reading this. We were taking screenshots and sending them to each other going, did you see this yet? This is great. Yeah.

So when he first put that stuff in, you know, here's my inclination on it. When he was writing it and we were going back and forth on the script is Suzy's always told me, do not date the book by putting something in it that 15 years from now is going to tell, is going to kind of make it obvious to the reader that this is 15 years old. Don't date the book.

So her, her wherever I put anything about social media, and she would always tell me, take that out. Just say social media because there'll always be social media probably. But that platform may not be there or may not be the platform you think it is today.

So my first inclination is to take modern or current language and generalize it. But that's not Jimmy. And that's not how people are actually talking.

If they were working this murder investigation today. So yes, I think it's great that he put that kind of some of those details back in the story. And yeah, I laughed about him too.

And I probably told him to take it out. And he probably overruled me and said, no, it's staying in, which is good. That's how this works.

So. Yeah, this is a big thing that I don't know people my age and young people are dealing with right now is the changing dating marketplace with these dating apps and social media. It's really making a lot of changes to how people get together.

And I think a lot of men like me think that one of the biggest problems is this tendency of men to be, I think, a little bit too permissive. And so the reference to Sims made me laugh. Yeah, very hard.

I was gonna say, you already talked a little bit about Michael Murphy. As soon as you said that name, I'm a big reader of military history. I read two military history books for every apologetics book.

And Michael Murphy is a name of a very famous Navy SEAL from Operation Red Wing. So he's in a book called Lone Survivor. And in a movie, did you name him after that guy? Or you said he is a collection of a bunch of other police officers? And could you tell us a little bit about him, even if you didn't name him after? Yeah, no, so we did not.

And as a matter of fact, I must confess to you, I didn't know there was a Michael Murphy from Operation Red Wings until you mentioned it. So so yeah, I would not I was not familiar. It's funny because we have had we've mentioned in the next book where we've got a suspect that's got a name that we picked.

And the publisher said, Hey, can you not use that name? Because it turns out he's an author here at that. And I thought, Oh, okay, I guess we can't use that name. And so it wasn't like we were trying to morph names from people we knew, but the characters are definitely morphed.

And this has been true for all of my work, especially in those times. You know, so so this character, Michael Murphy is a guy who's at the end of his career. And this something interesting happens in law enforcement, as you for all of us in any career, as you approach the end, you start to wonder, like, okay, if I leave this, have I allowed this to become and I wrote about this in the truth and true crime, as one of the chapters, I've allowed this to become who I am, I've allowed this to kind of capture my entire identity, to define me, this is super true in law enforcement.

And the reason why it's true is because the nature of law enforcement is superhero work. You put on a uniform, like a superhero, you save people like a superhero, you have an extraordinary amount of power and culture, whether that's good or bad, you do, you have the authority to take someone's life, if need be, you're carrying a weapon, you have a lot of superhuman kind of power in that. And it becomes part of your identity of who you are, are you ready to take off that uniform to no longer wear that badge? So we know that at some point, we're always going to be exploring that aspect of Michael Murphy, that he is at the end, he's surrounded by younger detectives that he's got to kind of train up, it's irritating.

It's not just that that's a kind of a trope, a kind of a meme that you see in other detective fiction, you do see that occasionally, you know, that the guy who is the experienced guy is irritated with the newbies. But that's just the reality. The reason why you see that is because that does happen.

And so yeah, that's that's what that's who he is. Now, he is a compilation of other, you know, I had a series of kids books also, for eight to 12 year olds. And in that, I had a guy whose name was Alan Jeffries.

Well, Alan Jeffries is just a guy who I really worked with. His name wasn't Alan Jeffries, but it was very close. And he just passed, maybe in the last two months.

He just passed a weird he went in for a surgery, and he had a complication in the surgery and suddenly died on the operating table. And it was shocked all of us. He's not that much older than me.

But he was senior to me on the job by probably 10 or 15 years, but I came on late because I was an architect first. So so he was senior to me. And he was just like this guy.

I mean, so much about. So I'm just compiling. I've always done that is I don't want to name people by name and lay them out, but I do have I just changed the name slightly.

And then I that's easy to write about these characters because you knew them personally. So Murphy's a guy that is probably a composite of every crusty, seasoned detective or police officer who's at the end of his career. And that's why we wanted to make his kind of his counterpart be this patrol sergeant, who is just at the exact same place that Murphy is in his life and his career.

Yet he's got a very different view of where he is in his career and how he's going to handle whatever's coming in front of him compared to Murph. So so I think we can tell this. You're right.

We have this story about murder and meaning and the human value, but there's lots of other kind of parallel things we're trying to talk about that are just realities for people who work in this industry and probably everybody else who works in any industry that they've allowed to form their identity. Absolutely. You know, one of our most popular we did an entire episode on identity and identity in Christ because we have seen that that has actually been a huge issue for everybody.

Whether, you know, people we all find our identity in something, whether it's, you know, the the the being really athletic or being really smart or our specific career or our role as a stay at home mom or whatever the case may be. And that like we were talking about before the show, that all of that is a season. We have seasons of life and they change and our kids grow up and go away, you know, and start their own lives, start their own jobs.

And then our role looks different. And then they're there, you know, you're in the grandchildren stage right now that I love it. I love that you're loving it.

And so when we find our identity in what we're doing or something that we're really good at, it has the potential to absolutely devastate us, send us into great despair when that ends. If we get hurt, if our career ends, if the children move away from home, whatever the case may be. And that actually turned out to be winter.

Isn't that like one of our very popular, most popular episodes ever? Yeah. And so it. Yeah.

So I think you're touching on something that actually affects everybody. I'm not surprised. The next book I'm working on is just blowing out that chapter of the truth and true crime on identity, because people will ask, OK, so this is the issue.

And here's what's interesting about it. And Murph in this book kind of discovers it that that when you have a trauma in your life or a challenge in your life, you're diagnosed with cancer, you get a divorce, your kid dies, whatever it may be, whatever the trauma and trauma looks different for everybody. Right.

So it can be a higher level or lower level. But what typically happens at the point of trauma is that your identity takes a hit. It changes the way you think about yourself.

You think, oh, I'm a healthy person. Well, not anymore. Oh, I'm a married person.

Well, not anymore. I'm the mother of, well, not anymore. OK, this is the problem.

It shifts your identity the way you think of yourself. But the reverse is equally true. Every identity shift involves it causes trauma.

Trauma causes an identity shift. Identity shifts cause trauma. So if you want to tell this to people, the kids at Summit Worldview Conference, which are all high schoolers, where I'm on the faculty there, I mean, I'm teaching there and I always tell these students, it turns out if you want the life that has the least number of traumas and challenges in it, then you'd be wise to simply pick an identity that doesn't shift.

Right. Because the shiftable identity is traumatic for the rest of your life, the ups and downs of that roller coaster. So so that's something.

But then the question becomes, well, if our identity is supposed to be in this transcendent thing that is immutable and eternal and does not change, if our identity is in Christ, that sounds good, but none of us do it. None of us, including the Christians, including the three of us, we say we do it. We say we're in Christ.

And in some sense, formerly we are. But our actions give it away. We become not in Christ, not a child of God.

We're now the host of this podcast, the author of this book. It shifts. And suddenly we're spending way more time on that other thing than we are submitting ourselves to Christ.

And we think that by doing this thing for Jesus, we are putting our identity in Jesus. No, we're not. No, we're not.

We are now putting our identity in that thing that we are. We're tracking how many people have viewed that. How many people? You knew that that was the most popular podcast.

Why? Because you're checking the podcast stats. I get it. Right.

And we fall into this trap. Now, I can tell you that part of it is the age that you're in. So I think that was me for years and years and years.

You know, I would like how many subscribers do we have on YouTube? How many people are watching the video? Okay. I think what happens is at some point you get to an age where you're like, really? I realized that none of that really matters compared to the things that really matter to you, which are the people who know you the most deeply. And this is what Merv is also going to experience in this comic, because, you know, the relationship with his daughter.

So you see some of that happening because that's the stuff that really, really matters. Now, look at this for a second. If you look at scripture, the writers of scripture identify Christians as the word Christian, I think three times.

But Paul repeatedly and other authors repeatedly describe Christians as simply those who are in Christ. Right. So it turns out that the foremost way that people are identified as Christ followers is their identity in Christ.

Yet none of us truly puts our identity in Christ because we know that because look at my where am I on my email signature is the word Son of God or Christ follower. It's just not there because we are identifying ourselves to the world and where we really practically speaking, put our identity. It's in this stuff we do, especially if you have a worldview that says it's done for you by Jesus on a cross.

You are far more likely to see yourself as somebody who is not having to do something in order to be in Christ. But it turns out if you are in Christ, you ought to end up doing something. So the point I'm trying to say is the question most people have for me is, OK, if you're saying that my identity is not well, the first key to this is we have to figure out like where it's all about worship.

It's all about idolatry. Our identity is typically in the thing we are falsely or over devoted to. We have misplaced our devotion into something else.

And that now becomes the thing that we're possessed about. And it's often just our work as public Christians. Right.

I mean, if you're a podcast, if you're a YouTuber, you're looking at your YouTube numbers. If you're a podcaster, you're looking at your podcast numbers. If you're an author, you're looking at your book sales.

And it's not so much about monetizing that. It's about is this work, does this work matter? Because when you ask the question, does this work matter? And Murph is asking this also in his own mind. Right.

The real question you're asking is, do I matter? Because we have now joined those two things, our work and our personal identity. They are now inseparable for us. And so we have a falsely think that we only matter and we only have meaning if our work matters and our work has meaning.

And then we look for others to affirm our work so we can say, oh, yeah, OK, I matter still. And I remember doing this as when you first came out of law before I first came out of law enforcement. It was I was like Murph at the end and I was like, OK, well, am I going to what's what's the next thing? And and then when people started to book our speaking events after I wrote the first book, I thought, oh, this is great.

They still think that this is important. They think that this topic is important. OK, what are you doing? I mean, none of this.

So so here's what we typically do. We have this post and on the post, we hang signs and the signs of the labels that we we because we all wear several identity hats at the same time. Husband, father, grandfather, a detective, Christ follower, you know, a Californian.

That's where I am. You know, all these things that we have labels and we put them on the post. And sometimes the signs change positions depending on where you are in life and what you're doing today.

Sometimes being a father is more important than you're going to do that day. Get it. Well, it turns out we falsely think that the Christ follower is one of the signs on the post.

It's not. It's the post. It is the post.

That's right. And we're just covering the post up with all the signs. Right.

And so we have to figure out how do we get comfortable? Because if you don't take those signs off that post, God will knock them off the post at some point. So it's up to you when you want to eventually get right with this identity thing. So I do think it's a huge issue.

And we're just trying to, we're just not really, that's not the issue in this book so much as it is, but it is. It's that his struggle, exactly the worst struggle you see in the quiet moments when he's drinking a beer, that's that's the struggle that is very human struggle. And he's not a Christian.

So he's kind of approaching it in a different way. I got to say one quick thing. So about that identity in Christ episode, you know, it wasn't like we have actually been spending some time with one of our listeners who that's his favorite episode.

So we've been calling him and having talks with him. He's had kind of a troubled family background. He's questioning some of the decisions.

He's making a very successful guy. But that's what I meant. Like I didn't, like, I don't think that don't don't try to back out of this like this.

Look at how he's trying to cover this up. Really. My identity is in Christ.

Really. I swear to you. And my identity is in Christ.

Come on. Now you're just saying here. Here's how I always say it.

If you were to look and I'm at this point in my life, it's in my sixties, I'm able to spend a lot of time each day in scripture because I write a Bible for each one of my grandchildren. And I'm just making like a commentary. It's, it's a journal Bible.

So it's got a huge wide amount of commentary. Okay. And I'm just going through each book and it takes forever.

Let's say I do a paragraph and I'm in Romans with, with Lucy. Okay. Well, that takes to do a paragraph and a commentary and that's, that takes forever for me.

And then I'm, I'm in proverbs with Emma. Well, that's even harder. Sometimes it seems like there's so many different ideas and proverbs that I'm in first Samuel with my grandson James.

Okay. Well, I'm in these things for hours every day now. But if you were to calculate the number of hours that I think about other things, they still grossly outnumber the number of hours and I'm retired.

I have no excuse. It's not like I have to think about those other things, but I get caught up in other things too. Other things that maybe are about, you know, what an apologetics issue that I'm working on.

That's not God. That is just a work that I'm doing. That's public.

And also, if you look at how I spend my money, I always say this to everybody. If you want to know what your God really is, where you've put your devotion, let me see your receipts. I'll tell you what's important.

If we got to eat, take that stuff out, but your discretionary income, where are you spending your discretionary income? We'll often tell you what your priorities are. And I think we can align those things, but also if I could just do a brain scan and log the number of minutes that you're thinking about any particular thing. We, again, we sometimes think that our work as public ministers, apologists, that this is our identity in Christ.

But not really, because it turns out you can do all that and be as far away from Jesus as anybody else. So I'm still struggling. Like, what does it mean? And I think the answer is in the Gospels, for sure.

It's in the teaching of Jesus. I actually think it's in the teaching of Jesus in those areas where he taught about his own identity. That's where we're going to find the answer for us putting our identity in him.

So that's kind of where I'm headed in the next book. But I think that we have to, it is an important issue and there's lots of ways to kind of slice that pie. And I think that it's worth our time.

And that's why we had to include something about that in Case Files. We knew that Murph was, that's why we put him as a guy in his fifties, early fifties, because that's when all of us retire from law enforcement. So here's a guy who is like the oldest guy on the team.

And we knew of all the people on the team, that's the guy who's going to struggle with who am I now. So that's why we aged him at that point, because we didn't have to, we could have made everybody in their thirties. But we wanted an older guy on the team with another older character out in the field.

They could, we could compare the two. Yeah, that's great. I love it.

Another topic that you, that seemed to come up subtly, I would say throughout is marriage and family. I was wondering if you might just share a little bit about kind of what you were thinking there, what you hoped might come up, how that might relate to some of the big questions of life. Yeah.

Well, then this is where we're headed in the next book. We're going to develop that even more robustly. So I think that, yeah, this isn't, so, so what we're writing is a book that is coming out of a Christian worldview.

So without preaching, we just want to hold up the values that we think exist in scripture and then examine them, let the characters live them in one direction or the other. And let's see what happens with those characters when they either pursue a Christian worldview in their actions, or at least they, they, they reflect a Christian worldview in their actions and those that don't. And let the, and without being pejorative, without making a mockery of, of something that's not Christian, like this is the reality of who we are as humans, that we are wired differently as men and women.

And that it turns out that, that, that I, I need someone like Susie in my life to moderate the way that I am biochemically wired. She's biochemically wired in a very different direction. And together we can make really good choices that bless our family and that whenever we work as a couple, then we are really representing the best version of each of us.

You know, because I know her well enough and I've been with her for 46 years. This, the idea here is that, Hey, that I've given her permission over those 46 years to just be honest about who I am. Just tell me.

And she's given me the same permission. So what ends up happening is that you get sanded down and chiseled into a better position to a better shape than you would have been if you didn't have a chisel or a piece of sandpaper that you've allowed to chisel you. And, and, and she's so, her perspective is so different and it's not about culture.

It's not that she's different than me because our culture has taught her to be different than me. Even if there was no cultural boundary or no cultural teaching on who men and women are, we are different biochemically as long as her, and those things produce a different result in me that we are. I mean, and that's not to say that the women don't have some of that and the men don't have some of the other.

Of course we do, but we are dominantly driven on average. I'm talking about on average is that men are driven in a different way and you'd definitely see this in law enforcement. Oh, you definitely see it in law enforcement.

And there's an expectation by the way that women detectives and police officers are going to be better in some things than we are. And we know we're better in some things than they are. Now, most of the things that we would say before you get upset about that, the most things that we would say we are better at are things that just require brute force.

So if you walk into a bar fight and you're six foot two, six foot four, 280 pounds cut like a Greek God, trust me, drunks are going to pay attention to you and they're probably going to do what you tell them to do. If I, as a man was to walk in at five foot four, 130 pounds, I'm going to get pushed around. I'm probably going to get in a fight.

I'm going everyone's going to challenge me because they think they think it can take me. Now that's just the reality of it. And you can say, well, yeah, but I've got tools.

Well, it turns out that guy who was six foot four and 280 never has to pull his taser out of the holster. He just says, do this. And guys go, okay.

I think you clearly take me. So there's a certain, because law enforcement is what law enforcement is, it is going to have to require some guys to be not not six foot four, 280. I was one of the guys that involves in the pair, right? They're going to try to take me before they take my partner who's six foot four.

Okay. It's just the nature of it. I get that.

But still you have to be a certain kind of physical physicality is required for this job. But there's also insights that I don't have intuitive insights that I've got. I really trained myself hard to catch in interviews that probably I wouldn't have to train Susie to catch.

She right away will tell me, did you see that? Well, yeah, I saw it now. I see it, but I'm glad to have somebody who's got a little bit more intuitive in that way. And we're just wired differently and it's our biochemistry.

So when we write books, especially fiction books like Case Files, we're going to reflect our views and how the best version of you is probably the version that you that's been committed for a long time in a marital relationship with somebody you've allowed permission to speak truth to you. Because the mess that I am often Susie is quick to point that out. Okay.

That's okay, because I wanted to. Yeah. So the reality of it is, is that's what we, and so our books are going to reflect those kinds of things.

These are important. And you see what happens in broken relationships. That's what we're trying to paint with Murph also that, you know, by the way, regret does not exist.

And how many numbers your podcasts are getting, you will never find a regret in your podcast stat sheet. You won't find it in your place of employment. Regret lives in your house with you.

It's as simple as that. These are the things that you will someday regret you didn't do better. You will never look back and say, man, I wish I could have worked a little bit longer.

I wish I could have solved another case. Yeah. I wish it'd be nice if I could have solved more cases, but I don't have any regrets about what I did.

This next man up over there, they don't even miss me. Okay. They got somebody else doing that job.

Now, this is a paramilitary organization. The military teaches you better than anything else that if you drop in the line of duty, there's a guy behind you who also is holding a gun. Right.

And that's your job. It's next man up. And if you can't live with that, but in your house, there is no next man up.

Your kids don't think there's another man's going to do or another mom is going to do. Exactly. You have critical importance of those things that we think are important in the circle, the order of love, the order of charity, the order of responsibility.

Okay. We spend a lot of time in our work life trying to serve as a first priority. A bunch of strangers, we don't know.

They're out there in the outside ring of those concentric circles of the order of love. Meanwhile, that most concentric ring in the center is your family, is your kids. And they don't care about your promotion or what you did at work today.

They honestly don't. You know, I was thinking about this, my kids, I realize that now I'm going to spend thousands of hours writing three books that I'm not even sure that those three kids are going to read. They have to become Christians to read the Bibles I'm writing to them.

And it will take me thousands of hours in each one. I just know because I've been at now for a year because we've got our kids are all grandkids are all under two years old. And, and I'm not making much progress.

So, so can I, how much can I get done? Thousands of hours. But the target is the, the innermost circle of the order of loves rather than I spent six months writing a book that thousands of strangers might read. Right, right.

That's important. I want to do that too. But to be honest, I got to retreat back to this.

And those are the kinds of things that I think can show up in the character development in books. The things that I can write that out as a nonfiction claim, just as a claim, or I can show you a life that is, has either embraced that of an attitude or rejected that attitude. And let's see where they go.

Yeah, this whole conversation is such a great example and reminder of me to how critical it is to have intergenerational fellowship going on at all times, because you have such a different and valuable and wise perspective being in a different season. And what I largely see around me is people investing most of their energy and thought and desire to please and get approval and get rewards and everything else from that outer circle. And then coming home and going, well, this person's going to love me anyway.

So I'm just too exhausted to pay attention to the marriage. I'm too exhausted to play with the kids. Everybody just leave me alone, kind of a thing.

And I think I understand the challenge and the tension and we have to make people have to make a living. People have to provide for their family. But just that shift in attitude of, you know what? I don't have to give everything I have for people I don't know.

I don't need the approval of everybody I don't know. I need something for the inner circle. Absolutely.

And you realize it, I think most critically when I realize at some point that my kids have not read any of my books. So Jimmy has, I mean, Jimmy, I think Jimmy probably read probably the most of any, but my parents haven't read my books. I don't have value to those people in the inner circle in that way.

My value comes in an entirely different way. And if I don't realize that, then I'm missing it. And you see this all the time.

Where's the people's regret? And you see this all the time in ministry leaders whose kids do not carry the banner then who aren't interested in the very things their fathers or mothers were willing to give their life to. Look, what happens is, and I talk about this in the Truth and True Crime 2 and a chapter that talks about the value of work. There's two things that you have right now that have value.

If you're listening to this podcast, it's really simple. It's your time and your money. And when you're young, you have to leverage one for the other.

You have to give up your time because you need to pay the bills. And I tell this to all the apologists that I know right now who are in their forties. I know many of them who are famous in the country that are working in apologetics, and they have no strategy to shift that dynamic.

In other words, they will always have to give their time to pay the bills, which is important. Now, I knew when I came out of architecture and went to civil service work that I could, if I could learn to live on whatever I made as a cop, that I could shift the dynamic at some point and shift the thing of what's going to happen is you're going to hit your sixties and suddenly money doesn't matter. What am I going to do with money now? Honestly, I'm in the same house I've been in for 30 years.

My cars are all paid for. They're all the bottom of the line cars. I don't care about that stuff.

I want to have no bills. You know, financial independence is not the ability to buy anything. It's the ability to buy anything you want.

I don't want anything. So I'm already financially independent. Now, why does that matter? Because as you get older, the shift takes place.

And now what has value is your time. Not is not your money. It's your time.

You would gladly pay to stay home because now you want time with your grandkids. You want time being the person you really should have been all along. But you had so if you don't have an exit strategy, a way to make that shift from the value of money to the value of time, then then then you're I have a pension now and I did that job because although I do, the pension wasn't going to be maybe as great as I could have made as an architect.

But but I had I'd still be working if I was an architect. I would have worked through the last 10 years and never written a book. But because I was able to step out like Murph is going to eventually be able to step out in his early fifties, you now have an opportunity to do the shift where now you're not chasing money.

But again, if you don't live right, then you still are going to need to chase money in your fifties. I remember Bob Buford wrote a book called Halftime years ago, and he was a part owner of the Cowboys. And what he was arguing for is, hey, is there a way to get to your fifties and move from success to significance? Can you then invest in a way so that when you hit your fifties, you no longer have to work, but now you can serve the church, you can serve in ministry and not have the burden of having to work to do that.

And that was his whole strategy for halftime. How do you get to the halftime of your life and make a shift so you can serve in the second half? Nice. And that's something we need to think about.

And most of us don't. And what happens too, is that people like Murph end up retiring after 30 years in law enforcement and they drink themselves to death or they drop dead basically because they don't have a purpose to get up in the morning. Yeah, we have to.

That's why they let us retire in our fifties. We're dead before we're 60, most of us. So that's, you know, when I hit 60, I was like, woohoo, I'm beating the odds.

So I mean, that's the kind of thing you have to think, right? It's like, where do you make that shift from the value of money to the value of time? And I think if you're at the point where you don't have a lot of time and you're still working hard for money, you've missed the opportunity. Yeah. Let me say one quick thing about this.

I just want to agree with you about something. I grew up with kind of a distant working mom. And, you know, a lot of the decisions I made in my teens and twenties, you know, were kind of lacking that woman's input.

And then gradually after starting my blog, I started meeting older women, older Christian women who were very wise in other countries, and they just turned my writing and how I was able to be persuasive upside down. So I'd say if you're a young man, like I was, and you're struggling a little bit, you know, with being impressive to the opposite sex, you know, then I would rarely recommend getting the benefit of someone who has a different perspective of the opposite sex. You know, older or wiser Christian women are great mentors.

And I'm sure there's an equivalent for this, I could say to women, but as a man, I'm just speaking for myself and saying this has had a big effect on me is letting people see my decision making, letting women see my decision making. Wiser women, you know, accomplished wise biblical women and getting their feedback. I think it's made a bit of a difference.

We're also be a better judge of that than I would. Well, and I think this is just the truth about mentorship, right? About this is why it's not, we've moved away from, you know, I'm Jay Warner Wallace. My name is Jim, James Wallace, but I'm Jay Warner Wallace because, and I was that long before I became a writer on all my search warrants.

They all say Jay Warner Wallace. Well, that's because my grandfather was Warner and he had a huge impact. I still, when I think of what it is to be a man and what it is to be a married man, for sure, the only role model I had for that was my grandfather.

That's it. And so, so I wanted, I grew up wanting to be my grandfather. And so now sometimes when I have his mannerisms, my wife will tease me, but I'm like, yeah, that's good though.

That's the whole point is that you want to get to a place where you become that man for your grandchildren. And by the way, he was a worker. He was a workaholic, but he knew how to embrace his kids.

Like I did a lot of things with him. He would take me and go paint something. He was just a construction guy, just a painter.

And he was, he could fix anything. And that's the guy who I wanted to be like. He was the one at first, I went to my first concert with him and my dad.

He was a big country music fan. I remember seeing Johnny Cash here in Anaheim, California at the age of 10 because my grandfather was a huge music buff. And that's how I embraced music.

You know, that's why I became interested in music. So I do think that that shouldn't be an oddity. That shouldn't be the exception.

That should be the rule, but that would require us to have a different view right now in culture than we have because you don't get a grandfather who is the biological parent of your mom or dad. Like we have to have intact relationships. And so much of the time we're talking about people who are surrogates, which is great.

If you don't have a biological grandfather who's part of your life, then a surrogate will do, but wouldn't it be great if everyone, because to be honest, I see now where I got these mannerisms from. I see now why I think this way, that this is coming through that genetic line. And much of this has got explanatory power.

You just won't have if all you have are surrogates. So that's why I think in the end, Freeman and Flourishing is dictated on a very old traditional idea that two people come together, they stay together and they have their children together and they raise them together. And if you can do that, that's going to be the number one component, the highest benefit to raising your kids.

Can you raise them other ways? Yes. I was not raised that way. My parents divorced when I was three.

Can you struggle through that and get through it? Yes. Is it optimal? No. So I think I'm not saying anything against every other form because that's me.

I didn't raise my kids that way either because I have two adopted daughters and they were not raised by their biological parents. They were raised by us surrogates. But so is it ideal though? No.

Would it have been far better if their parents had stayed together and given that kind of home as biological parents? Yes, it would have been far better. So this is an alternative. It's the best alternative, but it's not the optimum.

It's not the ideal. The ideal is still something ancient, something which, by the way, even if Christianity wasn't true and evolutionary processes got here, it would still be the ancient model that we should embrace. Because if nothing else, we would say, well, this is how nature works.

If it's not how God works, we would at least say this is how nature works because it turns out that it is in that relationship that children become the consequence. So I think in the end, it's still the best model. Absolutely.

I'm reading a lot about natural law for my dissertation and my doctoral work and natural law as a means of showing what is true and what is good and what is beautiful. And then kind of coming around and pointing back to God saying, again, what is the foundation for this? What makes sense of the fact that there is this type of order and consistency that this behavior leads to flourishing, this behavior consistently doesn't, and things like that. Even if I had never been introduced to scripture at all, I would conclude the exact same things that you just said based on studies done by non-Christians and Christians alike.

No, absolutely. As a matter of fact, I often will say that there's two questions that people have in a murder investigation, and you're going to see a lot of this in these books we're writing right now. As you have these two questions, and the questions really are, who did it? Why did he do it? Why did he do it? The other question often is, well, if there's a God, why would he allow it? So there's two kinds of questions we have to examine, at least for believing victim families, they're going to want the second question answered too.

And if you're a thoughtful person, you're going to think about this also. So I often will say that the fuse that leads up to any explosive murder event, and I talk about this in person of interest, that fuse that leads up to that's where you're going to find the answer to the first question, why did he do it? It's in the fuse. It's in the series of events that you can examine and investigate that will probably give you some sense of why he would do this.

But it turns out, why would God allow it is often only discovered in the fallout, right? Backside, because it's in the backside that you see sometimes years later, maybe decades later, that you finally see the connectivity and how something amazing happened that you didn't expect that couldn't have happened in any other way, sadly. So it's a domino that has to be pushed over a certain way, and then something develops on the backside of it. Now, when I talk about answering those two questions, if you're not a believer, then you're answering two slightly different questions, not why did he do it? Why did what's the in the human nature that causes somebody to do this? And then why would God allow it? What's in God's nature that will allow something to happen? What you're saying instead is what's in human nature that would cause somebody to do this? And then what is the nature of lifelike? Because if you reject God, you don't reject the idea there's a there's a life and there's and there's there's a nature to life.

And that's the kind of thing that you can look and find out in the fallout. So you're going to see a lot of that in these books that we're writing, because there's a consequence like if you don't if you don't think if you think you're just an evolutionary accident or an evolutionary product of evolutionary processes, well, then you process your life very differently. You'll see the characters in this.

One is going to struggle deeply with what do I do next? Like, who am I now? The other is is confident in the midst of of knowing something very difficult is coming. Something very difficult about his life. Now, that's just the fact that you have two different worldviews that lead you to answer those questions about what's human nature and what's the nature of life or what's the nature of God.

If you're just trying to figure out the nature of life, then you're going to be pretty, I think, despondent about how crummy life can be. But if you're looking at it as terms of trying to figure out what's the nature of God and is designed for me, that's the only hope you have is going to reside in that second kind of question. You can't get that answer out of the first kind of question.

Right. Absolutely. Yeah.

So you've mentioned upcoming books in the series. You titled this one Volume One. So how many books do you guys have in mind for the series? Well, here's what's interesting about this industry.

And we kind of had to discover as we go, it's a very collaborative industry. So we can talk about ideas and make sure that the characters are portrayed a certain way, and we can write the scripts. But then we have to trust that there are artists out there that we know well enough, that we've worked with long enough, that can bring these characters to life in a way because we want to allow them some choices here.

In other words, we might think the script says do it this way. But visually, you get an idea and you want to run with it. Just run it by us.

And we'll sounds good because this is a very collaborative effort. And we're in visual storytelling here. And sometimes something needs to be changed based on the way you're going to show it visually.

So it's very collaborative. So here's what's happened to us is we've met a bunch of artists in this process. It turns out all of the artists that we started with are not part of the process by the time you end.

That's very common for comic books. So for example, whether you know it or not, most comic books have a series of artists that work on them. And they may not be the same set of artists that did the second half of the book.

And although the characters look the same, there are different artists and there are some variations if you really pay attention. This is true in almost all comic books. This will be true for us with every comic book we do or every graphic novel we do.

But here's what's great about it is you meet a lot of people. So this publisher is committed to doing the first two books and we'll see how they do. It's a very nichey kind of audience.

I mean, you very seldom are going to see a graphic novel in the New York Times bestseller list, right? This has definitely got its own kind of audience. So how long will this publisher say, OK, yes, these are the reasonable expectations for graphic novels, how they're going to sell. OK, we'll find out.

But we would do this for free. This is why I tell you, you have to get to a place in your ministry life where money is not the issue. Right.

So if there is a comic book company out there that would take all the profit and we can just enjoy the creative process, well, we would be game with that. So I don't think this is going to end for us. We'll see how far we can go with with David C. Cook.

I think we can go pretty far. I think they would probably be open to as many as we wanted to do. But what if they stop doing comic books or stop doing graphic novels altogether? If they do, well, now we know enough artists and where they reside to be able to go with a different company and hopefully just continue the same series with that other company.

And so so we'll we'll do what we can to keep this these characters alive as long as Jimmy and I have ideas about what we could communicate, what what aspects of a Christian. The next one, we we have a kind of a tentative title. It's all case files, but we have a tentative subtitle.

But right now, I'm not sure that'll stay. But we're going to try to examine in the next one is, OK, so how do we we talk about human value? But how do we ground moral values? How do we ground moral truths? Who gets to decide? Because you'll see this all the time in gang culture. There's a law amongst those gangsters that they abide by their rules.

But the rules are not the rules that you and I think are the rules they ought to be abiding by. But they have a code amongst thieves. And so who gets to decide the code? That's something that I think that is it kind of is answered naturally when you do this kind of casework.

So we want to at least kind of put our toes in that a little bit. So that's what the next story is about. And we're working on that script right now.

I love it. Really great. Yeah, we're going to look forward to that.

Yeah, it's so it's always such a gift to be able to spend time with you. Thank you so much. Well, thanks so much for doing this.

I tell you, you're the first people I think now that I've talked to you. This is really new. It doesn't even publish for a while.

And for just a little while now, we're getting close. But but it's nice to have somebody who actually read the book to get some feedback because, you know, it's it's a it's one of those things where you don't know until you know what people think of it. So I'm just glad that you found it both entertaining and hopefully enlightening in some way.

So I appreciate that. Absolutely. Yeah, I, to be honest, I don't think I've ever read a comic book before.

And so and I had messaged WK. Sorry, a graphic novel. It's a big fat comic book.

That's what it is. And I had actually messaged WK when I first started reading it. I was like, this isn't really my thing, but everything J. Warner Wallace does is excellent.

So here we go. Well, I mean, before a few minutes into it, you know, I'm messaging going, oh, check this out. Oh, this is so great.

Oh, wow. And have you seen this? You have to start reading it. And he was like, oh, I definitely need to start reading it.

Sounds like fun. Looks fun. And I just couldn't put it down.

I you know, I started it pretty late one night. And so I didn't quite get to it that night. But the next evening I picked it up again and was finished in no time going, OK, where's volume two? It's so encouraging.

It's so encouraging. We don't know. This is I think this is an entirely different art form and it can be a creative.

We try to be very creative with our nonfiction books. Right. I want to take an approach that somebody else wouldn't ordinarily take.

But this is so different. I just don't think that skill set transfers. The more I learn about structuring fiction, the more I'm glad I'm not a fiction writer.

But I'll tell you that this kind of story is easy for us to image because this we're kind of just telling stories out of school. We're basically tracing stuff that we've kind of put our feet in. We know these characters.

We kind of know how they're going to respond. And it's much easier if you but if I was going to write some other kind of fiction that wasn't like true crime detective stuff, I know I would probably not be very good at it. Because sometimes the crime is the thing that keeps you going.

You know, you've got to solve this crime. It takes the narrative in a certain trajectory that has a beginning, a middle and an end. So I hope that that's what this book did with you, too.

And I'm glad that you guys both enjoyed it. Absolutely. And I just want to say again to Jim, thanks for coming on the show and discussing this new book with us.

Hey, thanks for having me. Both you guys are awesome. I appreciate it.

All right. Well, listeners, I think that's a good place for us to stop for today. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider helping us out by sharing this podcast with your friends, writing us a five star review on Apple or Spotify, subscribing and commenting on YouTube and hitting the like button wherever you listen to the podcast.

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