Starting Right is a 5 minute Day Starter to help keep you motivated, encouraged, and focused throughout your day. DannyMac is a pastor, teacher, motivational speaker, husband, and father. His years of leading and training people have given him vast experience in helping individuals to accomplish change in their lives and meet their goals. He can help you set the course for your day by offering practical advice from God's Word in a positive and fun way. There is no better way to begin your day than by Starting Right with DannyMac.
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Someone looks you in the eye and says, “I don’t believe God exists.” Your mind races, your heart pounds, and even though you feel sure of what you believe, the words don’t come. That tension, knowing something deep down yet struggling to explain it clearly, is where we start today.
We talk through one of the most common objections people raise: if God is real and loving, why is there so much suffering? We name the realities people point to sickness, abandoned children, starvation, racism, political unrest, and even pandemic loss. Then I share a simple, memorable barbershop story about a man named Bob and his barber that flips the argument in a way you can use in real conversations. It’s not about picking a fight or offering shallow answers. It’s about opening a door, reframing the question, and speaking with both clarity and compassion.
We also anchor the challenge in Scripture, drawing from 2 Timothy 4:2 and the call to be prepared “in season and out of season.” If you want practical Christian apologetics that fits into everyday life, plus encouragement to trust God to give you the right words at the right time, this short episode is for you. Subscribe, share it with a friend who wrestles with faith questions, and leave a review to help more people find Starting Right.
Good morning and welcome to Starting Right. I am Danny Mack, and I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back and relax for the next five minutes as I help you start your day by starting right. Hey, good morning everyone. Welcome to the start of another week.
Today I want to start off by asking you this. If you were in a conversation with someone that you sort of knew, but they weren't a really close friend or anything, and they said to you, I don't believe God exists, what would you say to them? How would you try to prove to them that God actually does exist? See, the situation for many of us is that we we'd really believe that God exists. In fact, it goes beyond simple belief. We know it. And we know it not only just in our heads, but I call it knowing in our knower. We know it deep in the depth of us, down in the part of us, that it really is at our core. We know deep within us that God exists. And we can know it in our knower and still not be able to explain it to somebody else. And that can be frustrating sometimes, both for us and the person we're talking to that's trying to understand why we believe what we believe or where we're coming from.
Well, I want to tell you a story this morning that I think will help you a little bit. This story is about a man named Bob who went to his regular barber shop to get his hair cut and get his beard trimmed. He'd been going to the same barber now for a number of years, so he knew the barber, but just as an acquaintance, but they always had good conversations together. So as usual, as the barber began to do his work, they had an ongoing conversation about football and family and hockey and all kinds of things. Finally the conversation got around to talking about God, and the barber said, I don't believe that God exists. Well Bob looked at him and said, Why do you say that? The barber stopped clipping at the moment and stepped back and said, Well, you just have to go out into the street to realize that God doesn't exist. Tell me, if God exists, would there be so many sick people? Would there be abandoned children? Would there be people starving and suffering all around the world? If God existed, there wouldn't be any pain or suffering or pandemic. There wouldn't be all kinds of political unrest. There wouldn't be racism, there wouldn't be any of those things. I simply can't imagine that a loving God would allow anything like that to happen.
Bob thought for a moment. He he didn't respond right away because he was uncertain of how to put into words what he was thinking, and most of all, he was a little bit shy about getting into an argument. He really didn't want to make a scene there in the barber shop. The barber finished his job, Bob left. Just as he was walking away from the barber shop, Bob saw a man in the street with long, stringy, dirty hair and an untrimmed beard. He looked pretty dirty and pretty unkept. Bob stopped, turned around, and went back into the barbershop again. And he said to his barber friend, You know what? Barbers don't exist. The barber looked at him and said, How can you say that? I'm here, I'm a barber, and I just worked on you. Bob said, No, barbers don't exist. Because if they did, there would be no people with dirty long hair and untrimmed beards like that man outside. The barber laughed and said, Oh, but barbers do exist. What happens is the people don't come in to me. Exactly, said Bob. That's the point. God also exists. What happens is that people don't go to him. Isn't that the truth for a lot of people? They look at all the negative things in the world and they say, Hey, you know, if there really was a God, none of this negative stuff would be happening. Everybody would be living in peace and getting along, there would be no sickness, there would be no sorrow. There certainly wouldn't be people dying from a pandemic. But the truth is, God exists. People are just not relying on him to help them and to be in control.
Over in Second Timothy chapter four and verse two, it tells us that we are to be prepared in season and out of season. We're to be ready to give an answer to people who want to know, want to know about who God is and what God wants and how he works and where is he if he's real. And so that challenge is there for all of us, to be ready at all times, to be able to say what we know in our knower about our God, to let people know that he is real, that he is real in our lives and that he's important to us. And often God will work in us to give us insights and ideas and stories that we can use that will help to relate to the person who's asking the question, just like Bob did with the story about the man who needed a haircut.
Let God bless you. Ask God to use you. Expect him to open doors for you. Be blessed, my friends. We'll talk again tomorrow. Thank you for listening today. And I invite you to join me Monday to Friday right here on Starting Right with Danny Mack.
