“Isn’t It a Privilege to Love People?”

Remembering Nat Belz

Psalm 90: “The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.”

Last Thursday Nat Belz died at age seventy in Asheville, N.C., surrounded by family, neighbors, and friends. I thought by reason of strength he’d have more years, because he had an exuberant love of life and God—but in five months cancer overwhelmed his physical defenses. To me he represents the greatest generation of American evangelicalism: expansive, energetic, and embracing.

Our first meeting was in 1990, in the basement of a mostly-dead mall in Asheville, North Carolina, where Nat and his older brother Joel toiled to publish World, then a weekly news magazine from a Christian perspective. Both had worked in the family printing business back in Iowa. 

The Belz Brothers’ magazine was a labor of love, like the Bailey Brothers Building and Loan in It’s a Wonderful Life. It worked because Joel and Nat were endlessly curious about God’s creation. World introduced readers to people they were unlikely to know, places they were unlikely to visit, and sometimes ideas they were unlikely to have. 

Nat’s title during World’s first decade—Corporate Creative Director—was perfect: He had ideas that were not only fertile but fun. Probably his favorite idea, which worked wonderfully for a while, was to publish Explore!, a magazine that showed nine-to-fourteen-year-olds how amazing and intriguing the world is—with, in his words, its “deep structure and interrelatedness.” 

For example, the September 2001 issue of Explore! catapulted readers skyward by showing them how to travel in a hot air balloon with a route that might depend on wet-and-wild weather. But that issue was in young hands on Sept. 11, 2001, as the sky brought death. Some kids grew up fast. Some kids’ magazines after that became more didactic. “We don’t kid ourselves,” Nat said: “Kids are reading Cosmopolitan, and we just would like to hold the parent’s hand and help pull [children] back for a moment to say, ‘You’re kids still!’” 

Sadly, Nat’s funding ran out. He was always mission first and money second, but sometimes money talked. A harsher time arose. Christianity is a religion of love, but you wouldn’t know that from reading some Twitter streams. His daughter Emily says Nat last month, amid cancer, told her, “Isn’t it such a privilege to love people?” Emily’s comment: “That’s my dad. He felt keenly the difficulty of the world—it made him really blue—but he felt that loving people was a joy.”

Nat’s Christian understanding was theologically orthodox and sociologically inclusive. When he visited Emily in New York City and walked with her, she would suddenly realize he wasn’t there: He had stopped to talk with a stranger. “When we were kids,” Emily recalls, “we would visit any factories that allowed tours.” After church each week they would drive around, looking for new construction projects to check out and analyze. 

In one of his Explore! editor’s notes, Nat wrote, “We aim to be straightforward. Delighted and delightful. Sometimes sad about the world, but always optimistic and eager to see its hurts healed. Confident that some things are true and good and others are not. Sometimes corny, never ‘scorny.'” That described his hopes for the children’s magazine. It also described him.

Nat’s daughter-in-law Kate says, “Nat wasn’t just interested in ideas: He loved to play. Two summers ago during a rainstorm he ran out into the downpour with our two-year-old to help him launch his toy boat into the waters racing down the street gutter. He got soaked and he never stopped laughing. He built exquisite toy ships out of cardboard and wood. He let the kids take over the house with Playmobil. Play was not silly, or a diversion: Play was a beautiful gift from God.”

A verb and a noun inhabit my memories of Nat. The verb is discover. He loved discovering the world through travel but also the internal worlds of all he met, adults and children. He never pandered, always partnered: Let’s see how this machine works. Let’s see how a clock is made. Kate: “Just days before Nat died, my son was having a meltdown and Nat helped settle him down not by scolding or comforting him—but by asking him for his help designing a boat ramp.”   

The noun is hospitality. Visiting Nat started with eye contact, a hearty handshake, a big bearhug. It continued with discussion: He’d lean in and ask questions, not just to make conversation but to make connections, genuinely desiring to hear other perspectives. He’d offer hot coffee or cold water, a slice of pie and a slice of life, a delight in contemplating deep mysteries. He once told Kate about death and resurrection, “I don’t understand it, but I’m sparkling with the wonder of it all.” 

Nat did not fit with the scornful version of evangelicalism we see too often today. Explore! contracted to publish scenes from Wallace & Gromit, a beloved British comedy franchise. My favorite episode, now exactly thirty-years-old, is “The Wrong Trousers.” In it Wallace, an eccentric cheese-loving inventor, mistakenly puts on “techno trousers” that walk by themselves on floors, walls, and ceilings. A good-natured person becomes a Frankenstein’s monster.

Many evangelicals have slipped into the wrong trousers, it seems. But Nat had an effusive ability to make people of all kinds seem at home. Emily says, “My dad taught his kids to care deeply about the world, however hostile it is.” Toward the end of a long trip Nat took to Kenya in 2010 he text-messaged me: “We are so ready to be home again. Packed full of stories and packing some more tomorrow.” Referring to heroes in chapter eleven of Hebrews, Nat concluded that “We’ve met a lot of people ‘of whom the world is not worthy.’”

Nat Belz accomplished a lot. As a teenager he worked at a radio station and once sang the national anthem on air when he couldn’t find a recording. He was an elder of City Church of Asheville and a board member of Asheville Christian Academy and The Chalmers Center at Covenant College. But he didn’t take the time to total up his “likes” and “follows.” He was a throwback to a time before phone calls replaced visits and text messages replaced phone calls, a time before blog posts replaced letters and Tik Tok replaced blogs.

Psalm 90 says, “Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” Nat Belz did not waste days. God gave him a wonderful life, although all who knew him hoped it would be longer.

Marvin Olasky is former editor-in-chief at World magazine and is now a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute and an Acton Institute affiliate scholar. He writes a weekly column on homelessness for the Fix Homelessness website and a monthly Olasky Books newsletter.