John Eldredge - Fathered by God: Learning What Your Dad Could Never Teach You

FATHERED
BY
GOD

OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN ELDREDGE

Walking with God

The Ransomed Heart

Captivating
(with Stasi Eldredge)

Epic

Waking the Dead

Wild at Heart

The Journey of Desire

The Sacred Romance
(with Brent Curtis)

2009 by John Eldredge

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or otherexcept for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

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Scripture quotations marked NIV are from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE.
The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are from The Message by Eugene H. Peterson. 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000. Used by permission of NavPress Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NLTare from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation. 1996.
Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7852-0677-4 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-0-7852-8868-8 (IE)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eldredge, John.
The way of the wild heart : a map for the masculine journey / John Eldredge.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4002-8027-8
1. Christian menReligious life. 2. MasculinityReligious aspectsChristianity. I. Title.
BV4528.2.E447 2001
248.8'42dc22

2006013989

Printed in the United States of America

09 10 11 12 13 RRD 5 4 3 2 1

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CONTENTS

How gladly would I treat you like sons...

JEREMIAH 3:19 NIV

ONE OF THE MOST HAUNTING EXPERIENCES I HAVE EVER had as a man took place on an early summer day in Alaska. My family and I were sea kayaking with humpback whales in the Icy Strait, and we stopped on the shore of Chichagof Island for lunch. Our guide asked us if we wanted to go for a hike into the interior of the island, to a clearing where grizzlies were known to feed. We were all over that invitation. After a twenty minute walk through a spruce forest, we came into what appeared to be a broad, open meadow about four hundred yards across. Being midday, and hot, there were no bears to be seen. Theyre sleeping now, through the afternoon. Theyll be back tonight, he said. CmereI want to show you something.

The meadow was actually more of a bog, a low-lying jungle of brushy groundcover about two feet high, barely supported underneath by another foot of soaked moss and peat. A very difficult place to walk. Our guide led us to a trail of what seemed to be massive footprints, with a stride of about two feet between them, pressed down into the bog and making a path through it. Its a marked trail, he said. A path created by the footprints of the bears. This one is probably centuries old. For as long as the bears have been on this island, theyve taken this path. The cubs follow their elders, putting their feet exactly where the older bears walk. Thats how they learn to cross this place.

I began to walk in the marked trail, stepping into the firm, deep-worn places where bears had walked for centuries. Im not sure how to describe the experience, but for some reason the word holy comes to mind. An ancient and fearful path through a wild and untamed place. I was following a proven way, laid down by those much stronger and far more prepared for this place than me. And though I knew I did not belong there, I was haunted by it, could have followed that path for a long, long time. It awakened some deep, ancient yearning in me.

This is a book about what it looks like to become a man, and far more to our needhow to become a man. This material was previously released in a book entitled The Way of the WildHeart but we felt that many men (and women!) missed that message and so we have re-presented it here. There is no more hazardous undertaking, this business of becoming a man, full of dangers, counterfeits, and disasters. It is the Great Trial of every mans life, played out over time, and every male young and old finds himself in this journey. Though there are few who find their way through. Our perilous journey has been made all the more difficult because we live in a time with very little direction. A time with very few fathers to show us the way.

As men, we desperately need something like that marked trail on Chichagof Island. Not more rules, not another list of principles, not formulas. A sure path, marked by men for centuries before us. I believe we can find it.

What you are holding in your hands is a map. It chronicles the stages of the masculine journey from boyhood to old age. This is not a book of clinical psychology, nor a manual of child development. For one, I am unqualified to write that sort of book. Further, I find them unreadable. Ponderous. Boring. What do you recall of your psychology textbook from high school or college? But I do love maps. Most men do. The pleasure of a map is that it gives you the lay of the land, and yet you still have to make choices about how you will cover the terrain before you. A map is a guide, not a formula. It offers freedom.

It does not tell you how fast to walk, though when you see the contour lines growing very close together, you know you are approaching steep terrain and will want to mend your stride. It does not tell you why the mountain is there, or how old the forest is. It tells you how to get where you are going.

A companion workbook is available to help you, and youll experience a whole lot more of the journey if you do the workbook too. The best approach would be to read this first, then go back through it with the workbook. Maybe get a few guys to go through it together. The workbook is now available as a free download at www.ransomedheart.com/fatheredbygod. Share it with your group; copy it for your friends! (The workbook will not be available in stores.)

Ive often wondered at the long lists found many places in the Bible that recount a roster of men as the son of so-and-so, who was the son of so-and-so. Youll find many of these rosters in the Scriptures, and elsewhere in ancient literature. Perhaps these accounts reveal something we hadnt noticed beforea father-view of the world held by those who wrote them, shared by those who would read them. Perhaps they saw in the father-son legacy the most significant of all legacies, that to know a mans father was in great part to know the man. And then, if you step back further to have a look, youll see that the God of the Bible is portrayed as a great Fathernot primarily as mother, not merely as Creatorbut as Father.

It opens a new horizon for us.

You see, the world in which we live has lost something vital, something core to understanding life and a mans place in it. For the time in which we live is, as the social prophet Alexander Mitcherlie had it, a time without a father. I mean this in two ways. First, that most men and most boys have no real father able to guide them through the jungles of the masculine journey, and they aremost of us areunfinished and unfathered men. Or boys. Or boys in mens bodies. But there is a deeper meaning to the phrase a time without a father. Our way of looking at the world has changed. We no longer live, either as a society or even as the church, with a father-view of the world, the view centered in the presence of a loving and strong father deeply engaged in our lives, to whom we can turn at any time for the guidance, comfort, and provision we need.