Eldredge - Wild at heart: discovering the passionate soul of a man

OTHER BOOKS BY JOHN ELDREDGE

The Sacred Romance (with Brent Curtis)

The Sacred Romance Workbook

The Journey of Desire

Wild at Heart Field Manual

Dare to Desire

Waking the Dead

A Guidebook to Waking the Dead

Epic

The Ransomed Heart

Captivating (with Stasi Eldredge)

Walking with God

Personal Guide to Walking with God

Walking with God: A DVD Study

2001 by John Eldredge

All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.

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

Published in association with Yates & Yates, www.yates2.com

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the HOLY BIBLE: NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations noted NKJV are from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. 1979, 1980, 1982, 1990, 1994 by Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Scripture quotations noted The Message are from The Message: The New Testament in Contemporary English. 1993 by Eugene H. Peterson.

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

Scripture taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE (R), The Lockman Foundation 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977. Used by permission

ISBN 978-0-7852-6694-5 (IE)
ISBN 978-0-7852-6883-3 (HC)
ISBN 978-0-7852-8796-4 (TP)

Printed in the United States of America

08 09 10 11 12 QW 50 49 48 47 46

For Samuel, Blaine, and Luke.

I love your warrior hearts.
You definitely have what it takes.

CONTENTS

My deep thanks to those who have helped me climb this mountain:

Sam, Blaine, Jenny, Aaron, Morgan, Cherie, Julie, Gary, Leigh, Travis, Sealy, and Stasi. Brian and Kyle at Thomas Nelson. The Thursday night poker group. And all those who have been praying for me, near and far.

Brent, for teaching me more about what it means to be a man than anyone else ever has, and Craig, for taking up the sword.

I know. I almost want to apologize. Dear Lorddo we really need another book for men?

Nope. We need something else. We need permission.

Permission to be what we aremen made in Gods image. Permission to live from the heart and not from the list of should and ought to that has left so many of us tired and bored.

Most messages for men ultimately fail. The reason is simple: They ignore what is deep and true to a mans heart, his real passions, and simply try to shape him up through various forms of pressure. This is the man you ought to be. This is what a good husband/father/Christian/churchgoer ought to do. Fill in the blanks from there. He is responsible, sensitive, disciplined, faithful, diligent, dutiful, etc. Many of these are good qualities. That these messengers are well-intentioned I have no doubt. But the road to hell, as we remember, is paved with good intentions. That they are a near total failure should seem obvious by now.

No, men need something else. They need a deeper understanding of why they long for adventures and battles and a Beautyand why God made them just like that. And they need a deeper understanding of why women long to be fought for, to be swept up into adventure, and to be the Beauty. For that is how God made them as well.

So I offer this book, not as the seven steps to being a better Christian, but as a safari of the heart to recover a life of freedom, passion, and adventure. I believe it will help men get their heart backand women as well. Moreover, it will help women to understand their men and help them live the life they both want. That is my prayer for you.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly... who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.

TEDDY ROOSEVELT

The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force.

MATTHEW 11:12 NASB

CHAPTER ONE
WILD AT HEART

The heart of a man is like deep water...

PROVERBS 20:5 NKJV

The spiritual life cannot be made suburban. It is always frontier, and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed.

HOWARD MACEY

I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
I cant look at hobbles and I cant stand fences
Dont fence me in.

COLE PORTER
Dont Fence Me In

At last, I am surrounded by wilderness. The wind in the top of the pines behind me sounds like the ocean. Waves are rushing in from the great blue above, cresting upon the ridge of the mountain I have climbed, somewhere in the Sawatch Range of central Colorado. Spreading out below me the landscape is a sea of sagebrush for mile after lonesome mile. Zane Grey immortalized it as the purple sage, but most of the year its more of a silver gray. This is the kind of country you could ride across for days on horseback without seeing another living soul. Today, I am on foot. Though the sun is shining this afternoon, it will not warm above thirty here near the Continental Divide, and the sweat I worked up scaling this face is now making me shiver. It is late October and winter is coming on. In the distance, nearly a hundred miles south by southwest, the San Juan Mountains are already covered in snow.

The aroma of the pungent sage still clings to my jeans, and it clears my head as I gasp for airin notably short supply at 10,000 feet. I am forced to rest again, even though I know that each pause broadens the distance between me and my quarry. Still, the advantage has always been his. Though the tracks I found this morning were freshonly a few hours oldthat holds little promise. A bull elk can easily cover miles of rugged country in that amount of time, especially if he is wounded or on the run.

The wapiti, as the Indians called him, is one of the most elusive creatures we have left in the lower forty-eight. They are the ghost kings of the high country, more cautious and wary than deer, and more difficult to track. They live at higher elevations, and travel farther in a day, than nearly any other game. The bulls especially seem to carry a sixth sense to human presence. A few times Ive gotten close; the next moment they are gone, vanishing silently into aspen groves so thick you wouldnt have believed a rabbit could get through.

It wasnt always this way. For centuries elk lived out on the prairies, grazing together on the rich grasses in vast numbers. In the spring of 1805 Meriwether Lewis described passing herds lolling about in the thousands as he made his way in search of a Northwest Passage. At times the curious wandered so close he could throw sticks at them, like bucolic dairy cows blocking the road. But by the end of the century westward expansion had pushed the elk high up into the Rocky Mountains. Now they are elusive, hiding out at timberline like outlaws until heavy snows force them down for the winter. If you would seek them now, it is on their terms, in forbidding haunts well beyond the reach of civilization.