Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul by John Eldredge

Author:John Eldredge
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Religious Aspects, Christian Men, Social Science, Christian Life, General, Religion, Religious Life, Masculinity, Christian Men - Conduct of Life, Men's Studies, Men's Issues, Christianity, Masculinity - Religious Aspects - Christianity, Christian Theology, Christian Men - Religious Life
ISBN: 9780785287964
Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc
Published: 2006-01-01T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

HEALING THE WOUND

Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses You been out ridin fences for so long now

O you ’re a hard one, but I know That you got your reasons ...

You better let somebody love you Before it’s too late.

—THE EAGLES “Desperado " (© 1973 by Glenn Fry and Don Henley) The task of healing is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less.

—WENDELL BERRY

The deepest desire of our hearts is for union with God. God created us for union with himself: This is the original purpose of our lives.

—BRENNAN MANNING

I think I’ve given a wrong impression of my life with my sons. Rock climbing, canoeing, wrestling, our quest for danger and destruction—you might get the impression we’re a sort of military academy of the backwoods or one of those militia cults. So let me tell you of my favorite event of the day. It comes late in the evening, at bedtime, after the boys have brushed their teeth and we’ve said our family prayers. As I’m tucking them in, one of my boys will ask, “Dad, can we snuggle tonight?” Snuggle time is when I’ll cuddle up next to them on a bed that’s really not big enough for both of us—and that’s the point, to get very close—and there in the dark we’ll just sort of talk. Usually we start laughing and then we have to whisper because the others will ask us to “keep it down in there.” Sometimes it breaks into tickling, other times it’s a chance for them to ask some serious questions about life. But whatever happens, what matters most is what’s going on beneath all that: intimacy, closeness, connection.

Yes, my boys want me to guide them into adventure, and they love to test their strength against mine. But all of that takes place in the context of an intimate bond of love that is far deeper than words can express. What they want more than anything, what I love to offer them more than anything, is soul-to-soul oneness. As Tom Wolfe said,

The deepest search in life, it seemed to me, the thing that in one way or another was central to all living was man’s search to find a father, not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the lost father of his youth, but the image of a strength and wisdom external to his need and superior to his hunger, to which the belief and power of his own life could be united. (“The Story of a Novel”)

THE SOURCE OF REAL STRENGTH

Guys are unanimously embarrassed by their emptiness and woundedness; it is for most of us a tremendous source of shame, as I’ve said. But it need not be. From the very beginning, back before the Fall and the assault, ours was meant to be a desperately dependent existence. It’s like a tree and its branches, explains Christ. You are the branches, I am the trunk. From me you draw your life; that’s how it was meant to be.

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