"If Christian men are going to change from a pitiful, wimpy bunch of
"really nice guys" to men who are made in the image of God, they must
re-examine their pre-conceptions about who God is and recover their true
"wild" hearts, writes best-selling author John Eldredge in Wild at Heart: Discovering a Life of Passion, Freedom, and Adventure.
Eldredge throws down the gauntlet--men are bored; they fear risk, they
refuse to pay attention to their deepest desires. He challenges
Christian men to return to authentic masculinity without resorting to a
"macho man" mentality. Men often seek validation in venues such as
work, or in the conquest of women, Eldredge observes. He urges men to
take time out and come to grips with the "secret longings" of their
hearts. Although the book succeeds best in its slant toward a male
audience, it also strives to help women understand the implications of
authentic masculinity in their relationships with men. Eldredge frames
the book around his outdoor experiences and appealing anecdotes about
his family, sprinkling the text with touches of humor and overlying
everything with heartfelt passion. Even as he mixes eclectic ideas
about masculinity from popular movies such as Braveheart with
classic words from Oswald Chambers, and lyrics from the Dixie Chicks
with stories from the Bible, he points to only one answer for men
searching for their true wildness of heart. Writes Eldredge, "The only
way to live in this adventure ... with all its danger and
unpredictability and immensely high stakes ... is in an ongoing,
intimate relationship with God." --Cindy Crosby
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences
Don't fence me in.
-Cole Porter
"Don't 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 it's
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 air-in 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 fresh-only a few hours
old-that 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
I've gotten close; the next moment they are gone, vanishing silently
into aspen groves so thick you wouldn't have believed a rabbit could
get through.
It wasn't 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.
And that is why I come.
And
why I linger here still, letting the old bull get away. My hunt, you
see, actually has little to do with elk. I knew that before I came.
There is something else I am after, out here in the wild. I am
searching for an even more elusive prey . . . something that can only
be found through the help of wilderness.
I am looking for my heart.
WILD AT HEART
Eve
was created within the lush beauty of Eden's garden. But Adam, if
you'll remember, was created outside the Garden, in the wilderness. In
the record of our beginnings, the second chapter of Genesis makes it
clear: Man was born in the outback, from the untamed part of creation.
Only afterward is he brought to Eden. And ever since then boys have
never been at home indoors, and men have had an insatiable longing to
explore. We long to return; it's when most men come alive. As John Muir
said, when a man comes to the mountains, he comes home. The core of a
man's heart is undomesticated and that is good. "I am not alive in an
office," as one Northface ad has it. "I am not alive in a taxi cab. I
am not alive on a sidewalk." Amen to that. Their conclusion? "Never
stop exploring."
My gender seems to need little encouragement.
It comes naturally, like our innate love of maps. In 1260 Marco Polo
headed off to find China, and in 1967, when I was seven, I tried to dig
a hole straight through from our backyard with my friend Danny Wilson.
We gave up at about eight feet, but it made a great fort. Hannibal
crosses his famous Alps, and there comes a day in a boy's life when he
first crosses the street and enters the company of the great explorers.
Scott and Amundsen race for the South Pole, Peary and Cook vie for the
North, and when last summer I gave my boys some loose change and
permission to ride their bikes down to the store to buy a soda, you'd
have thought I'd given them a charter to go find the equator. Magellan
sails due west, around the tip of South America-despite warnings that
he and his crew will drop off the end of the earth-and Huck Finn heads
off down the Mississippi ignoring similar threats. Powell follows the
Colorado into the Grand Canyon, even though-no, because-no one has done
it before and everyone is saying it can't be done.
And so my
boys and I stood on the bank of the Snake River in the spring of '98,
feeling that ancient urge to shove off. Snow melt was high that year,
unusually high, and the river had overflowed its banks and was surging
through the trees on both sides. Out in the middle of the river, which
is crystal clear in late summer but that day looked like chocolate
milk, logs were floating down, large tangles of branches bigger than a
car, and who knows what else. High and muddy and fast, the Snake was
forbidding. No other rafters could be seen. Did I mention it was
raining? But we had a brand-new canoe and the paddles were in hand and,
sure, I have never floated the Snake in a canoe, nor any other river
for that matter, but what the heck. We jumped in and headed off into
the unknown, like Livingstone plunging into the interior of dark Africa.
Adventure,
with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual
longing written into the soul of man. The masculine heart needs a place
where nothing is prefabricated, modular, nonfat, zip lock, franchised,
on-line, microwavable. Where there are no deadlines, cell phones, or
committee meetings. Where there is room for the soul. Where, finally,
the geography around us corresponds to the geography of our heart. Look
at the heroes of the biblical text: Moses does not encounter the living
God at the mall. He finds him (or is found by him) somewhere out in the
deserts of Sinai, a long way from the comforts of Egypt. The same is
true of Jacob, who has his wrestling match with God not on the living
room sofa but in a wadi somewhere east of the Jabbok, in Mesopotamia.
Where did the great prophet Elijah go to recover his strength? To the
wild. As did John the Baptist, and his cousin, Jesus, who is led by the
Spirit into the wilderness.
Whatever else those explorers were
after, they were also searching for themselves. Deep in a man's heart
are some fundamental questions that simply cannot be answered at the
kitchen table. Who am I? What am I made of? What am I destined for? It
is fear that keeps a man at home where things are neat and orderly and
under his control. But the answers to his deepest questions are not to
be found on television or in the refrigerator. Out there on the burning
desert sands, lost in a trackless waste, Moses received his life's
mission and purpose. He is called out, called up into something much
bigger than he ever imagined, much more serious than CEO or "prince of
Egypt." Under foreign stars, in the dead of night, Jacob received a new
name, his real name. No longer is he a shrewd business negotiator, but
now he is one who wrestles with God. The wilderness trial of Christ is,
at its core, a test of his identity. "If you are who you think you are
. . ." If a man is ever to find out who he is and what he's here for,
he has got to take that journey for himself.
he has got to get his heart back.
WESTWARD EXPANSION AGAINST THE SOUL
The
way a man's life unfolds nowadays tends to drive his heart into remote
regions of the soul. Endless hours at a computer screen; selling shoes
at the mall; meetings, memos, phone calls. The business world-where the
majority of American men live and die-requires a man to be efficient
and punctual. Corporate policies and procedures are designed with one
aim: to harness a man to the plow and make him produce. But the soul
refuses to be harnessed; it knows nothing of day timers and deadlines
and P&L statements. The soul longs for passion, for freedom, for
life. As D. H. Lawrence said, "I am not a mechanism." A man needs to
feel the rhythms of the earth; he needs to have in hand something
real-the tiller of a boat, a set of reins, the roughness of rope, or
simply a shovel. Can a man live all his days to keep his fingernails
clean and trim? Is that what a boy dreams of?
Society at large
can't make up its mind about men. Having spent the last thirty years
redefining masculinity into something more sensitive, safe, manageable
and, well, feminine, it now berates men for not being men. Boys will be
boys, they sigh. As though if a man were to truly grow up he would
forsake wilderness and wanderlust and settle down, be at home forever
in Aunt Polly's parlor. "Where are all the real men?" is regular fare
for talk shows and new books. You asked them to be women, I want to
say. The result is a gender confusion never experienced at such a wide
level in the history of the world. How can a man know he is one when
his highest aim is minding his manners?
And then, alas, there
is the church. Christianity, as it currently exists, has done some
terrible things to men. When all is said and do...
Customer Reviews
A Truly Moving Book 
I read this book last year between airplanes and airports, on a
lengthy trip that I took. I greatly enjoyed it and found it spiritually
uplifting. On several occasions I became weepy, which I can usually
avoid doing while sitting next to complete strangers. I especially
enjoyed the author's writing style and how he mixes biblical teachings
with his therapeutic knowledge.
Of those who have written critical reviews of this book, there are
a few things I would like to say. Many critics seem to approach this
book as if it were a scholarly article from a peer-reviewed journal. I
don't think Eldredge had that intent. He wrote this book based on his
own experience, and based on his own understanding of the gospel. You
can appreciate the book without agreeing with all that is said. Also,
you don't need to try and show that you have superior knowledge of the
Bible. It does not need to be a contest.
Eldredge has also drawn a lot of fire for making the claim that
Christian men should not be so passive. Many critics reference
Eldredge's story about telling his son to hit the bully, and his
interpretation of the "turn the other cheek" verses of the Bible. I
firmly believe in turning the other cheek. But Christ doesn't say what
to do after you run out of cheeks. The Bible also says something about
there being a time and season for all things. Sometimes you have to
stand up and fight if you're a man! So I agree with Eldredge in this
area.
I think Eldredge was misunderstood on a few levels. I don't think
he was trying to downplay Christ's compassionate side, he was merely
trying to emphasize a definite part of Christ's personality that has
been largely forgotten. One of Jesus' defining characteristics as the
Son of God was his ability to be so absolutely merciful and just, at
the same time.
Also, I don't think Eldredge is trying to say that men should just
blame all their problems on their fathers, as some critics say. A key
part of healing emotional wounds is often understanding what needs you
had as a child that went unmet. It is possible to acknowledge the ways
that your parents failed you, without blaming, and while remaining
accountable for yourself and your actions.
I did not agree with everything that was said in the book. My main
beef with it's message is how Eldredge seems to think that God was
really pissed at Adam for eating the forbidden fruit. I don't think God
was angry at Adam. To me, the Fall was clearly a necessary part of our
Father's plan from the beginning.
I am giving the book four stars based on the overwhelming
positivity that I felt while reading it. I found it very moving and
healing to read.
Wild at Heart 
Great book for men especially but great learning for women who want
to really do right by your man. Shows the inner character and
personality of how a man is made and how they too need lots of support.
Reaching those that cannot be reached
I think we need to realise that everyone is different. I have read
this book and known many who have read it, mostly men. What has
happened to them in the aftermath of reading the book is amazing.
They are happy! They are joyful, they are relaxed, calm, sincere,
open, content and full of energy. They weren't before this book came
along.
I judge not the book from its text, but from the result I see in
those around me who have read it. The fruit of this book is undeniably
good.
All the things I've seen this book give to men are things that I believe God wants us to have.
