Introduction:
John Eldrege’s stated purpose for this book is to be a book that gives men “permission.” He doesn’t want this book to just “be another one of those.” Immediately, when setting out to read this book, the reader can see that he accomplishes this goal of being extraordinary. More specifically though, his goal in writing this book is ultimately to discover the secret of a man’s soul, and to help him recover a life of freedom. Here his purpose in his own words, “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.”
Body:
Chapter 1:
Eldredge sets up the rest of the book in the first few chapters. He starts out by contending that man has a longing to explore and have an adventure. That is when and where we come alive. He also believes that is where we find the answer to the questions, “Who am I, what am I made of, and what am I destined for?” He supports this conclusion with the examples of Moses, Jesus, Elijah, and Jacob. “Adventure, with all of its requisite danger and wilderness, is a deeply spiritual onging written into the soul of a man.”
He then goes on to discuss the attack on a man’s heart in today’s world. Both Western Culture, and the current Church Culture, have repressed a man’s soul. Western Culture redefines masculinity. It makes the ideal man more sensitive, more safe, more manageable, and ultimately more feminine. Our culture tries to tell us that when we leave boyhood and become a man, we leave behind the wilderness and our “wanderlust.” We ultimately end up with gender confusion in our society. Man and women are just plain confused as to how they are supposed to act. “How can a man know who he is one, when his highest aim is minding his manners.”
Church culture has also done bad things for men. The highest goal Christianity seems to have for men is being good boys, “nice guys.” This culture ultimately cause men to live disconnected from their heart, and being convinced that this is the will of God.
Now Eldredge goes on to give the underlying premise for this book. He gives it in the form of three points. He declares that these three points are the three desires of the masculine heart. “They may be misplaced, forgotten, or misdirected, but in the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.”
He supports the first statement, men have a deep desire for a battle to fight, by first asking us to look at little boys. Little boys are always making guns and weapons, and every game must have danger, battles, or competition. It starts with little boys. He then makes the point that life needs men to be fierce and fiercely devoted. We need soldiers. “The wounds he will take throughout his life will cause him to lose heart if all he has, has trained him to be soft.” So where has this desire gone in today’s modern man? It has either been submerged or it has taken a dark turn. Like it or not, there is something fierce in the heart of every man.
An adventure to live starts with little boys as well. “The recipe for fun is pretty simple raising boys: Add to any activity an element of danger, stir in a little exploration, add a dash of destruction, and you’ve got yourself a winner.” Adventure puts us to the test, it’s where we find ourselves. The author states that in adventure “we have the best times of our lives.”
A beauty to win motivates men incredibly! Eldredge contends that men need someone to fight for. “There is nothing more inspiring to man, then a beautiful woman.” The feminine heart, he goes on to conclude, is not entirely different from the masculine heart. “Not every woman wants a battle to fight, but every woman yearns to be fought for.” She also longs for an adventure bigger than herself, and to have beauty to unveil—she wants to be the beauty. “The world kills a woman’s heart when it tells her to be tough, efficient, and independent.”
By way of conclusion in this jammed packed first chapter the author states that the deep desires of our heart tell us how we were meant to live. “God gave us eyes that we might see, ears that we might hear, wills that we might choose, and hearts that we might live.”
Chapter 2:
The title of this chapter is, “The wild one whose image we bear.” He talks in this chapter about the where he believes that we get our deep desires; we are made in the image of God. God is wild. He supports the statement, “God has a battle to fight,” by giving the examples from the life of Jesus and Samson. Jesus turns over tables in the temple. Samson killed a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey, what’s interesting though is that all those events in Samson’s life, happened when “the Spirit of the Lord came upon him.” (Judges 15:14).
God also has an adventure to live. Look at nature around you, the author says. Everywhere is wild, unpredictable forces that our wild, unpredictable God set into motion. The prime example is, however, giving man free will. “Even though he knew what would happen, what heartbreak and suffering and devastation would follow upon our disobedience, God chose to have children…. God gave us a remarkable choice…. He let others into His story, and He lets their choices shape it profoundly.” There is definitely something wild in the heart of God, Eldredge emphatically states.
Finally, God has a beauty to fight for. “God is a romantic at heart, and He has his own bride to fight for. He is a jealous lover, and His jealousy is for the hearts of His people and for their freedom. As Francis Frangipane so truly sates, “Rescue is the constant pattern of God’s activity.” We are his beauty, and even though we constantly turn away from him, even committing adultery with the world, He is willing to move heaven and earth to win us back. God invented romanticism.
A women’s heart also stems from a part of the nature of God. God wants to share an adventure with us, God wants to be loved, and God has beauty to unveil, just look at the world around us! “Eve embodies the beauty and the mystery and the tender vulnerability of God.”
Chapter 3:
As he sets up the question that dominates this chapter, “What is a man for?” He explains the confusion that results when we don’t know the answer. Men try to replace their deep desires of their heart with imitations, he concludes. Several examples of this are anger and pornography. He believes that men are angry because they have no battle to fight and struggle with porn because they don’t really know how to win the “beauty.”
He will go on later in the book to explain this more deeply when he addresses the issue of “the wound.”
Fear is also another result of not knowing the answer to the question. Specifically, men live in the fear of being exposed as not really a man. “We doubt very much that we have any real strength to offer, and we’re pretty certain that if we did offer what we have it wouldn’t be enough.”
So what is a man for? That’s the question of this chapter. To start to answer this question he states, “Desire reveals design, and design reveals destiny.” We are not here to kill time, he emphatically states! We have a purpose. “This is not Home Improvement,” he states, “It’s Saving Private Ryan!” He then goes into the story of Adam and Eve to illustrate this and what happens when we don’t fulfill our purpose. God put Adam in charge, but he failed. Adam’s sin was paralysis. He didn’t do anything when the Serpent tempted Eve, even though the Genesis tells us that they were together.
Eve was meant to be a helper, literally in the Hebrew, a “lifesaver.” Instead, she is integral to bringing death into the world. “When Eve was deceived, the artistry of being a woman took a fateful dive into the barren places of control and loneliness.” She turned from being vulnerable to being grasping, from sharing to controlling, and from having beauty to unveil to hiding it in fear or anger, or using it secure her place in the world.
What happens next in this story is what many men do. Adam goes into hiding. Men are faking. We only pick battles that we can win, only set out on adventures that aren’t too much for us to handle, and only pursue beauties that we are sure that we can win, Eldredge says. This isn’t limited to the world, this also happens in churches across America.
Adam and Eve’s fall were responsible for a tremor that entered the human race, a fatal flaw entered the original, the author states. “Even if he can’t quite put it into words, every man is haunted by the question, “Am I really a man? Have I got what it takes… when it counts?””
Chapter Four:
The question of this chapter posed by the author is, “Am I really a man?” He makes the point that masculinity is bestowed by a Father. Femininity never bestows masculinity, he asserts. He also asserts that men need to rescue their sons from the emasculation that can come from well-meaning mothers.
This leads us into the discussion and exploration of what he calls, “The Father Wound.” He divides this into two categories, the “obvious wound,” and the “subtle wound.” He gives several examples from his own life and from others he has counseled to explain these. An example of the obvious wound would be a father calling his son a “Mama’s boy.” The subtle wound, which he believes is much harder to heal, could be caused by his father’s indifference or absence; it leads a son to believe that the question, “Am I really a man?” has no answer.
These wounds can cause a lot of harmful effects, but he boils them down to this sentence: “Men either overcompensate for their wound and become driven (violent men), or they shrink back and go passive (retreating men). Often it’s an odd combination of both.” He ends this chapter by concluding that so many men fell that they are stuck. They are either paralyzed and unable to move, or unable to stop moving.
Chapter Five:
He revisits the idea in this chapter that both the society and the church have emasculated men, and the destructive work that begins with the “father wound,” is continued by society. Men are not raised to be strong and have the strength that the world needs them to have. He blames much of this directly on our enemy, Satan.
He also addresses our search for the answer to the question of who we are, and if we have what it takes to be a man. Men look for the answer in cars, jobs, money, status, popularity, and women (the deadliest place of all, he contends). We are haunted with Eve, we try to redeem our masculinity through and with her, he says. Eve is a garden of delight, but she is not all we need, he emphatically states. “When a man takes his question to the woman what happens is either addiction or emasculation. Usually both.” If you take your question to Eve, he says, your heart will be broken.
In finishing this chapter and setting up the next one, he explores this subject of our search for validation and the answer to our question, “Because we cannot hear the real answer until we see we’ve got a false one.” In our search for the answer to our question, he pleads that you must walk away from Eve.
Chapter Six:
In this chapter he sets out to tell us where to turn for the answer to our question. He sums it up well here: “That deep heart knowledge comes only through a process of initiation. You have to know where you’ve come from; you have to have faced a series of trials that test you; you have to have taken a journey; and you have to have faced your enemy.”
So who is supposed to take us on this journey? The author provides us an answer, “Even if your father did his job he can only take you partway. There comes a time when you have to leave all that is familiar, and go on into the unknown with God.”
He goes on to explain how God starts us and helps us through this journey of initiation. It starts out with us though, and us understanding what God is trying to do in our lives. We need to stop whining and start asking the right questions. Questions like, “What are you trying to teach me here? What issues of the heart are you trying to raise with this? What is it you want me to see?” Eldredge tell us. We also need to not have contempt for our wound. “… A wound that is unacknowledged and unwept is a wound that cannot be healed.”
God’s plan to restore our heart starts with thwarting our false selves. He does this by shattering our false self. He will take away all that you’ve leaned upon to bring you to life, the author assures us. This is a very painful process. However, this is where the real journey begins. It’s the turning point. However, the author warns us, it’s dangerous! Satan uses this as an opportunity to accuse God. To try to tell us that God isn’t on our side and He’s just trying to hurt us. He tries to tempt us back toward control and comfort in our life by reviving our false self. It’s difficult to resist this because we are feeling so vulnerable and exposed with our real selves starting to be revealed.
A big key to this process in the author’s opinion is waking away from the woman. “A man needs a much bigger orbit than a woman.” A man should not go to a woman to receive his strength; he goes to offer it, Eldredge states. He continues by saying that a man is not really searching for a woman, he is searching for God. A woman is just the closest thing to God on this earth, and so we substitute her for Him. We must reverse the choice Adam made when he chose Eve over God.
Chapter Seven:
John Eldredge continues to go into more depth about the role of God in our initiation. He starts out by telling us that our source of strength is God, and that we shouldn’t feel ashamed that we need healing.
We need to enter the wound in order to heal it. We have to deal with the underlying issue, unbury it. Only then can we start to heal it.
“The way that God heals our wound is a deeply personal process.” It doesn’t happen outside of intimacy with Christ, though, the author assures us. The author then goes on to give us his steps to healing the wound. They are as follows:
1. The first step is surrender.
2. We need to invite Jesus into the wound.
3. Grieve the wound. It was not your fault, and it DOES matter.
4. We need to let God love us, let Him get close.
5. We need to forgive our father. Two quotes stand out in this passage: “As someone has said, forgiveness is setting a prisoner free and then discovering the prisoner was you.” He goes on to say. “Don’t wait to forgive until you feel like forgiving; you will never get there. Feelings take time to heal after the choice to forgive is made.”
6. The last step is to ask God to Father us and give us a new name. Along with that new name, comes a new heart. We need to ask God what He thinks of us, and be secure in that knowledge!
He ends this chapter by assuring us that our strength is not the things we lean on to prop us up, but that, through God, the strength is in us!
Chapter Eight:
Eldredge devotes the final four chapters to each of the three things that he claims are deeply seated in the heart of a man. He starts out in chapter eight by discussing, “A battle to fight.”
He starts out by discussing the warrior’s heart. A warrior has vision, a cause greater than self-preservation, he states. He also tells us that a warrior is cunning. He knows when to fight and when to run, he can sense a trap, and he doesn’t charge blindly ahead.
He continues this discussion by identifying our enemies—the world, devil, and our flesh nature. The flesh tries to take the easy way out, he warns us. However, as Christians, he reminds us that God gives us a new, good heart. We don’t struggle AGAINST God, we struggle WITH Him. How do we overcome the flesh? Eldredge answers, “Choose against him (our flesh) every time you see him raise his ugly head. Walk right into those situations you normally run from. Speak right to the issues you normally remain silent over.”
He also tells us that we need to stop sabotaging our strength. I believe, after reading what he says, that this is a key point. He presents several ways that we sabotage ourselves. Not standing up for what is right when we know we should, backing down from a battle we know we should fight, is one. This, he explains, is pushing down your true strength. Another way we sabotage our strength, he continues is by giving it away. This happens in several ways, but the biggest one is in sexual sins, especially in masturbation and sex outside of marriage, he says. These are inherently selfish acts that tear you down, he asserts.
The second enemy that we face is the world. He calls the world a “carnival of counterfeits.” The world is full of counterfeit battles, adventures, and beauties. He defines the world as, “…any system built by our collective sin, all our false selves coming together to reward and destroy each other.” It offers us a false sense of power and security. How do we make it in a world like this? This world of posers we live in is drastically shaken by the strength and presences of a real man, Eldredge claims. We must let our strength show up.
The third enemy is Satan. Satan is our adversary in this battle that we have to fight. The devil lies, in fact he works hard at it. The author reminds us with several anecdotes that not every thought that we think is our own.
Chapter Nine:
Eldredge is going to talk about our strategy to fight the battle that we are in. He starts out by taking a more in-depth look at Satan and how he works. He explains how Satan works in three stages.
Stage one is, “I’m not here.” The author assures us that when we ignore Satan, he wins. We start blaming stuff on others that he is responsible for. This ruins relationships through his specialty, lies. It can ruin our relationship with others; it’s especially effective in marriages when we don’t recognize the working of Satan for what it is. It can also ruin our relationship with God. “These good people with good hearts wanted to explain everything on a “human” level and let me tell you—when you ignore the Enemy, he wins. He simply loves to blame everything on us, get us feeling hurt, misunderstood, suspicious, and resentful of one another.”
He also talks about propaganda in this section. The devil is constantly hurling lies at us, we can counter this by hanging onto the truth.
The second stage is intimidation. The author explains what he means by this here: “When we begin to question him, to resist his lies, to see his hand in the ordinary trials of our lives, then he steps up the attack; he turns to intimidation and fear…. He moves from subtle seduction to open assault. The thoughts come crashing in, all sorts of stuff begins to fall apart in your life, your faith seems paper thin.” A warrior’s courage, recognizing that God is with us, and resisting, really resisting, Satan is the key to win against this tactic, the author concludes.
Stage three is cutting a deal. In this strategy he whittles away our defenses over time and gets us to compromise slowly, and then picks us off when we are weak. This strategy is overcome by awareness and steadfastness.
He ends this chapter by talking about our “weapons of war.” He addresses several strategies that will be integral in our battle to fight. Against the flesh, discipline is key. Time with God in personal devotion is important. This discipline, the author warns us, is not the point though. The whole point of a devotional life is getting and staying connected with God. The armor of God is meant to be used; use it! Realize that you will take wounds and don’t go it alone! Finally he sums it up here, “The point is simply to do whatever brings me back to my heart and the heart of God.”
Chapter ten:
Chapter ten is about the desire of man for a beauty to rescue. He starts out this chapter by discussing Eve’s wound and her need to be rescued. “If masculinity has come under assault, femininity has been brutalized.”
The author presents Eve’s wound in somewhat of a parallel to how he describes Adam’s, in the fact that it is two-fold. The two main sources for the wound are violence and abandonment. Violence in the form of sexual assaults or physical ones will make her feel dirty or worthless. Abandonment will make her crave attention, and drive her all sorts of bad places to get it. This quote is key to this discussion, “The message is this, YOUR ATTRACTIVENESS IS DIRTY; YOU ARE NOT DESIRED, YOU WILL NOT BE PROTECTED, NO ONE WILL FIGHT FOR YOU.” This is what women need to be rescued from, the author is telling us.
How do we rescue her? The author provides the answer to this. We offer our strength, he tells us. Sex is a beautiful example and illustration of this, but it must go further and translate into life. The author uses the example of the beauty trapped in the tower by the dragon and evil sorcerer. This is what a man is meant to do in rescuing the beauty, “He (the man) goes to find his strength; he returns to offer it. He tears down the walls of the tower that has held her with his words and with his actions. He speaks to her heart’s deepest question in a thousand ways. ‘Yes, you are lovely. Yes, there is one who will fight for you.’ But because most men have not yet fought the battle, most women are still in the tower.”
Eldredge then writes about the opposite and wrong way men approach women. Men tend to try to use women. They want the maiden without any cost to themselves. Don’t pursue her superficially, the author rebukes. In this discussion, remember that actions speak louder than words. Make sure that the message you are sending with your actions is not one that tells her that you are using her.
He ends this section of this chapter by reminding us that she needs God more than she needs us, and the proper attitude is that you love her, not to gain validation, but because that is what you are made to do.
He then briefly talks about what a woman’s response to a man is. He starts out by describing her role. “… a women who is living out her true design will be valiant, vulnerable, and scandalous.” He references in this discussion Rahab and Ruth’s “seduction” of Boaz to illustrate.
In closing this chapter, he reminds us that this is a battle, and not one that we will fight once or twice or even three times. It is a continual rescuing that she requires and yearns for deep down inside.
Chapter Eleven:
In this last chapter, he finishes off the book by discussing, “an adventure to live.” There are a plethora of quotes that draw my attention, excite, and inspire me in this last chapter. I cannot leave them all out.
He begins to describe what he means by “an adventure to live,” as he expresses his desire here: “I want to live my whole life like that. I want to love with much more abandon and stop waiting for others to love me first. I want to hurl myself into a creative work worthy of God. I want to charge the fields at Banockburn, follow Peter as he followed Christ out onto the sea, pray from my heart’s true desire.”
He goes onto state equivocally, “Life is not a problem to be solved; it is an adventure to be lived… He (God) rigged the world in such a way that it only works when we embrace risk as the theme of our lives, which is to say, only when we live by faith. A man just won’t be happy until he’s got adventure in his work; in his love and in his spiritual life.”
In talking more about adventure, he quotes from a book he picked up randomly one day, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
After really describing what he means by this concept of an adventure to live, he goes on to talk about how—how to live like you’re alive. Dream, he exhorts. “Too many men forsake their dreams because they aren’t willing to risk, or fear they aren’t up to the challenge, or are never told that those desires deep in their heart are good.” He then tells us that when in approaching these dreams, and the mission for which we are created, never let the question, “how,” stop you. How is God’s department, he assures us. “How is never the right question; how is a faithless question.” Find out what makes you come alive, and follow that thread, or dream, or whatever it might be. This quote is a good summation of this section, this call to LIVE, “A man’s life becomes an adventure, the whole thing takes on a transcendent purpose when he releases control in exchange for the recovery of the dreams in his heart.”
He continues on in this chapter with the observation that the spiritual life cannot be made suburban, that is, it will always frontier because God does not operate like a system with formulas and rules, he operates “with all the originality of a truly free and alive person.” He makes the point here that Christianity tries to “tame the wildness of the spiritual frontier.” The problem, he complains, is “Christianities obsession with principles is that it removes any real conversation with God. Find the principle, apply the principle—what do you need God for? … Never make a principle out of your experience; let God be as original with other people as He is with you.”
As he concludes this book he ends it appropriately, with describing our need for God in this whole process. He aptly points out that adventure can be fun and exciting, but it can be scary and uncomfortable as well, but God doesn’t leave us alone. “The only way to live in this adventure—with all its danger and unpredictability and immensely high stakes—is an ongoing, and intimate relationship with God.”
John Eldredge ends this book with a call for us to live out our own adventure. He fulfills his original purpose by giving us permission to live like God intended.
Conclusion:
After reading this book, I feel like I have discovered a new height of living in a relationship with God that I didn’t even knew existed. Not that it was all this book’s fault, but in reading and writing this book report, God spoke to me through this and other means to really show me some amazing things about himself, and this adventurous relationship that we get to live out with Him! All of that to say, “Wild at heart” impacted me profoundly. I don’t know if I will ever be able to look at my relationship with God and the subject of being a man the same.
God spoke to me in several areas particularly while reading this book and writing this report. I was challenged by some things in the section about the battle to fight, yet encouraged and uplifted through the tools and new viewpoints on overcoming in those areas. I have a better view point and mindset toward women, and the woman I will ultimately marry because of the things he said about women, especially in the section about a beauty to rescue. And finally, I am so excited and thrilled about my journey through this life with God. I definitely see how my relationship with God is going to be an incredible adventure, and I am so excited to continue down that path!
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone and everyone. Not just guys, but women also! I can truly say that I am ready to set out on this adventure and live my life passionately with a wild heart.
