I read the Wild at heart Book by John Eldredge and create notes. I share the Wild at heart John Eldredge quotes in this article.
Table of Contents
For Men:
Men have had an insatiable longing to explore. “Never stop exploring.”
Men 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.
Most of the men I know are trying hard not to become like their fathers. But who does that leave them to follow after? From whom will they derive their sense of strength?
God is a person who takes immense risks. No doubt the biggest risk of all was when he gave angels and men free will, including the freedom to reject him, not just once, but every single day.
How come when men look in their hearts they don’t discover something valiant and dangerous, but instead find anger, lust, and fear?
Men either overcompensate for their wound and become driven (violent men); shrink back and go passive (retreating men). Often it’s an odd mixture of both.
Men come into the world without the God who was our deepest joy, our ecstasy.
Most men spend the energy of their lives trying to eliminate risk, or squeezing it down to a more manageable size. Read Does Alan Watts believe in God?
For Soul:
Men take their souls’ search for validation in all sorts of directions.
To lose a leg is nothing compared to losing heart; to be crippled by shrapnel need not destroy your soul, but to be crippled by shame and guilt may.
You literally sacrifice your soul and your true power when you insist on controlling things.
Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man.
About genuine:
We are genuine characters, and not mere puppets, we can choose our defining stories.
About creative:
When it comes to living and loving, what’s required is a willingness to jump in with both feet and be creative as you go.
On true strength:
Begin to taste your true strength and you’ll want more. Something in the centre of your chest feels weighty, substantial.
If you want to know how the world really feels about you, just start living out of your true strength.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
Why don’t they offer their strength to a world desperately in need of it? 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.
Start choosing to live out your strength and you’ll discover that it grows each time.
Many of us have actually been afraid to let our strength show up because the world doesn’t have a place for it. Let people feel the weight of who you are and let them deal with it.
About Belief:
There is a whole lot more going on behind the scenes of our lives than most of us have been led to believe.
On discipline:
The ability to discipline himself is there, but dormant for many of us.
Freedom is useless if we don’t exercise it as characters making choices.
Your strength is revealed and even increased–through exercise. Stand on what is true and do not let go.
About enemy:
Behind the world and the flesh is an even more deadly enemy. One we rarely speak of and are even much less ready to resist.
You will be wounded by the Enemy. But these wounds are different; these are honour wounds.
Christ draws the enemy out, exposes him for what he is, and shames him in front of everyone.
On Masculinity:
God made the masculine heat.
Masculinity is an essence that is hard to articulate but that a boy naturally craves as he craves food and water.
Masculinity is an essence that is passed from father to son. That is a picture; many things in life are, of a deeper reality. The true essence of strength is passed to us from God through our union with him.
If we can reawaken that fierce quality in a man, hook it up to a higher purpose, release the warrior within, then the boy can grow up and become truly masculine.
The warrior is not the only role a man must play. But the warrior is crucial in our movement toward any masculine integrity; it is hardwired into every man.
Walk right into those situations you normally run from. Speak right to the issues you normally remain silent over. If you want to grow in true masculine strength, then you must stop sabotaging yours.
Don’t even think about going into battle alone. Don’t even try to take the masculine journey without at least one man by your side.
If masculinity has come under assault, femininity has been brutalized.
Originality and creativity are essential to personhood and to masculine strength. The adventure begins and our real strength is released when we no longer rely on formulas.
About man choices:
A man is never more a man than when he embraces an adventure beyond his control, or when he walks into a battle he isn’t sure of winning.
You are a man; don’t need Me to hold you by the hand through this. You have what it takes.
The control we so desperately crave is an illusion.
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.
As though if a man were to truly grow up he would forsake wilderness and wanderlust and settle down.
Like it or not, there is something fierce in the heart of every man.
But you can’t escape it–there is something wild in the heart of every man.
A man wants to be the hero to the beauty.
The battle itself is never enough; a man yearns for romance. It’s not enough to be a hero; it’s that he is a hero to someone in particular, to the woman he loves.
Yes, there is something passionate in the heart of every man.
A man must know he is powerful; he must know he has what it takes.
If a boy is to become a man, if a man is to know he is one, this is not an option. A man has to know where he comes from, and what he’s made of.
If a man is only tender, we know something is deeply wrong.
So most women lead lives of quiet resignation, having given up on their hope for a true man.
If a man does not find those things for which his heart is made, if he is never even invited to live for them from his deep heart, he will look for them in some other way.
Every man feels that the world is asking him to be something he doubts very much he has it in him too.
A man needs to know his name. He needs to know he’s got what it takes.
I’m not blaming everything on the devil. In almost every situation there are human issues involved. Every man has his struggles.
You love her because that’s what you are made to do; that’s what a real man does.
For False self:
Most of the men you meet are living out a false self; that’s directly related to his wound.
When you look at the structure of the false self men tend to create, it always revolves around two themes: seizing upon some sort of competence and rejecting anything that cannot control.
From the place of our woundedness, we construct a false self. We find a few gifts that work for us, and we try to live off them
The false self, our plan for redemption, seems so right to us.
But the false self is a lie; the whole plan is built on pretence. It’s a deadly trap.
Losing the false self is painful; though it’s a mask, it’s one we’ve worn for years and losing it can feel like losing a close friend. Underneath the mask is all the hurt and fear we’ve been running from, hiding from.
As we walk away from the false self, we will feel vulnerable and exposed. We will be sorely tempted to turn to our comforters for some relief, those places where we’ve found solace and rest.
The world offers a man a false sense of power and a false sense of security. Be brutally honest now.
About life:
He must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
We are still seeking to save ourselves; we have forgotten the deep pleasure of spilling our life for another.
Life is not a problem to be solved; it is an adventure to be lived.
A man just won’t be happy until he’s got adventure in his work, in his love and in his spiritual life.
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.
The soul longs for passion, for freedom, for life.
Life needs a man to be fierce–and fiercely devoted. The wounds he will take throughout his life will cause him to lose heart if all he has been trained to be is soft.
Truth be told, most of us are faking our way through life.
No matter how good your life may have seemed to you, you live in a broken world full of broken people.
A man is not wounded once, but many, many times in the course of his life. Nearly every blow ends up falling in the same place: against his strength.
If your forgiveness doesn’t visit the emotional core of your life, it will be incomplete.
A man must have a battle to fight, a great mission to his life that involves and yet transcends even home and family.
On handling choice:
We pick only those battles we are sure to win, only those adventures we are sure to handle, only those beauties we are sure to rescue.
The only thing more tragic than the tragedy that happens to us is the way we handle it.
He knows when to fight and when to run; can sense a trap and never charges blindly ahead; knows what weapons to carry and how to use them.
About wound nature:
A wound that goes unacknowledged and unwept is a wound that cannot heal. You’ve embraced is a wound that cannot heal. A wound you think you deserved is a wound that cannot heal.
The struggle with pornography or masturbation is most difficult when you are lonely or beat up, or longing for comfort in some way. This will become more intense as you get closer to your wound. The longing for the ache to go away, and the pull toward other comforters can seem overwhelming.
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.
For Homosexuality:
Homosexuality is an attempt to repair the wound by filling it with masculinity, either the masculine love that was missing or the masculine strength many men feel they do not possess.
For sexual strength:
If he can feel like the hero sexually, well, then mister, he’s the hero.
About Fear:
Adventure requires something of us, puts us to the test. Though we may fear the test, at the same time we yearn to be tested, to discover that we have what it takes.
In our fear that no one will speak on our behalf or protect us or fight for us, we start to recreate both ourselves and our role in the story. We manipulate our surroundings so we don’t feel so defenceless.
The violence, no matter what form, is a cover-up for fear.
You face your fears head-on. Longer than you want to; long enough to raise the deeper issues, let the wound surface from beneath it all.
There was much fear beneath the surface; fear that I would fail, fear that I would be found out, and finally, fear that I was ultimately on my own.
Satan is trying to appeal to the traitor’s commitment to self-preservation when he uses fear and intimidation.
For women:
The less a guy feels like a real man in the presence of a real woman, the more vulnerable he is to porn.
But the deadliest place a man ever takes his search, the place every man seems to wind up no matter what trail he’s followed, is the woman.
Under the shadow of a man’s strength, a woman finds rest.
The battle itself is never enough; a man yearns for romance. It’s not enough to be a hero; it’s that he is a hero to someone in particular, to the woman he loves.
A man needs a much bigger orbit than a woman. He needs a mission, a life purpose, and he needs to know his name. Only then is he fit for a woman, for only then does he have something to invite her into.
When a man withholds himself from his woman, he leaves her without the life only he can bring.
There is also something wild in the heart of a woman, it is feminine to the core, more seductive than fierce.
A man does not go to a woman to get his strength; he goes to her to offer it. You do not need the woman for you to become a great man, and as a great man, you do not need the woman.
If a woman is only fierce, we sense she is not what she was meant to be.
A woman doesn’t want to be the adventure; she wants to be caught up in something greater than herself.
A woman must know she is beautiful; she must know she is worth fighting for.
About Femininity:
Femininity can arouse masculinity.
Femininity can never bestow masculinity.
About sharing:
And certainly, we see that God wants not merely an adventure, but an adventure to share. He didn’t have to make us, but he wanted to.
We need a band of brothers willing to shed their blood” with us.
We nearly lost to the Evil One; instead, it will go down as a memory we’ll share with our friends for a long, long time.
For God:
God has the battle to fight, and the battle is for our freedom.
God gave us a remarkable choice. He did not make Adam and Eve obey him. He took a risk. A staggering risk, with staggering consequences.
It’s not the nature of God to limit his risks and cover his bases. Far from it.
Nevertheless, there is definitely something wild in the heart of God.
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.
A man bears the image of God in his strength, not so much physically but soulfully. Regardless of whether or not he knows the biblical account if there’s one thing a man does know he knows he is made to come through.
Are we willing to live with the level of risk God invites us to? Something inside us hesitates.
God thwarts us to save us. We think it will destroy us, but the opposite is true–we must save from what really will destroy us.
The way in which God heals our wounds is a deeply personal process. He is a person and he insists on working personally.
What God sees when he sees you is the real you, the true you, the man he had in mind when he made you.
The Father’s voice is never condemning. From that place we ask God to speak personally to us, to break the power of the lie that was delivered with our wound.
You have a specific place in the line, a mission God made you for.
There are no formulas with God. Period. So there are no formulas for the man who follows him.
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.
The way in which God fulfils a desire may be different from what first awakened it.
About Warrior:
A man needs the battle to fight; he needs a place for the warrior in him to come alive and be honed, trained, seasoned.
He wants to develop and release in us the qualities every warrior needs.
