Wild at Heart

“Wild at Heart”
By John Eldredge

John Eldredge believes what really is in the heart of men has been badly missed. “When all is said and one, I think most men believe God put them on earth to eb a good boy,” write Eldredge in Wild at heart. “The problem with men, we are told, is that hey don’t know how to keep their promises, be spiritual leaders, talk to their wives, or raise their children. But, if they will try really hard, they can reach the lofty summit of becoming ………. A nice guy. That’s what we hold up as models of Christian maturity: “Really Nice Guys.”
     Now in all of your boyhood dreams growing up, did you ever dream of becoming a nice guy? Ladies, was the Prince of your dreams dashing…or merely nice? Eldredge believes that this dedication to niceness is the reason there are so many tired and lonely woman, so many fatherless children, and so few men around. He writes, “We’ve taken away the dreams of a man’s heart and told him to play the man. As C.S. Lewis said, “We castrate the gelding and bid him be fruitful.’”
Deep in his heart, every man longs for a battle to fight, and adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. That is how he nears the image of God; that is what God made him to be.

Adventure, with all of its requisite danger and wilderness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of a 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 the 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 a 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 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.
     
     A Beauty to Rescue
There is nothing so inspiring to a man as a beautiful woman. She’ll make you want to charge the castle, slay the giant, leap across parapets. Or maybe, hit a home run. One day during a Little League game, my son Samuel was so inspired. He likes baseball, but most boys starting out aren’t sure they really have it in them to be a great player. Sam’s our firstborn, and like so many firstborns he is cautious. He always lest a few pitches go by before he takes swing, and when he does, it’s never a full swing; everyone of his hits up till this point were in the infield. Anyway, just as Sam steps up to bat this one afternoon, his friend from down the street, a cute little blonde girl, shows up along the first base line. Standing up on tiptoe she yells out his name and waves to Sam. Pretending he doesn’t notice her, he broadens his stance, grips the bat a little tighter, looks at the pitcher with something fierce in his eye. First one over the plate he knocks into center field.
A man wants to be a hero to his beauty.

Feminine Heart
     There are also three desires that I have found essential to a woman’s heart, which are not entirely different than a man’s and yet they remain distinctly feminine. Not every woman wants a battle to fight, but every woman yearns to be fought for. Listen to the longing of a woman’s heart: She wants to be more than just noticed – she wants to be wanted. She wants to be pursued. “I just want to be a priority to someone,” a friend in her thirties told me. And her childhood dreams of a knight in shining armor coming to her rescue are not girlish fantasies, they are the core of the feminine heart and the life she knows she was made for. So Zach comes back for Paula in an Officer and a Gentleman. Frederick comes back for Jo in Little Women, and Edward returns to pledge his undying love for Eleanor in Sense and Sensibility.

And so this is not a book about the seven things a man ought to do to be a nicer guy. It is a book about the recovery and release of a man’s heart, his passions, his true nature, which he has been given by God. It’s an invitation to rush the fields at Bannockburn, to go West, to leap from the falls and save the beauty. For if you are going to know who you truly are as a man, if you are going to build a life worth living, if you are going to love a woman deeply and not pass on your confusion to your children, you simply must get your heart back. You must head up into the high country of the soul, into wild and uncharted regions and track down that elusive prey.