For some reason unknown to even me, I started posting some of the thoughts I have had as I’ve been reading John Eldredge’s Waking the Dead. It started, I guess, because I had already been thinking about some of these things. Without restating everything, I felt that his rather dramatic presentation in Chapter 2 may just encourage those people who already have an overactive sense of “spiritual drama,” where everything is a spiritual battle, and their lives always “hang in the balance.”
Well, I finally made it into Part 3, and I have to say, Waking the Dead is finally the book I expected it to be, and already I am telling people, “everyone needs to read this book.”
First, he - in a different way, of course - made the same point I was making: “Reach for the stars; follow your dreams; find yourself. It’s not that the advice is bad; it is, however, woefully inadequate.” I would have really liked him to have made this point earlier when he was first discussing the messages of myth, but I’m glad he said it. It’s not enough to pump people up with expectation, even if there’s truth there. In Chapter 6, Eldredge finally gets around to finishing out the picture, discussing the necessity of adding wisdom and revelation and “developing a discerning heart.” He warns that “Many things are trying to play upon … the heart,” something that many Christians seem oblivious to. In just this chapter he speaks enough truth to set many people free from religion, manipulation, guilt and condemnation.
It’s good stuff, and I can feel life flowing back into places that I haven’t felt in a while. Now, nothing I have read is really new to me, but the cool thing about real truth is that it doesn’t get old. We get old, and we get cold - and we need to hear the Good News again and again, because everything in the world tells us something different.
Again, this is good stuff. I may have completely misunderstood his direction; at least, it didn’t seem like he was going where he seems to be going now. Regardless of who was off track, it seems Eldredge and I have turned a corner and I like the direction we’re heading.
