Summer reading: one more reason why i love summer

John Eldredge is a champ. I just finished his book The Sacred Romance, which he co-authored with Brent Curtis. I’ve also read his books Waking the Dead & Wild at Heart, and Captivating, which he co-authored with his wife Staci.

I loved this book. There is so much to it, so many little poignant stories and lessons which “invite us to see what God is doing behind the scenes of our lives to woo us to Himself,” as one author said.

Eldredge’s exploration of Satan makes me want to revisit C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters. Love comes from God (1 John 4:7), so Satan’s main objective is to keep us from knowing this love. Clive Staples (C.S. Lewis) and I have already reconnected; last night started reading The Four Loves, which unpacks Liking/Affection, Friendship, Eros, & Charity kinds of love.

Summer reading: one more reason why I love summer.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from The Sacred Romance:

To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart and there to stand before the face of the Lord ever present all-seeing within you

If we allow our mind simply to listen we perhaps begin to hear our heart speak. It says, “I am so weary, so lost. I have no energy to redeem myself. How I long for rest." Our mind hears these words and realizes its no use to ask God to give us the energy to make it back over the cliff over which we have fallen. We need the Good Shepherd to come and get us. If we allow our heart to give our mind the words to pray we say, “Jesus, help me. All my lovers have failed me. Forgive me. I cannot quench my thirst. Give me the water of life.”

Hope is for the soul what breathing is for the living organism.

If for all practical purposes we believe that this life is our best shot at happiness, if this is as good as it gets, we will live as desperate, demanding, and eventually despairing men and women. We will place a burden on this world it was never intended to bear.

Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith just as indifference, not hate, is the strongest enemy of love.

We do not merely want to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it – CS Lewis, The Weight of Glory

My journey today will bring me closer to home; it may just be around the bend

Awakened souls are often disappointed, but our disappointment can lead us onward, actually increasing our desire and lifting it towards its true passion

Each of us, Christians included, is oppressed directly and specifically…this is the enemy’s first deception: “I am not here. It’s just you struggling with these things.”

Most of us, perhaps, live in not a terribly evil place in the moralistic sense of the word. We simply live where busyness, or apathy, or struggle with circumstances that won’t change occupies most of our energy. And the enemy is perfectly happy to keep us in such a place practicing our religion. We are already defeated.

Once we take him seriously, [Satan] switches from his tactic of “I’m not here” to one of us having to worry about him.

As Beelzebub from John Milton’s Paradise Lost said, “Drive them as we were driven,/ The puny Habitants, or if not drive,/ Seduce them to our Party, that their God may prove their foe.”

Satan’s desire is to keep us away from communion with God. He doesn’t care how he does it.