309 Quotes by John Eldredge

We talk about unplugging, but we’re enchanted – by the endless social media circus of love and hatred, the vapid, alarming, sensational, and unforgivable. We’re snagged by every new notification. And while we’ve always had our individual struggles and heartbreaks to deal with, now we have the tragedies of the entire world delivered to us hourly on our mobile devices. This is all very hard on the soul. Traumatizing, in fact.

God wants to live this life together with you, to share in your days and decisions, your desires and disappointments. He wants intimacy with you in the midst of the madness and the mundane, the meetings and the memos, the laundry and the lists, the carpools and conversations and projects and pain. He wants to pour his love into your heart and he longs to have you pour yours into his.

All of the happiness we have ever known and all of the happiness we hope to find is unreachable without a heart.

Pause when you are offered beauty and make the conscious decision, I receive this grace. We open our clenched soul to let it in. To find God in it. I will often pray, Thank you for this beauty. I receive it into my soul. And with it I receive you, in it, by it, through it – your love, your goodness, your life.

Oswald Chambers, a man who wrote profoundly and elegantly on prayer, made a radical statement when he said, “The idea of prayer is not in order to get answers from God.” Good heavens – it’s not? What then is the purpose? “Prayer is perfect and complete oneness with God.” 1 A mighty truth is being uncovered here.

Touch nature. I’m serious – every day, your soul needs to engage creation.

Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man. The masculine heart needs a place where nothing is prefabricated, modular, nonfat, zip lock, franchised, on-line, microwavable.

To put it bluntly, your flesh is a weasel, a poser, and a selfish pig. And your flesh is not you. Did you know that? Your flesh is not the real you.

Sartre felt that Hell is other people, but precisely the opposite is true. Hell is being left alone forever with no other reality than your own consciousness of yourself. It is being locked in a casket of your own internal chaos with no hope of a window, or door leading in light from outside to give you a moment’s respite from yourself. Hell is the refusal of the gift of the other.