Dropped the beamer at Paul’s foreign auto (2nd street & MLK ) and then walked the 2.5 miles back to Lexmark in about 30 minutes. Good exercise for my pulled hamstring and just good “me” time.
Read John Eldridge’s Wild At Heart over the weekend
I must say, REALLY challenging book, written like a bad Freshman Composition paper. How shall we convince our audience to get off the couch and be real men? Let’s quote a bazillion “Real men” and make constant appeals to emotion. Let’s move from that to some Dave Ramsey-esque personal anecdotes that (obviously) apply to everyone out there. Let’s speak of broad vistas, of mountain climbing, kayaking, and other rather extreme sports. Did some of John’s buddies die doing those sports? Yep…but hey, that’s the point right? Life’s an adventure, not a burden.
Marvelous message, muddied by subpar, overwritten prose. This is a 200 page diatribe that could be a 100 page booklet. “Elements of Style” is 97 pages, and I’d say it gets its points across.
Anyway, I think the best message of the book, in summary, is that every man’s been wounded by his father & the world, resulting in poseur men, guys who put forth a false self, robbing them of any true connection to God, their family, and their life’s work. This false self, initially a defense mechanism, becomes a tool of Satan to anesthetize and emasculate the man. At best, this keeps him from his potential; at worst, it damns him.
Eldridge encourages us to move past this falseness to become genuine men. Not jerks, but not passive, bored couch potatoes, either. Men able to fight against injustice, who see not one battle but a constant war against a lost world. Men ready to mentor and train the next generation of men, giving them the reassurance their own workaholic, irresponsible, or addicted fathers denied them.
It’s a rousing message–again, if you can just get past the way he says it.
Thanks for the father’s day gift, baby!