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John Eldredge is the best-selling author of Wild at Heart, The Sacred Romance, and a new book, Waking the Dead: The Glory of a Heart Fully Alive. He is the founder of Ransomed Heart Ministries, which describes itself as part monastery, part military outpost, and part Red Cross unit for the soul. It hosts boot camps and retreats for men and women. His books are written to help men rediscover their masculinity in the image of God, but the have been popular with both men and women. Wild at Heart has sold over a million copies.

After being involved in the Los Angeles drug culture and kicked out of high school, Eldredge was looking for a "worldview." After exploring other religions, Eastern mysticism, Lao-Tzu, and New Age spirituality, he discovered the writings of Francis Schaeffer, who he calls one of the best philosophers of the 20th century. Through Schaeffer, Eldredge came to Christ and later to the church. He eventually got a master's degree in counseling and practiced in Colorado Springs before working for Focus on the Family.

How was Ransomed Heart Ministries born?

I started working at Focus on the Family doing debates and media and cultural studies. It was the whole Schaeffer thing, that if Christianity is true it ought to affect all of culture.

The early Celtic Christians called the Holy Spirit "the wild goose." And the reason why is they knew that you cannot tame him. But if you follow his haunting call, he'll take you on an adventure. Well, that's what it was. I just sensed that I have a mission, I have a call to speak, to write, to do sort of deep-heart surgery in people's lives.

Talk about the wild goose. We often hear of a "wild goose chase."

That derogatory phrase shows you how much we in Western culture hate mystery. We want a plan. . And I'm telling you, you don't get that.

You've got a computer, and a vision. Is that basically where you start? You then write Wild at Heart?

Yep. We had written Sacred Romance when I was at Focus. It had done okay. My publisher called and asked, "What else do you want to do?" I said, "I've got something on my heart to say to men. And I lay out the whole thing of Wild Heart, a 20-minute, impassioned speech." The publisher says, "Nah, books for men don't sell. What else have you got?" Well, it's sold a million copies now.

So meanwhile, Sacred Romance did fairly well. Wild at Heart is wildly successful. Now tell us about Waking the Dead. This is a book that's about the heart. And it starts with this: "There are few things more crucial to us than our life, few things we are less clear about." Talk about the significance of those two sentences.

Isn't it true? I mean most of us live in a fog. It's like life is a movie we arrived to 20 minutes late. You know something important seems to be going on. But we can't figure out the story. We don't know what part we're supposed to play or what the plot is. They look like bad guys and they look like good guys.

It's that sense of universal lost-ness, fog, confusion. We all share that. With the things that go wrong in our life, we think either that I'm blowing it somehow or that God's holding out on me.

Or we get in the category of living by faith, because the promise that I see is not a reality, but it's the thing hoped for yet not seen.

Now, that's the thing that's really going to punch my buttons. We put the entire offer of the Christian life off onto heaven. But Jesus doesn't do that.

First off, we have to recognize that we've lost the gospel. I heard it again yesterday on Christian radio that the gospel is this: Jesus died so that you can be with him forever in heaven. But Jesus doesn't describe the gospel just as heaven. He says, "I have come that you may have life. And have it to the full." He says, "It is not just later, but there is a Kingdom of God that you can enter into now, there's a life that is available now." A little humility will make us say, "You know what? Somewhere along the line we lost that. Let's get that back."

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November (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47