Wild At Heart Chapter 11

1. Wild At Heart Chapter 11 • An Adventure to Live • The place where God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. Frederick Buechner

2. John’s boyhood adventures 198-199 • There’s a faculty built into the human brain that makes every cliff seem twice the height when you are looking down from the top and everything in you says; • “don’t even think about it” • What are some of your “don’t even think about it” stories? • I want to live my whole life like that. I want to love with much more abandon and stop waiting for others to love me first.

3. I want to hurl myself into creative work worthy of God. To: • Charge the fields at Banockburn like Wallace • Follow Peter as he followed Christ out onto the sea • Pray from my heart’s true desire • Life is not a problem to be solved; it’s an adventure to live. • God made this world wild and dangerous called it “good” • He rigged the world in such a way that it only works when we embrace risk as a theme of our lives, which is to say, only when we live by faith.

4. A man just won’t be happy until he’s got adventure in his work, in his love and in his spiritual life. • What do you think about this?

5. Asking the right question 200 • God is intimately personal with us and he speaks in ways that are peculiar to our own quirky hearts- not just through the Bible, but through the whole of creation. • For some it may include: • Movies • Music (all kinds) • Nature • Friends • What about you? How does God speak to you?

6. God is calling us to come alive • “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive” Gil Bailie • John’s reply to this 201 • Can a world of posers tell to do anyhting but pose yourself? • Most men completely abandon their dreams and back down when the risk seems too great. • John’s choice 201-202

7. Two roads diverge in a wood and I, took the one less traveled by, and it made all the difference

8. What are you waiting for? 202 • Where would we be if: 202-203 • People hear voices all the time and who really knows whether it’s God’s or something else? • Most men spend the energy of their lives trying to eliminate risk or to to squeeze it down into a manageable size • Their children hear “no” much more than they do “yes” • Their employees feel chained up • And their wives are equally bound

9. If it works, if a man succeeds at securing his life from all risk, he will wind up in a cocoon of self protection and wondering all the while why he is suffocating. • If it does not work, he curses God, redoubles his effort and his blood pressure. • Our false self revolves around two themes: • Seizing upon some kind of competence • Rejecting anything that can not be controlled • You sacrifice your soul and your true power when you insist on controlling things. • Mark 8:36

10. You can lose your soul, by the way long before you die. • NCW movie clip • Rosie Little may be a madman, but he is also a genius. He knows the secret to a man’s heart, the cure for what ails him. • Too many men forsake their dreams because the are not willing to risk, or they fear they aren’t up to the challenge, or ar never told that those deep desires are good. • Little echoes that the soul of a man isn’t made for controlling things, he’s made for adventure.

11. Something in us remembers faintly that when God set man n this earth, He gave us an incredible mission- a charter to explore, build, conquer, and care for all creation. • God never revoked that charter • It’s still here waiting for each man to seize it. • If you had permission to do what you really want to do, what would you do? • Don’t ask “how”?- • This will cut your desire off at the knees. “How” is never the right question, how is a faithless question. • “How” means “unless I can see my way clearly, I won’t believe it, I won’t venture forth” • “How” is God’s department • Zechariah’s story

12. God is asking you “what” • What is written in your heart? • What makes you come alive? • If you could do what you always wanted to do, what would it be? • A man’s calling is written on his true heart, and he discovers it when, when he enters the frontier of his deep desires. • Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive, because what the world needs is men who have come alive.

13. There is a design God has woven into the fabric of this world, and if we violate it we cannot hope to find life. Because our hearts have strayed so far from home, He’s given us the Law as a sort of handrail to help us back from the precipice. • But the goal of Christian discipleship is the transformed heart; we move from a boy who needs the Law to a man who is able to live by the Spirit of the law. • Galatians 5:16, 23 • A man’s life becomes an adventure, the whole thing takes on a transcendent purpose when he releases control in exchange for recovery of the dreams in is heart.

14. How do we find the dreams of our heart? • We can pay attention to our desire. Often clues are in our past, in those moments when we found ourselves loving what we are doing. • Dale and Charles stories 207 • To recover his heart’s desire a man needs to get away from the noise and distraction of his daily life for time with his own soul. • Alone with himself, he allows whatever is there to come to the surface. • Sometimes it is grief for so much lost time.

15. Sometimes it even begins with temptation, when a man thinks that what will really make him come alive is something unholy. At that point he should ask himself “what is the desire beneath the desire? What is it I am wanting and that I think I will find here?” • Edgar Lee Masers quote 208

16. Into the Unknown 208 • “The spiritual life cannot be made suburban, it is always a frontier and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed” Howard Macey • The greatest obstacle to realizing our drams is the false self’s hatred of mystery and mystery is essential to adventure. • The most important aspects of any man’s world- his relationship with his God and with the people in his life, his calling the spiritual battles he will face- everyone of the is fraught with mystery.

17. Oswald Chambers quote 209 • There are no formulas with God • God is a Person, not a doctrine. • “The realm of God is dangerous” Archbishop Anthony Bloom • Joshua and the battle of Jericho 209 • Gideon 210 • Jesus’ healing of the blind • The problem with modern Christianity’s obsession with principles is that it removes any real conversation with God

18. Find the principle, apply the principle-what do you need God for? • “Never make a principle out of your experience; let God be as original with other people as he is with you” Oswald Chambers • IJ clip • Our adventure begins and our real strength is released when we no longer rely on formulas. • When it comes to living and love, what’s required is a willingness to jump in with both feet and be creative as you go. • John’s return home story 211

19. A woman does not want to be related to with formulas, she does not want to be treated like a project to be solved. She wants to be known. • The same will hold true to the spiritual battles we face. We must face the enemy creatively with God’s help. • Allies French story 212 • We are also in the midst of battle without the training we really need, and there are few men around to show us how to do it. We are going to have to figure a lot of this out for ourselves. • We know how to be nice, we need to know how to fight, and we will have to learn as we go.

20. That is where our strength will be, crystallized, deepened and revealed. • A man is never more a man than when he embraces an adventure beyond his control, or when he walks into a battle he isn’t sure of winning. • When have you experienced this?

21. From Formula to Relationship 213 • This is not irresponsibility 213 • Our false self demands a formula before he will engage, he wants a guarantee of success, in in this are you will not get one. • There comes a time in a man’s life when he’s got to break away from all that and head off into the unknown with God. • If we balk here the journey ends • God and Adam 213 • God did not abandon Adam.

22. God offered Adam friendship • That is what God is offering us as well • Oswald Chambers quote 214 • The only way to live this adventure- with all it’s danger and unpredictability and immensly high stakes, is an ongoing intimate relationship with God. • The control we crave is an illusion, it is better to give it up in exchange for God’s offer of companionship, set aside stale formulas so that we can enter into an informal friendship. • Abraham, Moses and David's relationship with God 214-215

23. Jesus said “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I call you friends, for everything that I learned from my father I have made known to you” John 15:15 • God calls you to be his friend, He wants to talk to you personally and frequently. • Our whole journey into authentic masculinity centers around those talks with God. • Simple questions change hassles to adventures; the events of our lives become opportunities for initiation.

24. “What are you trying to teach me here, God?” • “What are you asking me to do?” • “What are you asking me to let go of ?” • “What in my heart are you speaking to ?”

25. Further up and further in 216 • John’s desire to climb • We have desires in our hearts that are core to who and what we are, they are almost mythic in their meaning, waking us to something transcendent and eternal. • We can be mistaken about how these will be lived out • The way God fulfills a desire may be different from what first awakened it. • John’s desire revisited • Next time Chapter 12 Writing the Next Chapter