Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

by John Eldredge

with the same generosity and care, God also filled the world with a renewable supply of something our souls need daily: beauty. Yes, beauty. The fact that our world is so saturated with beauty, breathtaking in so many ways great and small—this ought to let you know God feels it’s something you need for your survival. We are absolutely swimming in it.

But apart from the artist and poet, most people don’t intentionally pursue beauty as nourishment.

Beauty is one of the richest graces God has provided to heal our souls and absorb his goodness.

Beauty is so healing.

What sort of madness have we come to accept as normal when a One Minute Pause feels like a luxury?!

(It appears even the emoji is too much effort now; my friends have all resorted to replying to a text with a “like” exclamation point, or the equally banal “ha ha” instant reply device. This isn’t even communication; we are grunting at one another like cavemen.)

I wonder—how many situations that we would call “disappointments,” “hassles,” and “setbacks” might actually be the loving hand of God trying to slow us down for the sake of our souls, and so that we might receive him?

When planning events like holidays or vacations, or coming demands such as a memorial service we must attend, create a little space for the transition needed before and after. Especially after.

Efficiency is the “how” of life: how we meet and handle the demands of daily living, how we survive, grow, and create, how we deal with stress, how effective we are in our functional roles and activities.

Then I ran across a news release so shocking I had to read it twice. It didn’t make the front page, but it should have: the average person now spends 93 percent of their life indoors (this includes your transportation time in car, bus, or metro).2 Ninety-three percent—such a staggering piece of information. We should pause for a moment and let the tragedy sink in. That means if you live to be 100, you will have spent 93 of those years in a little compartment and only 7 outside in the dazzling, living world. If we live to the more usual 75, we will spend 69 and three-fourths of our years indoors, and only 5 and one-fourth outside.

Relief is momentary; it’s checking out, numbing, sedating yourself. Television is relief. Eating a bag of cookies is relief. Tequila is relief. And let’s be honest—relief is what we reach for because it’s immediate and usually within our grasp. Most of us turn there, when what we really need is restoration.

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

This isn’t a matter of Christian and non-Christian; the Self Life has a religious version. It gets irritated when a prayer time goes longer than we think it should, it feels wronged when church services run late, and it doesn’t particularly enjoy worship. The Self waits to be asked during small group how we are doing, and it feels righteously irritated when someone else takes too long talking about their life. The Self Life hasn’t given a thought about the return of Christ, because it’s totally focused on the here and now—making things work out now—and it’s quietly angry when people suggest our hopes should to be set on the life to come.

lost to me as I get sidetracked with, What the blazes is an Ebenezer? Why am I raising one? I don’t think I have one. Am I supposed to? Would I recognize one if I saw it? All the while I’m equally distracted by associations with good old Ebenezer Scrooge, which takes me further off on rabbit trails. This hymn refers to a story from the Old Testament, to one of those fabulous Lord of the Rings–type battles when it looked like Israel was about to be utterly massacred by a marauding army. But God intervened, and he intervened so mightily that the people of God ran their enemies all the way out of the country and then some. The prophet Samuel then “took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen. He named it Ebenezer, saying, ‘Thus far the Lord has helped us’” (1 Samuel 7:12). The point being, every time an Israelite passed that way again, they would see the stone and remember what God had done, remember how utterly faithful he is.

We forget who we are, we forget who God is, we forget what he has spoken to us, we forget we live in a world at war. The news rarely reports on the wonderful things God is doing in the world. Evil loves to make it seem like it’s winning, and it can feel that way if you spend time online.

I know I’ve been sucked back into the madness when I flinch at a request for any kind of help: the text of a friend asking for my time, the email seeking some counsel. Or when Stasi shares the report of friends in crisis and everything in me wants to pull away rather than move toward them. Or when I don’t even want to look at email, because I know there are demands waiting for me there. The flinch, wince, long hesitation, unhappy sigh; the avoidance, the inability to enter in—these are symptoms that we’re running on fumes again. Our capacity for relationship is such a wonderful gauge. We are created in the image of a profoundly relational God, created for relationship. Am I available for relationship? Not with everyone all the time of course—I’m not meaning the entire social network with no boundaries whatsoever, not 24/7 access.

Moseying allows you to practice something Dallas Willard felt was essential in this world: “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

You’re not failing because you need God again tomorrow. You’re not a spiritual disaster because you need so much more of him. This is the nature of things. We simply come and ask. “Give us today our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). We practice those things that bring us more of God.

It’s not about perfection; it’s not about being amazing. God is nowhere in the pressure to be amazing. He’s waiting in the simple dailies. Just keep putting into practice the things that heal your soul and bring you more of Jesus.