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

by John Eldredge

So I began to write out a list of losses and disappointments from the past eighteen months. It wasn’t at all heavy or dark; it was cathartic. The relief in simply naming things was palpable. For the grief, or disappointment, or sadness is in there, recognized or not, and it takes a lot of energy to keep it below the surface. Letting it rise, naming its sources, is relieving. That beach ball we’ve been trying to hold underwater gets to pop up, and we don’t have to suppress it anymore.

needed to give up stimulants. Nicotine, caffeine, sugar—all those things we use to prop up our daily happiness will, over time, burn out the soul. Because the soul can’t always be “on.”

By contrast, the “graces” in this book are designed to help your soul come down from hypervigilant mode, or constant distraction, or the dopamine “loop”—whatever you are caught in. This allows your body, brain, and soul to calm down, to find Christ again.

My friends, I really don’t want to be the unwelcome prophet, but the fact is this: life is not going to get better on this planet. It’s going to get worse before it gets better; all signs indicate it’s getting worse at an alarming rate. “If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses? If you stumble in safe country, how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?” (Jeremiah 12:5). In other words, if you think this is hard, wait’ll you see what’s coming next. We’re going to want our souls strong and ready for the days ahead, filled with God, not fried and empty. So we must practice soul care.

Just begin to name your losses; write them down. What was lost—a friendship, a hope, an opportunity that might have shaped your future? It’s so important to name it.

Better still, I encourage you to write it down.)

Then what? Allow your soul to feel. Don’t tell it what to feel; it knows what to do. Just give it permission. It might be anger at first, or it might be sadness, loneliness, why bother? You might find yourself shouting some profanities—that’s okay. Your losses matter. Don’t edit yourself into silence.

The next step is to invite Jesus in. Invite his love, his comfort, his presence into this specific loss, for his presence brings mercy and healing. I find it important to ask, “What do you have to say about this, God? What are you saying to me about my losses?” His comforting words of interpretation, or promise, are part of the healing.

name this loss because it is loss—tragic, sweeping, and expansive. Your entire life, every dear moment, is currently being swept downstream from you even as you read this sentence. It does such harm to the soul and our life with God. All good things come to an end. I hate that phrase, hate it like the sound of sirens, the sound of dirt falling on a casket. Lest we despair, God has given us “a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11 nlt) and to be quite specific, it includes the restoration of every precious day of our lives. Heaven is not a memory wipe. It is the time and capacity to truly relish the story of our lives, to see the hand of God in it all (how many times angels rescued you), to be vindicated, and even rewarded. “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?” The King will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:37–40). Notice that this promise cannot be fulfilled unless our stories are known, down to the smallest details.

Unplugging helps because the war on our attention—that daily barrage of input and media, the constant fire hose of “stuff” from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Yahoo, and YouTube, plus the news and the texts you receive and email and memos at work—wages a war on our souls, and one of the immediate casualties is belief. 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. Pulling out to focus on Jesus and fix our eyes on him is healing for belief.

The great danger for sincere people is rather surprising: “Be a good woman; be a good man.” It is dangerous, not because it seems like the virtuous path, but because we’re still living from our own resources. “Apart from me,” Jesus warned his closest friends, “you can do nothing” (John 15:5). He said that as he was explaining the vine-branch relationship. We are cut flowers, dear reader. We need more than a vase; we need to be grafted into a vine. And so union with God, oneness of being, ought to be what we crave, what we pray for, a central part of our language, the main thing we seek.

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?

When I read that, I thought, I miss my soul. The world is changing our habits and routines; we need to push back. So enjoying a book or magazine has become an act of self-defense. As is time to enjoy making, and lingering, over dinner. Several times a week. Honestly, simply the ability to enjoy anything is a good sign to watch for.

Augustine described the whole life of the Christian as a holy longing. Your heart is going to grow for the kingdom, more and more as you mature, which allows us to receive more and more of God and enjoy so much more of the life he’s giving. But this can be very disorienting if you don’t understand what’s taking place within you. Just as you reach a place where you feel satisfied, it seems you need more. That’s because your soul is expanding, which is a very good thing.

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.

The enemy is frankly happy to leave them in that place. Just wear humanity down, push them into the shallows, make it so they can’t possibly give God their attention and receive his graces. In that haggard, famished condition, he can then present the false gods that will bind them forever. Dear friends, I hope you see clearly now that more of God is our greatest need, our greatest joy, our only rescue. This isn’t optional. He’s the source of the strength and resiliency we need for this hour, the Life that allows us to enjoy everything else in life.