I Screwed Yesterday Up...Today is 195

Journey of Desire. The time has come for me to tell you what I thought. I literally finished three minutes ago and I have a lot on my mind about it. Keep in mind that I do not review books, so try not to dislike me too much if you have read this and disagree with me. I am also condensing 212 pages of text into four paragraphs, which by no means does the work justice, but I don't want to re-write the book either.

First, a general overview. It was written by John Elderidge, whom I suppose is a well known counselor and author. This book is set up in somewhat philosophical terms. He banks a lot on such writers/ thinkers as Pascal, T.S. Eliot, and C.S. Lewis, but he did a pretty good job of keeping his sources diversified. He also relied a TON on scripture, which was awesome, and it's interesting to read what people get from things that I may not pick up on.

Topic-wise, it's about...well...desire. The longings that each of us have as a result of whatever circumstances. A fair amount of time, about 3/4 of the book, is spent showing that desire is God-given, and shouldn't be fought like most people have learned to do since we often get discouraged by having our hopes thwarted by the world, or even God himself. Many people find "imposters," as Elderidge calls them, to fulfill these desires. For example, if a man wants intimacy, he could obviously turn to something like pornography and other types of sexual sin to feel the void that a lack of intimacy has left in his life. This is made pretty clear throughout the book, so there isn't any sort of confusion following this.

The whole point is that it's OK to have these desires. God gave them to us for a reason, and although we realize that due to the Fall as described in Genesis our attaining perfect life is just not going to happen, it's ok to pursue these desires, as long as the God-given desires do not take precedence over God himself. Elderidge ultimately comes to the conclusion that if we surrender our desires to God, he'll take you places you may not expect that may be ABOVE your desires. There's definitely an element of eternal perspective in this mixed in, knowing that following Christ is eventually going to mean paradise for eternity.

I'm a little shaky on the conclusion to which Elderidge comes, and to be honest I felt a little gyped, considering he told me something that I feel I already knew and have been told many times, though I am not sure I follow all the time. Through the whole thing, I felt like he was saying things I really identified with, and I'm thinking "Yeah! That's ME! Tell me what to do about it." And he did. And I didn't feel like I learned anything through his conclusion.

While I was a little bummed with his conclusion, I was really glad that I read this book. It helped me think. I basically have two HUGE desires for my life.

1.) Adventure. I need to see new things, to travel the world snowboarding, climbing, meeting new and different people. This is rather unrealistic due to monetary circumastances, I realize, but it's what I want. Badly. As much as I love Bellingham and can tolerate Vancouver and the Portland area, I will go crazy if I'm here forever.

2.) A girl with whom I can share my adventure. I just to think a golden retriever named Jasper and a Chevy full of gear would be all I needed to see this country. No. If I have to go through life without a wife, I will go crazy. There's no sense in denying this anymore.

SO. Thanks to some underlining that had been done (thanks, Mom. There were actually some points in the book that I wanted to break out my highlighter, which I decided against because I didn't want to wreck your book...) I was able to derive that a main point Elderidge was trying to make was "surrender." Not not caring. Nor was he trying to suggest giving up hope for something better. It's giving your desires to God, putting them in his hands, and watching him work with them, going where he takes you.

I can do that. I think. It's hard though.

There was one point at which I was slightly confused. Elderidge talked quite a bit about relationships and how many of us have given up hope of ever having one that works out the way it was designed to (I have now taken myself out of this category. I can't remember if I explicitly said that I was ever in it. I think it's day #169 or something that I talk about this in greater detail.) Of course, the author takes this moment to talk about sex and what it means, being a metaphor of eternal union with God (which kind of creeps me out in ways that I'll be happy to indulge within the privacy of an email.) It didn't seem to add to his main point.

Side note: while this didn't necessarily make sense to me, I have to say that I get this image of heaven being sort of an eternal worship service. Which...gonna be honest...sounds REALLY boring. I want to do things like go fast, climb things, jump off stuff, and so on without the side effect of getting hurt and aching all the time. I have visions of snapping my broken bones back into place and laughing hysterically at the fall I just took from 1500 feet climbing some crazy rock face without a harness. Who knows what heaven will be like. Anyway, the author brings this up, but doesn't really say anything to say it's not as boring as it sounds, probably because he's never been there and none of his friends who have have bothered report back (for good reason.) I was glad that he did mention it, but I had hoped he would talk more about it. Anyway.

That's a jumble of conclusions I came to. I don't know that I would recommend it highly as previously mentioned, but I would recommend it. It took the place of Mein Kampf in my reading, so now I should probably read the rest of that as well as my textbooks. Awww man!

Hopefully I can hike tomorrow.

Cheers.