• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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A few months ago Jamaica gave me a copy of John Eldredge’s book, The Journey of Desire. She already knew I wasn’t a big fan of Eldredge from back when I tried to read his Wild at Heart. I couldn’t get through the first couple chapters without feeling bored or neutered. John is a man’s man and I am not. I can’t relate to camping stories and fishermen tales. I don’t really care to either.

Nonetheless, I told Jamaica I would read this one. She was really inspired by the quantity and quality of quotes that Eldredge incorporates into Desire, and she wanted me to share in the inspiration.

After a bumpy beginning–three pages into the book and I’m already hiking and swimming with John in the Tetons–I knew the next 209 would be a challenge. Three months later I made it to the end and I’m glad I did.

The Journey of Desire boils down to this:

• We are desire.

• Absolutely nothing of human greatness is ever accomplished with it.
• Desire fuels our search for the life we prize.
• We must go into our desire if we are to meet God.

Unpacking the above took me on a journey of patient redundancy, but I found some treasure. All quotations that follow are from John Eldredge unless otherwise noted.

“Those who would kill the passion altogether would murder the very essence that makes heroes of the faith.”

“Why are we so embarrassed by our desire?”

“Without a deep and burning desire of our own, we will be ruled by the desires of others.”

“It hasn’t taken us long to realize that life is not going to offer what we truly want, and so we’ve learned to reduce our desires to a more manageable size. But let’s be honest about what we’ve done, and call it what it is: sin.”

“The danger of disowning desire is that it sets us up for a fall.”

“The deadened soul requires a greater and greater level of stimulation to arouse it.”

G.K. Chesteron on how we’ve tamed the desires of Jesus:

Instead of looking at the books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with His hair parted in the middle or His hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild scenery of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who acted like an angry god–and always like a god … The diction used about Christ has been … sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled in the sea. (Orthodoxy)

Living a life without desire–yet wanting life to be so great–is ludicrous. C.S. Lewis says it this way, “We castrate the gelding and bid him be fruitful.”

“Our prayers are cordial, modest, even reverent. Eugene Peterson calls them ‘cut-flower prayers.’”

Maybe we should stop asking God what he wants all the time and instead have an answer for God when he asks, “What do you want?”

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