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Waking The Dead-John Eldredge

Ash Wednesday of 2020 was when I began to crawl in my first steps toward full-fledged Christianity.

I had been toying with giving up drinking for an extended period and Pastor Tom's sermon that evening was enough to convince me to go all in. So I did and went the full 40+ days of Lent without a drop of alcohol reaching my palate.
*I enjoyed that experience so much that, in the following years, I willfully pushed it beyond the parameters of lent and into early summer.*

Shortly after that, the Covid-19 virus hit, and everything shut down.

It was during this time of ample opportunity to indulge in hobbies that I began to explore the reasoning behind my self-imposed abstinence.

Why was attempting to match Christ's sacrifice so important?

What does it mean to be a Christian?

What does God expect from me if I deliver myself over to him?

What is to be expected of me going forward after "turning the leaf"?

These were all questions that began to spring up. The answers I found shortly thereafter in The Bible and various other books inspired by scripture. The advice was like an avalanche and I tried my best to absorb every flake that came into my consciousness.

It was like beginning a new adventure with both excitement and nervousness doing battle in my belly. I couldn't wait to spread the good news—but was also worried about how reactive I would be to the inevitable pushback from non-believers who would more or less look at me as if, frankly, that I had lost my marbles.

Four years later—after many, many hours of study and hands-on experience—I am proud to say that I believe that I have found a happy medium in my Christian life that balances out day-to-day living and tempers the duality.

My anticipation of the future is with goggles that are 75% optimistic and (realistically) with 25% worry. Empathy overwhelms apathy. Self-discipline generally lands in the field of 65% personal satisfaction. My relationship with God—despite multiple opportunities to levy a case against him—has never wavered beyond absolute trust and love. Words like "regret" and "luck" have disappeared from my lexicon. Bone-headed mistakes made in the present are kept at a minimum and the ones that sneak past the goal line don't beat me up too badly inside. My gratitude for blessings is on full blast every day and a majority of the hurdles in the future I genuinely have confidence in my faith to carry me through. I don't stew around wishing for my enemies to fail, give generously of both my time and resources to the needy, and make it a habit to stuff coal into the engines of edification trains more often than I hop aboard slander wagons.

These factors don't just happen overnight and are not trumpeted out on this platform as a means of self-aggrandizing, but are only included to kind of drink in the arduous length of the journey and the litany of successful attributes that I have picked up along the way.

It hasn't been without its challenges.

Despite my whole-hearted embracement of Christian living, at the end of the day, the sobering fact never fails to await you: the world doesn't care.

While I pray away at church, the rivers and streams of a Godless world still rush forth to eddy folks into an infinite whirlpool of sin. Where condemnation of others is encouraged, lust lurks around every bend, self-destruction of the vessel is seen as normal, and any investment into the betterment of one's soul is regarded as time wasted pursuing a laughable activity.

It isn't too hard to get whisked away from this life and swept back into the fold of sin. To build upon this sentiment, I would have to say that it is actually difficult to avoid being caught in the currents. And once you get locked in the momentum, the pain can be ten times worse than it once was.

And this is where a book like Waking The Dead can work its magic the best.

One of the unforeseen obstacles of Christianity I found was the self-abasement that follows when I would slip back into sin. The sin itself could be any act, it was the inner castigation that would follow that I found to be exceptionally harsh. Amplified. It's as if the courtroom of your belly bellows oxygen into the flames of its sensitivity to mistakes and dishes out penalties that are far more severe than when you lived life by the dictations of the flesh. The reasoning behind this is that, before, when you were a full-blown disregarding sinner, it was easy to excuse the absence of guilt because you didn't know any better. But now that you do know, and instead decide to forsake God's plan for that of your own, even if just for a temporary sliver of time, there is now hell to pay for all mistakes.

Mathew 24:42-50 (among many other passages) warns specifically against this transgression. And, perhaps, the sudden onslaught of inner rot and degradation may very well be the intended effect of sin when it is inflicted upon an aspiring saint. Like raw vinegar upon the tongue.

While I don't dispute the fact that we as Christians are held to a higher regard with the blessing of knowledge that we have received, I don't believe, via intuitively in my belly or deep within the most intimate cavity of my heart of hearts, that once you establish a relationship with God, that he demands life to be lived on a dental floss tight-rope.

Not only is it completely non-sensical to impose such illogical demands upon yourself—to live without falling into future sin. It completely abandons the most fundamental bedrock of Christianity's foundation for living: Through Christ, we are saved from sin!

It was this exact emphasis of focus on the former facts of life—that we are fallen sinners undeserving of God's acknowledgment—that pushed me away from Catholicism and into the arms of a Church (or, Churches) that embrace the latter concept, and embrace the fact that we are saved.

*I find the cavernous, low-lit, monolithic, and stony cathedrals of Catholic churches with their rudimentary methods of worship to be rather depressing. Some folks may find strength in their tether to God from one hour straight of melancholy kneeling and the morose recitals of ritualistic scripture reading. But that sort of worship is just not for me.*

In Waking The Dead, John Eldredge expands upon the false notion that, just because we've given ourselves over to Christ, doesn't mean that we are no longer subject to sin, and digs deep into what causes faith to fall into a state of plateau (hence the name).

I couldn't agree more with John's eloquently penned notion that, although we are and will continue to live as sinners, striving to live a life in obedience to the Father should not be based upon the fear that he is itching to condemn us, but as a common exchange of love for one another.

Abstaining from slander should not be an obedient nuisance bred from a fear that we will offend God with our hurtful remarks, but stem from His wish for us to love one another as He loves us. Saving sex for its proper compartment of marriage and abstaining from lust in all of its capacities should not be refrained begrudgingly, but out of common allegiance to the fact that God loves us so much that He granted us the gift of sex and love and wishes for us to experience it at its most potent apex.

Somewhere along the way the message of God's love for his children became so misconstrued that saints began to perceive him as this vengeful entity scribbling transgression after transgression upon a ledger, itching for us to reach a certain point just so he could relinquish his unbridled fury and punish us for the horrible little miscreants that we always were.

That is not at all true.

God loves you.

I'll say it again; God loves you more than you will ever know.
The fact that you are reading that sentence right now is fact enough of the matter. And if you've already surpassed this hurdle of accepting his grace, then look back and consider the incomprehensible depth of his lovingkindness for you when you were at your lowest. He saw something in me and you when we failed to see it in ourselves. What makes you think that once you've gotten this far along he's more apt to throw in the towel on us for our mistakes?

I know this review was overly digressive, but I hope it drives home the point of the book and what I was able to take away from it. There is far more between the pages than what I brushed upon, but this one was a serious banger and one that I highly recommend to anyone, especially those struggling with self-loathing.

Christian living, despite the widely accepted perception, is not a 24/7 stroll through strawberry fields while munching on cotton candy bereft of worry. It's got its obstacles just like any other method of living. And this book helps to get around a tremendous one.

Grade: A+

Verdict: Read

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