episode
144
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Spiritual Wholeness

Healing the Soul Through Encounters with Jesus Featuring John Eldredge

Episode Notes

In this profoundly insightful episode, Dr. Alison explores the often overlooked "young places" within our souls with John Eldredge, New York Times bestselling author, counselor, and the author of the new book "Experience Jesus. Really." Together, they explore how these inner areas of wounding can lead to transformative encounters with Jesus, providing opportunities for deeper healing through experiencing God’s loving presence.

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Here’s what we cover:‍

*John's challenge to move past our over-reliance on left-brain thinking

*The surprising ways God beckons our souls toward healing

*A powerful example of how Jesus responds to young parts carrying trauma

*The critical mistake many make when seeking healing

*Why John believes we are all like amphibians

*The difference between the illusion of security and the reality of safety

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Resources:

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If you liked this, you’ll love:
  • Episode 76: When Self-Help Isn’t Enough—Finding the Faith & Strength to Move Forward after Loss & Heartache With Granger Smith

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‍Thanks to our sponsors:

Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik

© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.‍

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Transcript:

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Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so thrilled you're here for this episode, because we are diving into something that honestly, I couldn't stop thinking about.

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You know when you have those moments when you come across an idea, or you're reading a book, and it starts to connect a whole bunch of dots? In this case, it began to pull together a bunch of different threads from my own life.

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That's exactly what happened as I was reading today's guest’s book, all the way to the very end, when he actually mentions the internal family systems model, which I was shocked by. I didn't know that this author was familiar with that model and there were definitely threads of that throughout this book.

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Now, if you've been around this podcast for a while, we talk a lot about internal family systems, IFS. If you're new to the podcast, this is a powerful way of understanding the different parts of ourselves and how these different parts of us shape our behaviors, our emotions, and are often a huge part of our healing, of becoming more integrated and becoming more whole.

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It's the topic of my first book that I wrote with Kimberly Miller called Boundaries For Your Soul. Today, to my surprise, my guest and I ended up taking that conversation into the intersection of IFS with mysticism. 

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Now, mysticism can sound like this lofty word that's reserved for saints who go out into the desert for weeks without food or whatever image you have in your mind about that word. It's really a way of describing a deeper, more experiential, more deeply intimate side of our faith. 

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As my guest will share with us today, it's how he believes we all should be living in this world as children of God. I had no idea until John and I started talking that the way I personally experienced IFS was what he describes as a form of mysticism. This conversation was really fun. 

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I have to admit, when I listened back to it for the first time, I felt a little embarrassed or a little chagrined because I talk a lot in this episode. I couldn't help myself. John's book resonated so deeply with different parts of my own story. He comes at these topics from a different angle, but we wind up at very similar places.

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I found so many overlaps that I wanted to have this conversation with him as two people who have been circling around different wells and arriving at some similar themes from different places. It was a really fun conversation for me to have with John. 

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I really hope you will find it enjoyable as well. I promise you, though, if you're someone who came to this podcast because of my work in Boundaries for Your Soul, you'll be fascinated by this episode. Or if you're someone who has felt stuck in overanalyzing your faith where there's this divide between what you believe and what you know to be true in your mind, and what you experience in your heart, I really think this episode and John's newest book is going to speak to you.

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So let me introduce you to today's guest. I don't think he is new to most of you. John Eldredge is a New York Times bestselling author. He's a counselor and a teacher who has spent decades helping people recover their hearts and encounter the presence of God in a deeply personal way.

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You may know him from his book, The Sacred Romance, which is how I was first introduced to his work, but today we're talking about his latest book, where he invites us to reclaim an ancient way of connecting with God. 

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Not through self help formulas or mental gymnastics, or trying to will ourselves into believing certain things that we don't really feel, but instead through the life of what John calls “the ordinary mystic”. The book is called Experience Jesus. Really: Finding Refuge, Strength, and Wonder through Everyday Encounters with God

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We talk about why so many of us have lost touch with wonder and mystery and deep personal encounters with God, and how our modern world often keeps us stuck in left brain pragmatism. We also talk about how reclaiming this connection with Jesus isn't for a select few–it's actually how God designed us to live. 

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Please stick around to the end of our conversation, because John shares a simple but profound practice that can help you start experiencing this shift in your own life today. It's something I wasn't expecting, and it left me thinking about my own faith and how I relate to God in a new way. 

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I cannot wait for you to hear this conversation. Please enjoy my conversation with John Eldredge.

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Alison Cook: John, I am so thrilled to get to meet you for the first time and to have you on the podcast today. Thank you so much for being here. I'm surprised that this is our first meeting, given the similarity of our work. So I feel like I'm meeting a friend. 

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John Eldredge: I feel the same. I've known your work for a long time and you've informed a lot of my own thinking from early on, when I was trying to figure out how to bring together faith with psychology. You were one of those early voices, really trying to help us understand the inner work from that faithful perspective.

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Alison Cook: I'm really grateful for you and grateful to talk to you about this new book. Man, it intersects with much of my life in so many ways. I'm thrilled to have this conversation with you.

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John Eldredge: Great. Me too.

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Alison Cook: The focus of your new book, John, is on what you call ordinary mysticism. I was laughing as we're getting ready to record, because most of my favorite saints are right behind us, which is not the way it normally is. I didn't plan that.

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You are really bringing to life some of these beautiful thinkers from the past. I want to tell the listener, there are some really neat intersections with what John's doing in this book and with parts work in IFS, which we talk a lot about on the podcast.

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We're going to get to that, but before we get there, I would love for you to talk about what you refer to as this discipleship we have to the internet, to pragmatism, this self-help gospel. The antidote to it is so surprising. You really had me in those first pages. You lay out the problem and you're like, here's my surprising offering to you. Tell us a little bit about what you're trying to do with the book.

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John Eldredge: Yeah. Alison, if I were to tell you, hey, prayer is really important, you would go, sure. If I were to tell you, hey, I saw this study that shows the neuroscience of these nuns and how prayer shaped them over time, you would go, oh, that's so cool. We are such disciples of the internet. We've been trained. 

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None of us meant this to happen to us. It is the world we grew up in. We believe that the latest science is the coolest thing in the world. We believe that you can get to the bottom of any mystery. You can uncover any cover-up.

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We also have come to fear and distrust anything that's right-brained, anything that's intuitive, that is apprehending truth through a means other than reason. Immediately our reaction is, that's the scary stuff. But the problem is, we are weary from this way of life. We are all such pragmatists and materialists. 

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Meanwhile, the soul is starving for the rest of God and for the rest of reality. So the surprise that you alluded to is the way out of the current madness. And it is to become an ordinary mystic.

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Alison Cook: I love it. It captures me, because it's not a five step plan. I intellectually know that five step plans rarely work, but I've been so conditioned by our culture, to your point. In your book, you're really taking us back into this way of being that has become so foreign to us. Tell us a little bit, what do you mean by an ordinary mystic?

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John Eldredge: Yeah. It’s foreign to us at this current moment. You don't realize what a hostage you are to this moment. This is normative. If you read the lives of the saints down through the ages, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, if you read the lives of these beautiful women and men, there is a common theme of a rich experience of Jesus.

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And there is a way into that. It's almost by saying to yourself, I'm going to become an ordinary mystic. I'm not going to fear mystery, I'm going to embrace it. I'm not going to insist that God answer me like the internet does in 0.003 seconds.

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Our soul has been so conditioned to immediate responses. We want to make God practical, just give me the three steps, show me how it works. I'm going to say, you know what? Go right brain. I'm going to wait, drop into an openness to experiencing God apart from the pragmatic, and see what happens.

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Alison Cook: Okay, so I love this. You talk about this in the book, that this is a problem not only in the scientific rational world, but it has infiltrated the church world, where we need the steps and our pat answers. I've experienced it in both. When I started my doctoral work at the University of Denver in counseling psychology, we were studying statistics.

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We're studying ANOVA, MANOVA, we're doing design studies, and I didn't mind it. The left brain part of me was like, this is interesting, but I was like, how is this going to help me heal humans? It's that gap in the educational process. I switched my degree, which in some ways made it harder for me to practice, because I switched to a joint degree in psychology and religious studies.

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This is where I began to get more into what you're describing, this kind of less utilitarian, less quantifiable understanding of God and of myself. But that kind of took me out of the realm of psychology. And I entered the field of psychology, John, because I loved the human soul, the psyche, the beauty of the God-made soul.

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I couldn't figure out how to find that in an institution of higher learning. Now, it's changed a little bit, and I began to really love IFS when I was introduced to it later. So it's in our training, it's in our institutions, but tell me how you also see it in some of our church culture.

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John Eldredge: It's baked into church life for most people now. You take the average marriage conference in churches, and they are trying so hard to make it quick. They don't ask people for a lot of time. We're gonna do it on Saturday morning, and we try to make it practical. 

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If it's not practical, we can't get people to attend. So we're going to give you the tools, that's the language, to a better marriage, and it ends up missing all of the romance, the intuitive non-verbals, of an actual happy marriage. We're trying to fix it like you're fixing your car.

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We are utterly enchanted with the latest science, the left brain, the practical. You were talking about healing souls–the soul is healed through union with Christ. If we are not leading people in their particular trauma into union with Christ, we can't heal their souls.

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Alison Cook: It's experiential, that encounter.

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John Eldredge: Yep. It’s an encounter. You and I have had clients who could tell you all about their eating disorder.

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Alison Cook: All their diagnoses.

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John Eldredge: Yes, they've got all the language, the latest jargon, and they're no better. There are these little epiphanies, folks, and one of them is, understanding does not equal restoration. Clarity does not equal healing.

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Alison Cook: That's good. That's the left brain. I can have all the knowledge in the world, but it doesn't translate into the soul and bring me into that encounter with Christ. I had mentioned to you, this has been such a great week for me, a beautiful gift of a week, because I got to interview Dan Allender yesterday and I know you guys are good friends. 

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I got to read both of your books, and here's what's interesting. I want to try to put it into words. He tells stories from his own marriage. There's very little “how-to”. You tell story after story of these mystics. You tell stories of how it shows up in our ordinary lives, in nature, through the thrill of adventure. 

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I feel it in my being, and you definitely give us practical ways to approach this for sure, but I feel it. So even in your writing, you're doing what it is that you're trying to teach us. You're showing us, this is a different way. I really loved that.

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John Eldredge: Yeah. You know what this is, Alison? This is like, the number of studies…and here I go. I have to do the studies. This is our lingua franca. It's the highly urbanized children who literally don't know what a duck is, or a turtle, and the level of deprivation of an experience of nature that they were created for is so profound. 

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So we're not talking about optional things here, not saying this is for some people, but not for others. God created a world in which everything has its habitat. Penguins want cold icy water, and hummingbirds love colorful gardens. The human soul is literally meant to live within the habitat of God, to dwell within the refuge of the Most High. 

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But also to be saturated with the presence of God. Most people are like a child who's never heard of a turtle. What's that? That's how low our baseline has fallen. This is normative.

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Alison Cook: Wow. Yeah, I see what you're saying. It's like we're fish made for water and we don't even know what water is.

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John Eldredge: Exactly. And rather than telling you about water, I take you there and throw you in it.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. It's like, wait, what is happening here? This is a different experience. It's beautiful. Yeah. It's not that science is bad. I want to put that out here. Gosh, it can be so helpful to, like you said, cite a study or to understand. That's a part of the whole, but it is not the whole, it is a part of it. It's not the end.

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John Eldredge: Yes. The mind is a beautiful instrument, but it was actually never meant to be the center of our life. 

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Alison Cook: So good.

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John Eldredge: The heart is the center of your life. That's why God put it in the center of your body. The heart is the new tabernacle. The heart is the dwelling place of God. To live purely in the mind, or mostly for the mind, or to mostly only trust the mind, you are depriving your heart of oxygen, the lovely presence of God that human beings need to live and flourish by.

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Alison Cook: Yeah. I love this. So you're painting a picture. We've got to find our way back. I'm going to ask the million dollar question: how do we do it? It starts with recognizing this longing in our hearts. You talk in the book about how children inherently understand this. What do we have to learn from children, and how do we reclaim that?

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John Eldredge: I'm gonna say something that might need some unpacking. Friends, you are using your resistance to mystery, you are using your fear of encounter, you are using your insistence on the pragmatic as self-defense. What was the invitation? Unless you become like a little child, you won't enter the kingdom of God. 

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He's saying, look, all of that cynicism that you learn by adulthood, the instinctive mistrust and the default pragmatism, he says, you got to let all that go. We all do it as self-protection. You're going to have to lay that down and open the heart up to believe again, and to wonder. 

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What Jesus is saying is, you can do it. You can do it. It's okay. You can do this. It's actually possible.

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Alison Cook: Okay. Everything you're saying is sending off all these bells in my mind. When I was in this doctoral program, years in my left brain, I started to have a lot of anxiety. This was in my early thirties, and I had to take time away. It sounds woo-woo, and this is sometimes challenging for Christians, but there was this deep thing inside of me.

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I understand it now, but at the time it was like, I want to act, I want to be in a play, and the idea was, I wanted to play, and for some reason, because I was so at rock bottom, I couldn't stop having panic attacks. Everything I'd been trying with my left brain had failed me. It created, in IFS terms, that exiled child in me that used to love to play dress up and be silly and create and not have to have a reason for doing things.

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So I signed up and took an acting class and I reconnected with that imagination. It was therapeutic. Here's the thing, John, that's so interesting for our field. At the time, I went to a therapist, and not all therapists do this, but they kept me in my left brain.

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This cognitive behavior, it was all the rage back then. It didn't help me. I was like, I can tell you all the rational things. It was that acting class where I began to find my heart, to your point. It brings tears to my eyes, because at the time I felt like I didn't know how to make sense of that in my Christian context.

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I knew it was okay before God. But I didn't know how to talk about that, either in my academic community nor in my Christian context. I knew it was what I needed.

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John Eldredge: Isn't that beautiful? The soul will find a way.

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Alison Cook: Yes!

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John Eldredge: That's what's so lovely. Listen to your soul folks. It will tell you a lot about how you're doing, and what you need. Give your heart a voice. Yeah, that's beautiful. That's a big piece of it we want to add to the conversation. God has been healing human souls for thousands of years, before any of the latest science. 

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Right now, we're discovering many beautiful things. I'm super grateful for science. Like, my goodness. I look stuff up, I'm like any other person–I use Google. But God has been healing human souls for thousands of years, and he's really good at it.

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There is a simplicity to the life of the ordinary mystic that will bring you the healing that you're seeking. There is a life that is available. It's not about taking on more activity. John Eldredge has a new program for you! God help us, we've all tried it. Instead, it is a different way of apprehending God that the saints knew, down through the ages.

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Alison Cook: How have you come to inhabit this life of the ordinary mystic? What are some key moments where you began to really realize, oh, this is the way? 

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John Eldredge: The primary place has been in healing human souls. Because we began to encounter things that were outside our training–for example, spiritual darkness and the presence of evil, in people who were not former occult members or that sort of thing. You go, wait a second. 

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There is an unseen realm that is thwarting this dear soul's recovery. We need to learn about that. That would be one thing. Another is this very simple, beautiful practice of learning to hear the voice of God. Dallas Willard, who many of us respect and have learned so much from, an absolutely brilliant guy, maybe the smartest man of the 20th century, he wrote many books. 

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In his very first book, he chose to start with a book on hearing the voice of God, because he thought it was so essential to navigating your life, navigating a very complex world.

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So as we began to listen, and oftentimes this would be in work with people, Jesus would gently say, ask them about the parakeet. I'd be like, no way man. That's woo-woo, that is crazy stuff. He's like, trust me. And I'd say okay, tell me about the parakeet, and they're bawling. At three, four years old, the death of the parakeet that their dad raged at. 

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Boom, we were at something that would have taken us a year to find. It was learning to hear the voice of Jesus and dealing with the unseen realm.

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The third thing, and this will get us right into parts stuff, we also began to encounter young places within people, and going wait a second, they don't need left-brain cognitive therapy, they need reintegration. As we would invite Jesus into that, some of the most extraordinary experiences began to take place that were absolutely breathtaking.

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The human soul is a lovely thing, and God is really great at healing it. Why don't we get him more involved in this process here?

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Alison Cook: Yes. So this is where our work dovetails. When Kim and I, my coauthor, were writing Boundaries for Your Soul, we wanted to honor the IFS model, the idea of parts, but we made two key changes to the model. Dick Schwartz, he did bless us, he did sign off on it, which we're grateful for, but he talks about the Self as being the agent of healing.

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We call it the Spirit-led self. It's the place inside where the Holy Spirit, John 14, comes to live. That is where we connect with the power of God inside our souls. So number one, that the parts are connecting with that Spirit-led place. 

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And then we added a step; you're not just focusing on the parts and learning about the parts–you're inviting Jesus in. We added that third step. Invite Jesus to be near the part and see what happens. To what you're saying in your book, it's fascinating what happens when we find those young places.

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It's beyond what our left brain, what our best skills, could come up with. So I really loved that in the book. That was what was transformational to me. I never thought about it this way, but it brought me back into that inner mystic. You say in the book that children are little mystics.

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John Eldredge: They are. 

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Alison Cook: I love that. Tell me more about that.

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John Eldredge: Stace, my wife, took two of our grandchildren to Peter Pan this weekend, and there's the part at which Tinkerbell is dying and you need to clap. Everybody, you need to clap to bring Tinkerbell back to life. Our four year old grandson, with all his heart, is absolutely clapping and clapping and clapping, because he is not going to let Tinkerbell die on his watch. 

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Here is the capacity to believe, the capacity to trust the unseen, the capacity to enjoy something you don't need to understand. You can actually enjoy things, folks, that you don't fully understand. This is how you love any person in your life, by the way. You can enjoy them without figuring out why they're so quirky.

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Children don't have the cynicism yet, they don't have the suspicion, the “prove it to me” attitude. There's an openness to belief and to wonder. So yeah, inviting Jesus in. Saint John of the Cross, as he writes some of his poetry about the intimacy of the soul with Christ, it sounds like parts work

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Alison Cook: Oh wow. 

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John Eldredge: This is 500 years ago. Yes. You read the saints and you go, oh, they were coming in through the doorway of intimacy with God, and in that intimacy, they found the healing of their souls.

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That's Isaiah 61. Revelation 3. I stand at the door and knock if you let me in.

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Alison Cook: Yeah, it's David: I've learned to wean my soul like a child within me.

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John Eldredge: Yes. He says, have mercy on me Lord and deliver me for my heart is wounded within me. He's inviting what the old saints called “consolation of God” into his wounded soul. It heals. And the more that we pay attention, the more we can experience Jesus showing up in a playful way on some days, in a very serious way on other days. 

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Sometimes he will show you something. For me, this has been going on at home in the last couple of weeks. It's been going on around four in the morning. He's been waking me up, and I call it “before the internal editor is on”. Your heart is more open. He's been putting his finger on things. 

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John, that fear, we need to go there together. Let's walk into this part of your soul together. I've been having this exquisite healing of my soul lying there in the dark at 4am. That's the life of the ordinary mystic. I don't fully have to explain it. I don't have to justify it. I can tell you it's 100 percent real.

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Alison Cook: I get it. It sounds revolutionary, but actually, this is the way it's been. This is the way it's been. I love the way you phrase that we go there together, where there's a with-ness to it.

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John Eldredge: Yes, very much so, because the mistake that many people make is they ask God to heal their soul from a distance. And that doesn't work.

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Alison Cook: Okay. So this was exactly where I wanted to go with this. Tell me what you mean by that.

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John Eldredge: The door opens from the inside. Jesus will never ever kick the door in. He doesn't do it. You see this. He'll let people go 30, 40 years in their rage, or their addiction, or whatever. He won't crash the door down, because he's very gentle with human souls. You have to go there in your soul and open the door from the inside, to ask Jesus to walk in. Together, you take the healing journey.

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Alison Cook: Okay. This is to your point about the heart being at the center. Being someone who can really go into my left brain, what I got from this as I was reading your book, and it was so funny even reading, because this is not a book one can read with just their left brain.

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It's beautifully constructed–it's an experience in and of itself. You're going into those places as you read. It's beautiful. It's a gift. I was thinking, early in my Christian walk, I theologically knew a lot of knowledge. I loved God. There was an experiential, emotional component, but I experienced it as inviting God in from the outside.

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But what you said, that's it. We actually have to go into the broken place itself, which means we have to feel it, which means we have to go into the fear, into the pain, into the wound, into the brokenness, and invite Jesus in from the inside. That's powerful.

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John Eldredge: Yes. Stay present to him while he does the healing work, because then he will usually begin asking us questions. He'll often start with young places. He usually asks the young parts, what are you feeling? He gives them a voice because older us has been exiling them for decades.

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Alison Cook: Shaming them.

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John Eldredge: Yeah. All that. He gives them a voice. What's really precious is the young places typically gravitate to Jesus very quickly. They know he's good and they know he's a healer. He'll ask questions like, where are you? And then they'll say, in my bedroom, or usually in the location the trauma took place, or in the location they used to feel safe.

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I'm in the backyard, I'm at school on the playground, on the swings, that kind of thing. Jesus again, in his gentleness, will say, can I come and be with you? Your work is to let Jesus come to the part. And then to watch it from there. 

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There was this lovely session where he comes to this young little girl, and what Christ always wants to do is remove them from the painful memory. So this is a little bit like the theophostic approach. He paused and he asked the little girl, what would you like to do? They were looking at the house that she had been abused in as a child.

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It was very much like that scene from Forrest Gump, but this is a little girl. Jesus says, what would you like to do? She said to him, I want to burn it down. Jesus said, me too. They torched the house, and it was a resolution. That house is ashes now. We're not going back there anymore. 

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Then what he will typically do is he will take the young places and say, I want to show you where I live, Alison, in the center of your being. They get to come home. They get to come back into an integrated life.

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Alison Cook: I love that. It's empowering. There's a healing moment there, in that mystical way, something real happens.

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John Eldredge: Yes. None of the mystics called themselves mystics. That was the historical appellation that was given to them later. They call themselves friends of God, or lovers of Jesus. This is normal, folks. This is not wacky taffy. You're simply describing the rest of reality, the unseen realm, the internal world. 

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It's the rest of reality. It's no less real than your car, your coffee cup, your table. The things we're describing right now are utterly real.

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Alison Cook: It is. It's funny because there's a part of me, when we talk about this, that's always tempted to go to Bessel Van der Kolk or some of the science. Because these are stored memories. There is something happening in the body, and there isn't a divide between science and spirituality. I love how you use that word integrated, that Jesus is the integrating center of it.

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John Eldredge: Of it all, of the universe. A hundred percent. Yes. He led you to the acting class, knowing that's what your soul needed to come back out of hiding.

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Alison Cook: You have this quote that is important, especially for folks who have experienced trauma or who are doing a lot of numbing, doing a lot of distracting, doing a lot of avoiding. You say “Being safe and feeling safe are not the same thing. This difference can really shake the human soul.”

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Then you write, “C. S. Lewis wrote, perfect love casts out fear. I love this, but so do several other things. Ignorance, alcohol, passion, presumption, and stupidity”. We can create a pseudo-safety. I wonder, John, what you think about this, that sometimes the safety of torching the house with Jesus can feel initially scarier.

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Like what is this, or I don't know what this is. I'm used to this little fortress that I've created over here. Do you bump into that with folks?

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John Eldredge: All the time. The Old Testament prophets spoke to this all the time. You're going to build for yourselves broken cisterns. You're going to run to Egypt for safety. You're going to run to Babylon for safety. It won't work. The hound of heaven will come after you. In his love, he will allow your false securities to fail. 

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He will, so that you realize there is only one refuge. There is only one safe place in the universe, and that is in the God who loves you, literally in his presence. Psalm 91, the shelter of the most high.

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Alison Cook: You really walk us through this in the book. It's a practice of inviting him from those broken places that we're trying to heal. We can't do it without going into those first.

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John Eldredge: Yeah, that's right. Oftentimes it involves, let's be honest, the good old practice of the saints, of repentance. We do have to turn from our other lovers and false comforters and say, this is not working anymore. Forgive me for trying to secure my own rescue. Let's be frank.

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There, there is a place for forgiving others that's required. All the old saints will tell you this. You cannot hold resentment in the soul. It will poison you. We have a part to play in allowing Christ to do his healing work with us. We really do. 

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Repentance from false securities, forgiveness of those who wounded us. This is Irvin Yalom. This is well known, but what's beautiful, gang, is we are simply recovering our own tradition. This is deep, and it goes all the way back into Jewish mysticism and the prophets and the writers of the Psalms. 

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They are experiencing God. I've seen you in the sanctuary, David says, I've seen you. I've beheld your glory, and he says, there is no love like your love. There is no life like your life. He is speaking out of an encounter that was life changing for him. This is normal, everybody, not weird.

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Alison Cook: I love it. This is the everyday work of following Jesus. What would you say, John, to a listener who wants to experience Jesus in this way, longs to have those moments with God, walking with them into some of their hardest memories or into some of their hardest things, but it feels overwhelming? They don't know where to start. How might you encourage the listener?

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John Eldredge: I would say, get the book and jump to chapter 11. If all you do is read chapter 11, it will bring you such comfort and show you how to do this. I will literally guide you through how to do this. Because we all need mentors. We all need spiritual mothers and fathers. This is how it works. 

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You are a spiritual mother to your listeners. You are helping them find the way. Don’t we all need this? I could say, oh, do this right now in five seconds, but that doesn't feel quite true. It doesn't feel fair. I would say, read chapter 11.

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Alison Cook: At the end of every chapter, it's so beautiful, you say, let's pause. Let's notice. You speak right to those parts of us very gently. So I would underscore that. I would echo that, and one of the other things for those of you who are listening, who came to the podcast, because you've read Boundaries For Your Soul, you're already primed for this. 

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When Kim and I were writing, we were like, this is a therapeutic modality for sure, and, it's a spiritual practice. It is inviting Jesus into these parts of our souls. It is a spiritual practice, and you're laying it out so beautifully. You walk people through it very gently in the book. 

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There was one more quote, John, I loved this, and I wanted to touch on it so the listener could hear it. You're quoting Chesterton, but then you're expanding on it. G. K. Chesterton wrote, “The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland”.

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You write that Chesterton was a devout Christian, and British. He wasn't somebody you would think would be talking about fairyland. What he meant by fairyland is the world of wonder and mystery that children accept as real, and which Christians understand to be the beautiful unseen realm, the rest of the kingdom of God. 

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One foot on earth and one foot in the realm the scriptures call the heavens, which is no less real. That's what we're after here. We're not trying to leave reality. That doesn't work. That's escapism. We're trying to bring a little bit more of heaven into the rough places here on earth. I thought that was so beautiful.

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John Eldredge: Because you are an amphibian, friends. You literally have an amphibious nature. You are created to live within the world of bike rides and road trips and dinner with friends, and you inhabit a world filled with angels and the presence of God. When Jesus talks about the river of life, for example, in John 7, it's not a fantasy. It's not fairy dust. 

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It’s real. This will flow from your inmost being. The rest of reality is this beautiful kingdom that we actually need for our well being. If you take a frog, a true amphibian, and you put it only in water, it dies. If you put it only on land, it dies.

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Alison Cook: That's good.

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John Eldredge: It needs both realms. So do human beings. You can't live without the presence of God.

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Alison Cook: That's beautiful. It's a gorgeous book. John, tell people where to go to find the book. 

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John Eldredge: Go get it where you get your books. I would say, if you like audio books, I read the audio book and I got permission to riff, and so in the audio book, I go off script. I explain things a little more, and then when it's time to pray, I lead you through those. We play some music, and we take you into the experience. So the audio book's really lovely as well.

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Alison Cook: I love that. I have two questions I like to ask my guests as we end. John, what would you say to the younger you, the younger place inside of you, from where you are now?

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John Eldredge: You’re gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay. There is so much scrambling that we do when we're young. There's so much fear-based striving that is not true. You're gonna be okay. You are deeply loved. You are seen by heaven. You are watched over by myriads of angels right now. You're gonna be okay.

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Alison Cook: I love that. What's bringing out the best of you right now?

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John Eldredge: Oh, two things. One, my wife, who is marvelous. Two, having grandchildren is the most disruptive experience in the world. Little mystics. There's no clock. There's no calendar. When Poppy is in the room, it's pay attention to me. You don't hurry past me.

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No efficiency. There's no pragmatism. None of that works. I am being forced to get down on my hands and knees and be utterly present to this precious little heart and surrender my agenda.

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Alison Cook: I love it.

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John Eldredge: Holy smokes, man. You don't need spiritual formation. Spend an afternoon with a three year old. You discover all of your sin, all of your addictions, and you will be invited to literally walk at the pace of a three year old down the street. It is so disruptive. It's healing. Oh my gosh, I had no idea how driven I was.

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So they're transforming me.

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Alison Cook: Cool that we get another shot at that. You get a shot when you're younger, but then you get another shot at slowing down as you have grandkids. That's beautiful. I love it. Thank you. Thanks so much for writing the book and for all that you've done all these years to inspire so many of us. Really grateful for your time.

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John Eldredge: Thanks, Alison. Bless your work. Bless what you're offering to people and leading them into. Well done.

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Alison Cook: Thank you. I will take that in younger places of my heart.

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