Recovering the Beauty of Our Souls
Sometimes there are authors that just speak to the way you learn, and you find yourself eating up their books in a flash. You resonate with the manner in which they write, talk, or tell stories. One of these for me is John Eldredge, and while recently reading his book titled, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices For a World Gone Mad, he shared about the typical progression of the Christian life: faith, obedience, service. People come to God with joy in their newfound faith, begin to realize what practices they need to follow, and then eventually want to give back. But he challenged this notion, saying that we are missing the final puzzle piece, in a way.
The ultimate purpose of our faith in God is union with him. We are meant to be fully connected with the God who made us. Each of those steps in faith is correct, but his words are meant to encourage you in that if your faith feels flat, it may be because you are being called to bring your faith to new depths. God wants you to experience him on the most intimate level possible. He wants union with you. But if you’re like me, sometimes you want something more practical. Well, it’s a lifelong process, not necessarily an achievable goal that you complete in a year. But Eldredge shared something that I thought was worth passing along:
“the basic things we practice, the things at the top of our to-do list, should be things that help us find union with God. Step one is understanding that God wants union with you, that union is the purpose of your creation, that it’s the priority.”
I don’t know about you, but I can’t always say that my to-do list is helping me experience union with God. Yet there are always moments, activities, and even people that help bring us deeper into our faith, and we should lean into those. You’re not even necessarily uprooting your current priorities – you are realigning your priorities to make sure you are bringing God into them. Whether it’s listening to rock music, buying clothes, or journaling, how can you let God into that space? There’s no one-size-fits-all.
Even with that said, sometimes it feels like our soul is out of touch, emotionless, or struggling too much to experience God. Hearing things like the union of God is difficult. As a last word, I want to share a quote from John earlier in the book, where he talked about caring for the neglected places in your soul. All of us need to attend to places where we have become numb, and the first step is to care for our soul:
“Your soul is a beautiful instrument, like a cello or a piano, capable of a vast expression and experience. Over time, strings get broken, keys are lost. Thirty years of this, and there isn’t much of us left with which to make music. Though we want God, he is forced to play with one or two notes; it’s all he has to work with. By attending to the neglected places of our souls, we recover the lost strings and damaged keys. The more we do, the more rich and colorful our life becomes, because God has so much more to make music with.”
*References from Get Your Life Back by John Eldredge
