Daily Readings by Wild at Heart

Today’s Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's book “Becoming a King” For many years, we were like just about everybody else: unconsciously forsaking honest soul rest, always going, with overfilled calendars and little to show in the category of true rest and simple delight. Sundays were much like other days, packed with activity and low on rest, restoration, or sacred space. Out of imme...

Every era has its problems when it comes to knowing Jesus. One of ours is this: Having lost all confidence in the noble, the heroic, even the consistently good, we have come to celebrate the neurotic. Really. The heroes of our novels and movies are antiheroes, broken characters riddled with addiction and self-doubt. In fact, doubt — masquerading as humility — has become a condition for acceptance...

Your wounds brought messages with them. Lots of messages. Somehow they all usually land in the same place. They had a similar theme. “You’re worthless.” “You’re not a woman.” “You’re too much ... and not enough.” “You’re a disappointment.” “You are repulsive.” On and on they go. Because they were delivered with such pain, they felt true. They pierced our hearts, and they seemed so true. So we acce...

This stream of Counseling doesn't just flow to us directly from Christ, only from him; it flows through his people as well. We need others—and need them deeply. Yes, the Spirit was sent to be our Counselor. Yes, Jesus speaks to us personally. But often he works through another human being. The fact is, we are usually too close to our lives to see what's going on. Because it's our story we're tryin...

Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:4–5)   How do we remain in vital union with him? By loving him, by obeying him, by surrendering more a...

Who among us has not suffered betrayal at the hands of a trusted friend? Who among us has not shrunk away in response to being hurt? Which one of us has not been responsible for wounding another? We all have. We all have. We need Jesus. We need mercy. We need healing. We are not meant to live this life alone, and we won’t get very far along on our journey if we try. We don’t have the luxury of ins...

If you have any doubts as to whether or not God loves wildness, spend a night in the woods ... alone. Take a walk out in a thunderstorm. Go for a swim with a pod of killer whales. Get a bull moose mad at you. Whose idea was this, anyway? The Great Barrier Reef with its great white sharks, the jungles of India with their tigers, the deserts of the Southwest with all those rattle-snakes — would you...

A Story. An Epic. Something hidden in the ancient past. Something dangerous now unfolding. Something waiting in the future for us to discover. Some crucial role for us to play. Christianity, in its true form, tells us that there is an Author and that he is good, the essence of all that is good and beautiful and true, for he is the source of all these things. It tells us that he has set our hearts'...

What does it mean to be defiantly joyful in this moment when I am dwelling on the ancient path of shame and disappointment in myself? Those paths are made of quicksand.  I need a Savior.    I have one.  My friend Lisa Beck says that God planned our rescue before we even knew we were in trouble.  I’m in trouble. I know it now. And the temptation is to hate myself for it. Do you know this place some...

Now, I know my fellow evangelicals will rush to protest that it is the cross of Jesus Christ alone that opens the way to heaven for any person. No amount of personal righteousness could ever suffice. I believe this. It is grace alone — the unmerited and undeserved forgiveness of God — that opens the way for any of us to know God, let alone come into his kingdom. “For it is by grace you have been s...

The thing you are made for is the renewal of all things. God has given you a heart for his kingdom—not the wispy vagaries of a cloudy heaven, but the sharp reality of the world made new. This is one of the most important things you can know about yourself. Did you know this about yourself? When was the last time you told yourself, as you looked in the mirror in the morning, Good morning; you have...

The book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face.     [John]   Either we have God or we don’t. Either he is our ally, or we are on our own. What you believe about this affects everything else.    If you don’t have God—and I mean as an intimate ally, right by your side—you must do your best to figure out a path for your life. This is of course...

The heart is the connecting point, the meeting place between any two persons. The kind of deep soul intimacy we crave with God and with others can be experienced only from the heart. I know a man who took his daughter to dinner; she was surprised, delighted. For years she had been hoping he would pursue her. When they had been seated, he pulled out his Day Timer and began to review the goals he ha...

Some of the sentences the Enemy accuses each of us with have been there since we were young; others were added in the ensuing years as Satan saw opportunity to strengthen our fear and cynicism through “interpreting” those events in our lives that seem to verify our particular Message of the Arrows. His purpose is to convince us that we need to create a story to live in that is not as dangerous as...

I’ve often wondered at the long lists found many places in the Bible that recount a roster of men as “the son of so-and-so, who was the son of so-and-so.” You’ll find many of these rosters in the Scriptures, and elsewhere in ancient literature. Perhaps these accounts reveal something we hadn’t noticed before—a father-view of the world held by those who wrote them, shared by those who would read th...

The deepest convictions of our heart are formed by stories and reside there in the images and emotions of story. As a young boy, around the time my heart began to suspect that the world was a fearful place and I was on my own to find my way through it, I read the story of a Scottish discus thrower from the nineteenth century. He lived in the days before professional trainers and developed his skil...

Now—is Jesus more like Mother Teresa or William Wallace? The answer is ... it depends. If you're a leper, an outcast, a pariah of society whom no one has ever touched, if all you have ever longed for is just one kind word, then Christ is the incarnation of tender mercy. On the other hand, if you're a Pharisee, one of those self-appointed doctrine police ... watch out. On more than one occasion Jes...

All sorts of awful things can seem to issue from your heart — anger, lust, fear, petty jealousies. If you think it's you, a reflection of what's really going on in your heart, it will disable you. It could stop your journey dead in its tracks. What you've encountered is either the voice of your flesh or an attempt of the Enemy to distress you by throwing all sorts of thoughts your way and blaming...

Jesus is everywhere.   But let me give you a grace that will help you see him:   He said to them, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.” (Matthew 13:52)   This is such a beautiful, gracious, and stabilizing verse. It is immensely kind; it is also immensely cu...

"The spiritual life cannot be made suburban,” said Howard Macey. “It is always frontier and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed.” The greatest obstacle to realizing our dreams is the false self’s hatred of mystery. That’s a problem, you see, because mystery is essential to adventure . More than that, mystery is the heart of the universe and the God who made it. T...

I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. (John 16:12-13) There's more that Jesus wants to say to you, much more, and now that his Spirit resides in your heart, the conversation can continue. Many good people never hear God speak to them personally for the simple fact that they've never been told that he d...

Something awful has happened, something terrible. Something worse, even, than the fall of man. For in that greatest of all tragedies, we merely lost Paradise — and with it, everything that made life worth living. What has happened since is unthinkable: we've gotten used to it. We're broken in to the idea that this is just the way things are. The people who walk in great darkness have adjusted thei...

In order to understand what compels Jesus, you must keep in mind the distinction between the laws of God and the laws of men, and furthermore, that magnificent difference between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. Jesus sets before us a deeper, truer view of holiness. The issues are first and foremost internal, before they are ever external. You can murder someone without ever pullin...

"The glory of God is man fully alive." (Saint Irenaeus) When I first stumbled across this quote my initial reaction was ... You’re kidding me. Really? I mean, is that what you’ve been told? That the purpose of God — the very thing he’s staked his reputation on — is your coming fully alive? Huh. Well, that’s a different take on things. It made me wonder, What are God’s intentions toward me? What is...

As a wise old sage was praying with me through some of the painful memories of my life, I was immediately reminded of the time in middle school when my first girlfriend broke my heart. These wounds can linger for a lifetime if you let them — the first cut is the deepest, and all that. We asked Jesus to take me back to the memory. I saw us, the girl and me; it was that fateful summer day. We were i...