I am reading Wild at Heart by John Eldredge. It may be directed toward men, but it is feeding my soul as well. I too crave wilderness and risk, as men do, but for a completely different reason, a reason I did not recognize right away. My question was: Why do I have a wild heart? And the answer came as I was walking home yesterday evening from the rugged headland on Nahant called East Point. Bathed in a sunset-pink that would be obnoxious anywhere but in God’s sky, listening to a loon calling in the harbour, I smiled at these words that blinked into my head: to be found.
Aha. It is feminine indeed, that desire to find myself lost in foggy hill country where the trees grow thick and the river is quiet but deadly in its swiftness. Here is woman’s heart in three words: to be found. We too desire adventure, want to take daring leaps . . . because we want to be rescued from danger.
A man, however, leaves behind the known and ventures into the wild to find. Find himself, discover what he is made of. And find that damsel in distress and rescue her.
Life is a love story. Yes, our very existence is founded on romance—not only between men and women, but first and foremost between the King and us. Human romance must flow from divine romance, if it is to be as passionate as it can be. It was He, after all, who created the wild and that craving within us to experience the wild. Why? Because He wishes to be found by and to find us.
So I will allure her;
I will lead her into the desert
and speak to her heart.
—Hosea 2:16
