Book Review: Get Your Life Back by John Eldredge
Book Review: Get Your Life Back by John Eldredge
4 July 2020
John Eldredge gives us practical strategies to slow down and engage with God in his new book.
When prolific American author and counsellor John Eldredge published his latest book, Get Your Life Back, earlier this year, the corona crisis had barely started.
Nevertheless, the pandemic in some ways announced his message for him by arbitrarily slowing us down and making us take stock of our daily practices: the morning rush to school and work; the dash from one appointment to the next; and constantly living with one eye on the clock and the other on social media with its unrelenting siren calls to switch on lest we be left out of the loop.
In his book, Eldredge urges us to detach ourselves from those things and to give ourselves time to rest and refresh our souls in, as he puts it, “a world gone mad”.
He recommends several ways in which it can be done:
• A simple one-minute pause between activities.
• Five minutes and a silent prayer before racing off to the next meeting or phone call.
• Practising ‘benevolent detachment’, where we release our past concerns, our present worries and our future fears to God, letting him take care of them.
• Taking time to drink in the beauties of nature (Eldredge loves the outdoors) – and just “getting outside”.
The book is full of lovely images from nature – Eldredge can write about a “whiff of cut grass, canned peaches, salt air and pine bark” in a friendly, conversational style. It aims to free us of the things that separate us from God, and to help us find peace and refreshment that leads to more God-time in our thinking, preventing “the erosion of our soul by the world”.
Stressed and over-worked Christians will find it a very worthwhile book – though, of course, they will have to make time in their ultra-busy lives to read it.
Get Your Life Back is available at Koorong.
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