religion and spirituality

The Sacred Romance is a journey of love. This book is crucial to any Christian struggling through their faith. It truly is a stream to any dry heart. I highly recommend this "love letter from God" , especially to those long-time believers who have (in our service and striving ) forgotten the wildness of our God.It captures the essence of a follower of Christ-total passion and wild abandonment to the Lover of our hearts. In memoirs,poetry excerpts,and personal examples from their lives,John Eldredge and Brent Curtis make you passengers on their journey of recapturing their First Love. This book is among the best I've ever read- you will never look at life the same way!

As a person who was acquainted with Brent for several years before he joined John and wrote this book, I looked forward with anticipation to attending the first conference where the authors presented this material. At that time, the book was in process and it was not released from the publisher until more than a year later. My life had already been radically altered to become more real, more true, and more authentic in my relationships before I read this book, but when I attended the first conference and later when I read and studied the book in a small group, I found that my heart was forever captured and changed by a God who is more than acquainted with my arrows and who knows my deepest desires and longings. Furthermore, I discovered that my longings were not something to be shunned, but something that were placed there to draw me into the great heart of God and to bring me to a place of deeper joy and life than I dreamed could be possible. Over the past 10 years, not only has my life has radically and solidly been changed for the better by the truth in this book (as well as in John's subsequent books "The Journey of Desire" and "Wild At Heart"), but so have the lives of numerous of my friends. Though it may seem to be impossible, I have come to KNOW at the deepest levels of my being that I am enjoyed and treasured by my Creator and my Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. This God has been lovingly pursuing me through the long, darkly tangled woods of my life journey, and because of it the pain of life continues to be transformed into joy which is beyond explanation.

If you read this book (and the sequels written by John Eldredge) and it does not captivate and change you as radically as it did me, don't be discouraged too quickly; your experience cannot take away the truths this book contains. We all go through times when certain books mean more than they might at other times. If that is the case, I urge you not to write off the book or the message it contains, but I trust that you will experience the same positive life results through some other source or in some other way. The truths presented here are much bigger than the book can convey!

For female readers (and the men who love them), I want to recommend "The Allure of Hope," written by Jan Meyers, which communicates these concepts especailly for women.

I experienced a dilemma while reading this..I didn't want to put it down!! Yet I had to stop every few pages, sometimes after just a few lines, to let the message 'soak in'. The content of this book was life-changing for me. I've been in church all my life, and born again for over 20 years, but so much of what we hear about His love for us can become rote...devoid of any meaning beyond the academic. The picture painted here will transform all the platitudes into a vibrating truth that will quicken the Spirit within the reader, and bring breathtaking life into the journey.