Reviewed: Walking with God

If you want to make music, you have to learn how to play an instrument.  And in the beginning, it doesn’t sound too good – all the squawks and squeaks and bad timing.  You really are on your way to making music.  It just sounds like you are strangling a pig.  If you stick with it, something beautiful begins to emerge.  Or how about snowboarding – learning to do that is really awkward at first.  You fall down a lot.  You feel like an idiot.  But if you hang in there, you come to enjoy it.  You get better.  It starts to feel natural.  That’s when it becomes fun.  This holds true for anything in life.

Including our walk with God.  It takes time and practice.  It’s awkward at first, and sometimes we feel stupid.  But if we hang in there, we do begin to get it, and it becomes more and more natural, our lives are filled with his presence and all the joy and beauty and pleasure that come with it. 

It is something to be learned.

And it is worth learning.

-from Walking with God

I originally picked up John Eldredge’s Walking with God because I had to.  Well, maybe had to is a little strong.  As part of a contract for a magazine article, I agreed to create a sidebar of “lessons learned” derived from the book.  This naturally required that I actually read the book.  This is not a complaint, just a fact.  I had enjoyed several of his previous works like Wild at Heart and Waking the Dead so I willingly paid my $22.99 at Barnes and Noble and took the book home.

After about the first ten pages of the book I knew that this book could be something special, if I let it be. 

Walking with God attempts to demonstrate how “conversational intimacy” with God can be obtained, that we can hear the voice of God and that the spiritual world, both good and evil, is anything but fiction. 

The reader spends a year with John, reading his day-to-day insights in an almost journal-like fashion on “conversational intimacy.”  The book becomes very personal as the reader is allowed to take walk through John’s head for a year.  We listen to John talk to God, seek advice on both big and small issues, and wait for God’s responses.

Through it all, John reveals the level of intimacy for which we were made to connect with God.  We see how God uses different situations in life to reach us, if we open ourselves to be reached.  And as one could imagine, John writes on how we can reach a higher level of relational intimacy with God.     

The book also throws in spiritual warfare.  Through real-life circumstances, John demonstrates his level of belief in the reality of the spiritual world.  To John, the spiritual attacks occur on a regular, even daily, basis.          

During the read, I found myself realizing how little I allow God to have a foothold in my daily life.  I easily include Him on the big things because those are, well, big.  The small areas of my life?  I can handle those.  Though at times I found myself thinking that John was a little extreme with his habitual inquiring of God’s advice, I was challenged nonetheless. 

It should be noted that the book is structured differently than most books on today’s shelves.  The writing does away with traditional chapters, dividing the writings into four sections, or “seasons” as John calls them, with only subtitles separating the different topics within each “season.”  This seems to fit the work well since the writings are more like that from a personal journal than a “how to” book. 

Do I recommend this book? 

Absolutely.

Though one may not neccessarly agree with everything in the book, it will make one consider the depth of their current relationship with God.  And this personal reflection makes Walking with God well worth the wait in line at Barnes and Noble and the $22.99.  Take time with this book, enjoy the storytelling, and uncover ways in which you can become more connected with the the one who desires to be connected to you.