“Experience Jesus. Really.” with John Eldredge

by on June 13, 2025

We’re living in a time that’s quietly—but profoundly—reshaping our souls.

Formed by a world of speed, efficiency, and endless information, most of us have been trained to seek quick answers, avoid ambiguity, and live with the belief that if we just do X, then Y will happen. It’s not our fault—we’ve been discipled by our cultural moment, where data is king and mystery is often treated with suspicion.

In the process, many of us have come to approach faith with an overdeveloped left brain—craving clarity and control, while growing uncomfortable with the unknown, the mystical, the experiential. And yet… something deeper in us still longs for more.

In this episode, Dr. Dan Allender is joined by psychologist and New York Times Bestselling Author John Eldredge to explore the themes of John’s new book, “Experience Jesus. Really.” Together, they offer a timely, tender invitation: to recover a life with God that is not only true, but felt—a life rooted in presence, wonder, and communion.

This conversation explores:

  • Why our modern world makes it hard to access the presence of God
  • The invitation to become an “ordinary mystic”—someone who experiences God from the inside out
  • What it means to live as an “amphibious” being, rooted in both the physical and spiritual
  • How the presence of Jesus brings refuge, healing, and integration—especially in trauma
  • Why this isn’t just for the spiritual elite—but for all of us, here and now

John draws from the wisdom of Christian mystics, scripture, and his own story to illuminate what it means to truly walk with Jesus today—in your body, your story, and your real life.

If you’ve ever found yourself saying, “I want to experience more of God, but I don’t know how”—we invite you to listen to this episode.

Listener Resources:

About Our Guest:

John Eldredge is an author, a counselor, and a teacher. He is also president of Wild at Heart, a ministry devoted to helping people discover the heart of God, recover their own hearts in God’s love, and learn to live in God’s Kingdom. John grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles (which he hated) and spent his boyhood summers on his grandfather’s cattle ranch in eastern Oregon (which he loved). John met his wife, Stasi, in a high school drama class. But their romance did not begin until they each came to faith in Christ, after high school. John earned his undergraduate degree in Theater at Cal Poly and directed a theater company in Los Angeles for several years before moving to Colorado with Focus on the Family, where he taught at the Focus on the Family Institute.

John earned his master’s degree in Counseling from Colorado Christian University, under the direction of Larry Crabb and Dan Allender. He worked as a counselor in private practice before launching Wild at Heart in 2000. John and Stasi live in Colorado Springs.  They have three sons (Samuel, Blaine, and Luke), two golden retrievers (Oban and Maisie), and two horses (Whistle and Kokolo).

While all of this is factually true, it somehow misses describing an actual person. John loves the outdoors passionately, and all beauty, Shakespeare, bow hunting, a good cigar, anything having to do with adventure, poetry, March Madness, working in the shop, fly fishing, classic rock, the Tetons, fish tacos, George MacDonald, green tea, buffalo steaks, dark chocolate, wild and open places, horses running, and too much more to name. He also uses the expression “far out” way too much.

Episode Transcript:

Dan: Well, dear friends, we’ve got, let me start with the negative. And it is one of those moments where Rachael and I could not find a common time to be able to engage a very beloved guest. Nonetheless, I’m also thrilled beyond thrilled to be able to reintroduce you to a dear, dear, dear friend, John Eldredge. John so utterly delighted to have this privilege of being with you.

John: Thank you, Dan. Now, in all truth friends, it was me who threw the wrench into the system that kicked Rachael out of the podcast. I was the one that needed to move the time. So we just need to let proper blame fall where it needs to fall and say we miss Rachael today.

Dan: Oh, we do, we do. She is again, such a glorious presence. But this does feel a little bit more like sitting with you as we have done many times by a stunning and beautiful river and having conversations that frankly have changed my life.

John: Oh, wouldn’t that be lovely? Let’s do that again.

Dan: Well, it’s happening even right now.

John: Okay.

Dan: Lemme tell you, it’s a good beginning to say that this new and really glorious book Experiencing Jesus then important to know there’s a punctuation at that point. And then the word really, I love that. I just love that. And to underscore this book for me was like moments that I spent with Becky in New Zealand where we’re fishing a braided river. And for folks who may not know what that is, that’s like you’ve got multiple rivers streams that are separate and yet they’re connected and each braided portion of the river can be fished. It’s glorious. And you walk across it and then you walk over to another braided portion and it’s, if you look at it, it’s like eight or nine rivers, and yet with a little bit of distance, you can see it’s all part of a glorious whole. So as we step into this beautiful, beautiful book, I just want you to start with where the book begins. And that is that we are, and I am, have been at times continue to be a disciple, not of the one I love, but of the internet. And as you engage what this book holds, start with that. It’s a very important beginning to say, most of us are averse to mystery and want a significant intellectual, conceptual knowledge base control.

John: Oh, we’ve been trained to it. You see, the thing is, what I want to say is it’s not your fault. You just don’t know what your moment has done to you. Dear souls. Our moment, this moment in time that we share together, you are a disciple of the system that tutors you on living. Whatever that system may be, where you turn to on a daily basis for guidance and direction in your questions of living. So in this hour, that makes all of us, anyone with an apparatus, phone, pad, desktop, we are disciples of the internet. I mean, we’re constantly just looking stuff up, right? It’s like, yeah, when was Andrew Jackson the President of the United States, and are there actually penguins in the North Pole or are there just penguins in the South Pole? We do this stuff all day long, and some of it is absolutely lifesaving. So this is not sort of a, I like, let’s all get off our technology talk. Some of it is lifesaving, people who, experiencing physical symptoms and they get on and realize, I need to go to the ER right now because of what they learn on the internet. Things like that. Their child just drank hydrogen peroxide. Is that poisonous or not? But the thing is this, is that what is baked into us now, we’ve been literally conditioned and I would say hardened to the presence of God by what we’ve learned. And we’ve learned a couple things we’ve learned. First off, you can have an instant answer to anything. There’s no waiting, right? I mean, when you hit click, you get 3 million results in less than a second. Okay? And so the saints and sages of ages past, they would’ve been appalled at that.

Dan: Yes.

John: Yeah. It’s almost like we found the tree of knowledge again, and we’re just eating off of it. We’re binging off of it. So it’s conditioned our poor souls. This is what we want to say. And it’s not your fault, it’s just, it’s your moment. It’s what we all do. But then to Dan’s point, not only has it made you an impatient pragmatist, but it’s also taught most of us a fear of mystery. Mystery is bad. Mystery is… there’s a coverup. Big pharma is not telling you the truth. Your governor’s not telling you the truth, right? Yeah. Gaza. Israel. We’re not getting the news. We’re not getting to the truth. And so if there’s mystery, your soul has been trained to think–bad. And again, our spiritual mothers and fathers would’ve gone, what? No, the child-heart, the world is filled with wonder, awe, beauty and mystery. It’s a good thing when you are seeking a life in God.

Dan: Yes. Well, and again, I concur. We’ve had these conversations actually for a long, many, many years, but it’s not for me just the power of knowledge, which is imputating a kind of omniscience. I want to know everything or at least have access to it. But it’s also an incredible realm of distraction in that when I know I’m not doing well, it is so easy for me to pick up Instagram and go through reel upon reel upon reel. And at some level it’s doing the work of fueling arousal and dopamine. It’s giving me a certain relief and in some sense, refuge and between the omniscience and the other side of refuge. So to now begin to talk about what this beautiful book’s inviting us to really is, and again, I want you to put words to my experience of the book, is it’s inviting me back into my first love and into why there are other loves that take me away and what it means to engage Jesus in the union of his presence in the temple, my body. And as we go through some of the major categories, we have been talking about union, with Jesus, I would say for a minimum of 15 years. And it’s just been some of the most important conversations I’ve had in a lifetime. So walk me in, walk us into the issue of what the book’s attempting to accomplish and how refuge begins the contrast to the internet’s source of solace.

John: Yeah. Okay. Let’s work our way in from a couple angles here. So first off, the global mental health crisis, the rising anxiety, depression, substance abuse and death by despair, suicide and all of it. I don’t think that’s because this generation is weak. I think that’s the canary in the coal mine. I think it helps us realize this is a very, very difficult moment on the human soul. You’re not alone in that. If you feel like that, you’re not alone in feeling that God is often hard to access. So I wanted to title the book Ordinary Mystics, but I just knew that most of Christendom would freak out. They would just freak out and they wouldn’t listen to what I meant. I wouldn’t get a chance to explain myself before they just went, we can’t let this in our bookstore or whatever. But what I mean by we are amphibious beings, we are created to live in both the world of coffee and friends and bike rides and the forest, good dinners. Yes, that nourishes, but also the actual experience of God who is not seen in the same way that your coffee cup is seen and his wonderful kingdom, all of the resources of the kingdom of God. And so the big idea of the book is because of our moment, we’ve been conditioned against, we have an overdeveloped left brain approach to our life in God. And if you go back to the garden and then you watch the flow through the Old Testament, particularly in the Psalms and into the New Testament and then down through Christian history… life with God was always meant to be richly experiential. And by that I mean an ontological existential encounter with the living God. We’re meant to experience love. We’re meant to experience attachment, we’re meant to experience the power of forgiveness and all these glorious things. But because of the overdeveloped left brain approach and the functional pragmatism of disciples of the Internet, most people are not enjoying that. And so I’m putting the idea out there of, hey, why don’t we all just become ordinary mystics and work our way back into what our spiritual mothers and fathers knew in very rich ways, an actual experiential life with God that’s extraordinarily nourishing.

Dan: With that invitation in using the word ordinary, at least I’ve interpreted that as you don’t have to be an aesthetic. You don’t have to come to a profound division so that you sell your home and literally move to the desert. Yet there’s something in that desert mothers and fathers that we have exceptionalized as beyond our capacity, unrealistic and in some ways undesirable. So with all that, the invitation to the reality that he is planted, he is engaged the deepest parts of you because he dwells in you. And that has implications. If we actually start with the assumption that God created the world with a word and that he is the word and that he speaks and he’s going to speak. And yes, he speaks through scripture, but he also speaks to our soul if there is an openness to hear the knock on the door. So when you think about the role of God speaking within us, to me it’s a very, very deep and rich part again of your writing and your teaching over many moons. But this just feels like there’s a greater depth and clarity, or at least for me, there was a greater depth and clarity in the midst of this. Does that feel true?

John: Oh, that’s lovely. I hope so. I hope so. So we’re going to put the cookies on the bottom shelf here. The secret life of the Christian mystics.. and we’re talking about people like Bernardo of Clairvaux and John of the cross, Julian of Norwich, Theresa of Ávila, but far more prevalent than you know in the history of the as you said, it’s not exceptional. It’s actually normal. It’s fairly normative. They would say the secret life is the inner communion with Jesus who now dwells in the depths of your being. And this is the secret. You read… So Brother Lawrence, the beautiful Carmelite friar who wrote… if people know anything about the writings of the mystics, they probably know Practicing the Presence of God, which was written by a Carmelite friar who worked in the kitchen of the Friary in Paris. Now, he wasn’t raised in this experience. He was actually injured in war and as a traumatized adult became a Carmelite. And he was apparently a fairly clumsy man. And the only thing that they trusted him to do was to wash dishes, work in the kitchen. But he was still known for his clumsiness there. And he was a fairly large individual. Someone described him as gross by nature, but delicate by grace, which I just love. Brother Lawrence would say this. He would say, we were talking about the secret life of the saints and the mystics down through the ages. What was their remarkable experience, the ontological, existential, experiential nature of their life with God. It’s the inner communion. And so here’s what Brother Lawrence says. He says, for my part, I can’t understand how religious persons, and that would be the language of the day, people of faith, can live satisfied apart from the regular experience of the presence of God. And then he goes on to say this, for my part, I keep myself retired in the depths of my soul with him where he dwells. And while I am thus with him, I fear nothing. And then he concludes with this thought. He says, but the slightest turning from him is in supportable. And so Jing XXX Theresa of ÁVila, John of the Cross, they would say the same thing. They would say the rich inner communion Christ who dwells in our hearts. And your question was about hearing the voice of God. Well, that’s where you’re going to hear it. It’s not an audible voice. It’s not going to come to you in external means. It’s going to come to you, follower of Jesus, because he now dwells in that He is literally the center of your being now, and your transformation is taking place from the inside out. So to learn to get out of the distraction, practice the presence of God, but instead of looking to feel his presence in the room with you, which he does, by the way, we’re looking to tune into his presence within us. And that’s where you’re going to hear the still small voice. That’s where you’re going to hear lovely things like, I’m with you. You’re going to be okay. And he will help. The number of things he said to me like, do not send that email. I’m about to blow up a situation with an acerbic email. And he’s like, John, don’t do it. And even what you were saying, the other thing about getting on Instagram and scrolling reels, so we have some loved ones who live in Spain and the blackouts hit. And so I’m on late at night trying to find out what’s happening in Spain and Portugal in the latest blackouts. I’m on there just searching, searching, searching the news, and there’s that gentle inner voice where Jesus says, John, do you really think that you’re going to have a greater measure of security by knowing? And I knew he was right. He’s like, why don’t you get off and come back into the living room where your wife is and do what you enjoy doing in the evening together. And so all that lovely, the saints would call it union and communion, the rich inner union, and then the ability to commune, we’re going back to the garden. We’re recovering the intimacy. The secret life now is through the inner communion, not through some sort of external experience, a great service, a good sermon, a fabulous podcast, a wonderful YouTube video or documentary, all of those good things. But the life of the ordinary mystic is the regular experience of God starting within.

Dan: John, we talked many moons ago about the notion that if we are the temple of the Holy Spirit and the temple really was meant to be a emblem, picture, not a metaphor, an actual place that held the very presence of God on earth. In some sense it was meant to be the presence of the garden where I walked. And so the idea that all of a sudden I am an outpost of Eden, and I’m meant to tend to the garden that is within me and not just nutritionally, including tending to the body, yes, it is not a husk to be thrown away. It’s a picture of something of the image of God and the tending to that inner world. I think many of us who are more psychologically oriented, would understand that. And yet when we begin to talk about the process of hearing God, of having refuge in God and the idea that the very core of Eden is a river, and you see that same picture in the end of Revelation. So a significant part of this new book captures things that maybe we would have said, of course it’s true, but it’s more metaphor. And all of a sudden, oh, wait a minute, the river is, I mean, it’s not to say metaphors aren’t real, but this is real, real. And so that tending to the garden, tending to the reality that within you is a river. Again, I would love just for folks to hear how that becomes part of a framework of understanding what it means to be an ordinary mystic.

John: So again, when the Biblical writers use that kind of language, are they being metaphorical? Perhaps, sometimes. But we assume it’s all the time. And so in Psalm 63, for example, when David says, I have seen you, I’ve seen you God in the sanctuary. I’ve beheld your glory and your beauty, and he goes on to say, your love is better than life and you satisfy me, you nourish me. He’s not being poetic. Not at all. He’s being absolutely practical. He is describing a literal experience of a living God. Okay? So it’s not metaphor at all. When Jesus in John 7 says, streams of living water will flow from your inmost being, he’s not being poetic. He is describing an actuality and again, an ontological, existential experience of a living God. Well, those streams happen to be the outflows, the braided rivers of the River of Life. So the River of Life is a real thing. And when you arrive in the city of God, either by your sudden appearance there to joy or it coming back to the earth as it does in Revelation 21 and 22, the river is there, it’s flowing down the center of the city. No one’s saying, oh, well, just poetically, just metaphorically. No, it’s there. It’s a real thing. It is in you and meant to flow more thoroughly through you. And this is where the child-heart comes in. That whole thing about unless you become his children, you shall not inherit the kingdom of God. Well, Jesus literally says, you shall not enter the kingdom of God, which is like, wow, that’s pretty strong language. What he’s trying to do is rescue us from the cynicism, the suspicion, and the prove it to me attitude. Show me the latest science. Right? Paul did not become a follower of Jesus because someone showed him the latest research. He had an encounter with the living God. Okay? So when he’s writing these things and when Jesus is speaking of these things and the other biblical writers, they’re not being metaphorical. They’re saying, look, there are kingdom realities that you as an amphibious creature were meant to enjoy. This stuff is here for your nourishment. So if I could deviate for a moment on to something that I think people will agree on, let’s take the blood of Christ. I don’t think anybody would say, well, the blood of Christ is just metaphorical. It’s like, no, he actually shed his literal blood on the cross. But then you get these passages like in 1 John chapter one where it says, the blood of Jesus will cleanse you, it cleanses you, and it does. It does. And so to learn to call upon the blood of Christ, to ask the blood of Christ, invoke the blood of Christ to do things for you, cleanse your conscience. If you were exposed to something that you didn’t mean to view, you were looking for something online, and then you know how it goes, suddenly you’re two clicks away from really horrible stuff. You go, oh Lord, cleanse my imagination from what I’ve just seen with the blood of Christ. It’s a literal agent. It’s a substance, the most treasured substance in heaven and on earth that is available to us. And the ordinary mystic doesn’t go well, how does all this work… the ordinary mystic goes, please, yes, I’m going to take that. I’m taking that one. I’m going to start using that. Well, the same thing with the River of Life. You’re promised the River of Life. It’s meant to flow through you. And the River of Life is a very, very healing presence, particularly when you have been in the presence of death or you feel like you’re being assaulted by death and again, kingdom of darkness, kingdom of God. You live in a world that is at war. The kingdom of darkness is a highly intelligent ancient realm with all sorts of sophisticated devices that they use against you. Well, the River of Life is more powerful. And so when I’m feeling assaulted by death and I feel death trying to get into my soul, I invoke the river. I said, let the River of Life once again promised in John seven. Now I’m asking for let it flow once again through my being and cleanse me and flush all death.

Dan: And that’s in part what you mean by we are amphibian. And again, this is not just a matter of refinement. I think in many years past the poetic and powerful language of scripture is healing. And yet there was a sense of the reality. The world around me feels more real than the unseen world. And it wasn’t that I didn’t believe the unseen world is real, but it almost felt like I don’t know how to be amphibian. I’m just a freaking man. And the fact is I know there’s another world and some moments feel like, oh, that the concept of thin worlds, of liminal space, of being touched, being aware. But it was more like it happens, and I don’t know how to participate other than I’m grateful that these moments seem to happen. But I sort of live in the material world with an occasional intersection, which wow, that was weird. I’m good. And there’s nothing in your labor in this book that it creates a kind of mechanism of if you do x, y will happen. But there is a deep, deep sense that if we engage our amphibian nature and the reality of how kind Jesus is, the Spirit, the father is, to invite us into again, an taste, a taste that’s sensual and the sensuality of the reality of the gospel, I just feel like you are calling us to a banquet.

John: You see, Dan, what you’re describing is everyone’s dilemma in this hour. And again, it has partly to do with the conditioning of your soul, against the experience of God. It’s not your fault, folks, the pace of life, the amount of media you need to consume, the pragmatism and this, show it to me with the latest science. This has been so, it’s hardened your soul against the experience of God. Okay? What I’m doing in the book is simply reaching back into the tradition and the writings of the desert fathers and mothers and the Christian mystics, by the way, didn’t call themselves Christian mystics. It was later historians who did. They just called themselves lovers of God, I just love God. There is a way. While there is not a formula, there is a way. Yes, of course, most of us have not had a mentor show us the way. So even when Dallas Willard, this is so interesting. When he wrote his work on the spiritual disciplines, he called it the spirit of the disciplines because he didn’t want to just give you tools. He wanted to say, this is why we do these things. Why do you pray? Why do you take the sacraments? Why do you study scripture? Why do you fast? He would say, because your amphibious nature awakens to the presence of God. What you’re trying to do is tap into the experience of God. So here’s the hopeful thing. Most of your listeners will be aware of the thousands and thousands of encounters that Muslim people are having around the world, a direct personal encounter with Jesus Christ that leads them to salvation in him. But I mean friends, even as intimate as this, that there was a woman in a lockdown Islamic regime. Christ shows up to her at night, introduces himself and gives her the cell phone number of a priest two countries away and says, call this man. He will help you and he will baptize you. So the priest gets this call from Muslim who says, I’ve just met Jesus in my bedroom. And he’s like, oh, yes, yes, that happens all the time. Yes, this is normal. And he baptizes her over the phone and then tells her how to download a Bible app so she can begin to do the scriptures. Now, most of us would go, holy smokes. That is the wildest story I’ve heard in a long time. But again, if you go back through Christian history, if you just read your scriptures, this was Philip and the Ethiopian. I mean, this is not that wild after all. It’s just that we were so baked into this particular, show me the latest science, make it practical left brain approach. So the book is written in a way that to mentor the reawakening of your amphibious nature, which the good news is it’s in every human being that the faculty to experience God and I add and His kingdom because there’s the River of Life, the blood of Christ. There’s all these beautiful things to draw upon. The reason I brought up the Muslim encounters with Christ is that I believe because of the punishing nature of this particular historical moment on the human soul, God is making himself more available. There are outbreaks of his presence happening on campuses in the US, in downtown London. In Brazil. It’s happening all over the world. God is moving very, very powerfully that Bible sales are up. Did you know this Bible sales are up by first time buyers. People are awakening to their amphibious nature. They’re awakening to the hunger for God, and God is making himself available. That’s the hopeful news. And so Brother Lawrence would be the first one to say, it’s something you practice like an instrument like riding your bike, learning to drive a car. It is a little clunky at first. It’s, it’s a little awkward. And was that you God and stuff? That’s okay. As you stay with it, you get really good at, and I live in this lovely kind of informal global network of ordinary mystics, and these folks are enjoying the presence of God. He’s doing deep inner healing work in their trauma. This is all quite available.

Dan: Well, I want to spend a few more moments just on what you have learned with regard to especially trauma and healing. And you talk about younger parts of us and moments where in the midst of not being able to sleep well, Jesus has called you to engage younger parts that needed more than just therapeutic understanding, but a kind of profound presence that opens the heart to a different kind of engagement with one’s story.

John: Yeah. All of your community would be very aware that understanding itself does not necessarily bring healing. I mean, we’ve all sat with people who could tell you all in the latest language, they can tell you all about their story and their heartache, but it hasn’t brought them one step closer to restoration. Something else is required. And what that something else usually is the presence of God. Okay? So again, this is the most hopeful, promising word for the world right now, is that the soul is healed through union with Christ. The soul is healed through union with Christ. That Revelation 3 I stand at the door, knock, if you open the door, I’ll come in. We’ll be intimate with one another. The idea of a meal together is we’re going to linger in conversational intimacy. God has done this multiple times in my life, and then you and I have done it together and we’ve done it with our wives is Jesus will raise something, something will trigger me during the day, and then I wake up in the middle of the night and it’s 2:00 AM and then it’s there. The fear is there, the shame is there, the abandonment is there, and I can feel Jesus saying, can we go there together? Can we walk into this? Which is both partly walking into your story, but it’s also walking into the region in your inner world… your inner world is like Narnia, folks. It’s bigger than the outside. The inside’s bigger than the outside. Your inner world is a place of fabulous, fabulous depth and mystery and beauty and heartache and harm and desolation. Jesus says, can we go to this particular place together? Let’s walk into the heartache together and through an experience of his presence. It might be love, it might be forgiveness, but mostly it’s something that I would call embrace. Like William Blake’s beautiful painting, the Souls Embrace with God. You can go look that up. It’s amazing, the embrace of God, of the part in need and his ability to not only bring about solace, but integration because Jesus Christ is the integrating center of all things. Colossians says, through him, all things remain, and in Him, all things hold together. So as the ordinary mystic begins to practice the presence of God, he will do this. He will knock. Things will trigger you. You’ll remember something. You’ll wake up in the night, you’ll be driving down the road, you’ll hear a song on Spotify from high school, and suddenly you are bawling and you have no idea why. Jesus is knocking on the door. That’s how he knocks. And he says, Hey, can we go there together? Let’s walk into that together. Would you open that up to me? Because the door to the soul opens from the inside. He can’t kick it in. He never kicks the door. He says, would you open this to me and we’ll go in together? And the union with Christ is the epicenter of all other spiritual experience. It’s the gateway to everything else. And so as we practice union and communion, oftentimes what happens is the healing of our souls.

Dan: Yes. I had a client who had recently read, obviously since the book’s only been out a bit, read your book. And he put it this way. He said, I think I’ve thought about the gospel and Jesus in particular as the package that FedEx or whomever delivers, and in it is a kind of healing presence that I’m to open and just sort of apply. And in that sense, the gospel is true and its life changing. And and he said, well, it may not be the best metaphor, he said, but I feel like instead of the package being left, there’s a knock on the door and Jesus actually comes in and in that I really want the ointment. But then I realized, no, I actually want a conversation. And in that growing capacity to actually be open, that he speaks, and actually not just in aphorisms, but actually has a conversation.

John: And not only speaks, not only speaks, here’s how Thomas à Kempis, the beautiful Dutch mystic from the 1400’s described it. He says, his visits, he’s talking about Jesus, his visits with your inner soul are frequent, his intimacy sweet and full of consolation and the union of the soul with him, wonderful indeed. So we’re talking about something that is profoundly mysterious, but is very, very ontologically real. Substantive. Substantive, not just metaphorical and the union of the soul with Christ, the communion that goes on there sometimes much deeper than words. So yes to hearing his voice, but it’s much, much deeper that the presence of God heals the human soul. Yes. It’s just marvelous.

Dan: And it just has a side, but one that you engage quite well. This is not an exclusion of normal discipleship, of good therapy, of engaging EMDR, of eating good food. So often when people have offered, at least in my past, past something of this, it’s always been with a kind of, this is the cure and nothing else is legitimate. And the reality is friendship, good meals, a good therapist, but ongoing taste and presence of the goodness of God in the land of the living, and in this case, the land of the living is your body, your temple, the outpost of Eden. And that is for me, and I know for many others, not an exclusion, but the openness to a wild new world and one that I always have to acknowledge myself is more wonderful and terrifying that I think I have the capacity for yet, in the kindness of God. There’s no throwing you into the deep end, but a movement that goes beyond dabbling. You have this beautiful metaphor of Louis talking about dabbing his feet into the sea. Yeah, you’re in the water, but you’re not being thrown immediately into the deep end with terror. And yet it’s like, do you really want the fullness of God? And I think that has always been for me, one of those, Yes, uhhh, yes. But you engage ambivalence, particularly through Psalm 91, and again, we won’t have time to go fully into that, but the ambivalence that many feel with regard to, there’s an allure to what you’re saying, but also a suspicion. And just before we end, how for those still a bit ambivalent hearing this, what do you want them to know?

John: Well, notice that Jesus provokes ambivalence. He does it all the time with people, right? What he’s saying is, would you give me access to your ambivalence? In other words, invite him in, say, Jesus, I dunno. I dunno what to do. I’m so hurt in so many ways around church and religion, and I don’t know what to do with this. And Jesus says, yeah, I fully understand that. Would you open that to me? Invite me into your ambivalence, and let’s see what happens.

Dan: Well, let’s just say in the honoring of our deepest questions, the kindness of God leads to repentance, but it leads to a taste of the waters, a taste of the bread of God and the banquet. And again, though I love you on so many ways and in so many domains, this gift of this book is one that I wish I could simply put into the laps of every person listening, because it’ll unquestionably evoke, provoke, but also bring something of the wonderful wildness of God into our lives, your life, and an invitation as to what it means to be in the playground of life itself. So John, again and again, thank you for how you have heard, followed, and invited us all to the banquet.

John: I’m so honored to be here with you and to get a chance to talk to your audience. Thank you Dan.