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, and spent his boyhood summers on his grandfather’s cattle ranch in eastern Oregon. John met his wife, Stasi, in high school (in 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 with their three sons (Samuel, Blaine, and Luke), their golden retriever (Oban), and two horses (Whistle and Kokolo). While all of this is factually true, it somehow misses describing an actual person. He 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.
- Recommended Resources
- Footnotes
Episode 94: Summary & Transcript
Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Episode Summary
In this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show podcast, host Dr. Jeff interviews John Eldredge, renowned author of Wild at Heart, about his new book Resilient. Eldredge, who has previously written influential works on biblical manhood, discusses how to regain resilience during turbulent times like the COVID-19 pandemic. He explains how the pandemic created widespread trauma through constant uncertainty, fear of death, news bombardment, and the lack of a clear endpoint.
Eldredge warns against unhealthy coping mechanisms people use for relief and instead advocates for intentional practices to rebuild resilience, including regulating technology use (limiting news to three minutes daily), embracing beauty, and most importantly, actively loving Jesus through prayer and gratitude. He emphasizes that true resilience comes through union with Christ, referencing Ephesians 3, where God imparts strength to our inner being. The conversation highlights how a biblical worldview that integrates heart and mind can help people navigate trauma and find healing through relationship with Jesus rather than temporary distractions.
Episode Transcript
Dr. Jeff Myers (00:01):
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast. This show is available on Apple, Google, Spotify, Liftable Edifi, or wherever you get your podcasts. And I know I ask this every week, but it really would mean a lot if you are hearing the show or watching it if you would go to your favorite podcast channel and give it a good review. That way, more people will hear about it. And we think that’s important because this show is the show where I interview major thought leaders to show that our worldview changes everything.
Have you ever wondered how having a biblical worldview can help you through times of turbulence? I mean, when all of society seems to be coming a part of the seams, like during COVID-19, I know we haven’t talked a lot about this on the show, but my guest today, John Eldredge, who you probably know because of his book, Wild at Heart, and it was huge for a lot of men who are struggling with how to understand who they are as men from a biblical worldview, has written a new book called Resilient.
So John and I sit down and talk about how do you regain resilience instead of being fragile in times like these, and why does your relationship with Jesus make all of the difference? So please welcome John Eldredge to the show. John Eldredge, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show podcast.
John Eldredge (01:28):
Thanks, Jeff. It’s great to be here. I’m really honored.
Dr. Jeff Myers (01:32):
Well, I’m honored to have you. Every time we’ve had a conversation, I’ve enjoyed it so much. I go home and tell Stephanie, this is what we talked about, and it’s so much fun.
John Eldredge (01:43):
I did the same thing with Stace.
Dr. Jeff Myers (01:45):
Oh, is that right?
John Eldredge (01:45):
Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Myers (01:45):
Yeah.
John Eldredge (01:46):
I do.
Dr. Jeff Myers (01:46):
Yeah. It’s a unique friendship and some of the books that you’ve written have been very shaping in my life and probably in the lives of a lot of the people who are watching and listening to our show right now. Some of the things that you’ve written on biblical manhood, for example, have been really helpful, especially in a culture that’s uncertain about whether sexuality and gender are the same thing, and how do you avoid the cultural stereotypes of masculinity and pursue God’s heart for a man, all of those kinds of things. So thank you for that.
John Eldredge (02:21):
It’s a rough time to be a man.
Dr. Jeff Myers (02:23):
Or a woman, right?
John Eldredge (02:24):
It just is.
Dr. Jeff Myers (02:25):
Yeah. Well, your new book that you’ve written and you graciously gave me a copy of the manuscript in a little photocopy store thing. I took it on my Christmas vacation and read it before the book came out, and I thought, this is the book for the times in which we live.
There is so much trauma for the rising generation coming out of COVID. We just finished our summer sessions, Summit Ministries, 1,710 students. They’re still feeling it. They’re still experiencing it. I mean, they’re happy that they can be together and all of that, but there’s a lot of stuff going on below the surface that makes them fragile in a time when resilience is more important than ever. And that’s what you’ve written about.
So just one, there were lots of quotes. I always bend down lots of pages in every book that I get, so I’ll have to, now that I’ve got this actual copy of the book, I have to go in and bend those down. You quoted an expert who’s a director of the Trauma Stewardship Institute, Laura Van Dermot Lipsky. And you said Lipsky has spent decades helping people navigate the consequences of natural disasters, mass shootings and other crises. As hard as the initial trauma is, she said in this interview, it’s the aftermath that destroys people.
(04:00):
Okay. We got to unpack that. I think there are probably a lot of ways without even our realizing it, that we are living somehow under the weight of trauma rather than in the freedom of God’s grace, given everything that’s going on in our world.
John Eldredge (04:22):
For a number of reasons, because trauma does not callous you to future trauma. It’s actually the opposite. Trauma sensitizes you. And it recalls, it calls back to mind previous trauma. And so it’s a fascinating thing. We were chatting offline here just a moment ago about all this stuff that’s coming online right now about adults discovering childhood trauma, and it isn’t a coincidence that that’s taking place in August of 22. Okay.
Because two years of global trauma, and we can unpack that statement if you want. We’ve just passed through two years of global trauma, unfortunately, or fortunately, if you have the help that you need, it’s bringing this up. And I think you saw that in your students this summer.
Dr. Jeff Myers (05:20):
Yeah. Yeah. I felt that there was a fragility, but an honesty about the fragility.
John Eldredge (05:27):
Good.
Dr. Jeff Myers (05:28):
Which I hope is a first step toward healing. But what would you say, as you look back over the last couple of years, what are the trauma triggers? I mean, what was it about COVID and the global environment during COVID that triggered this? Was it the lockdowns? Was it fear? What were the things that were actually happening?
John Eldredge (05:50):
And it’d be helpful if we contextualize it. So we didn’t walk into 2020. Great. Okay. We’ve been worn out from years of what we call the modern life, massive amounts of technology and way too much news intake, time spent on devices, et cetera, et cetera. People were worn out by modern life, and there was lots of talk about this. How do I live a more resilient life? How do I find a better rhythm? All that prior to, so we come in fairly beat up, and then we just get steamrolled.
And so for the purpose of this conversation, when we talk about COVID or the pandemic, we’re referring to the whole cluster of events that included the politics, the high tension, high octane debates around vaccines. Mass family members couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving because they hadn’t been vaccinated or vice versa, or couldn’t get back in the country or all kinds of, yeah. And if you look at just simply what happened to the church, churches split over this in ways that they have not split over abortion or gender, I mean really, or music. Yes. I mean, it has been the single most divisive thing of our hour.
(07:17):
For the church. So what I want to do is remind people what it was like, because everybody wants this in the rear view mirror. You have your normal taken away from you suddenly, and without warning, you find yourself in a constant state of uncertainty. Can the kids go to school? Can they not go to school? Can I work from home? What’s going to happen with my job and am I going to get ill? Are my parents going to die on this? So you had the bombardment of negative news every day, and they’ve come out and admitted this, by the way that they use negative news to induce fear, to get everybody to comply.
Dr. Jeff Myers (07:56):
That’s why we, two months into COVID, we canceled our cable subscription.
John Eldredge (08:01):
Yes.
Dr. Jeff Myers (08:02):
Best thing we ever did.
John Eldredge (08:03):
Yes. Well done. Well done. Well done.
Dr. Jeff Myers (08:05):
I could just see the news. I won’t tell you which network it was, but you’ll all be able to figure it out tonight, and then it’s the same trauma over and over again. It’s like everything that you’re trying to work through throughout the day gets unraveled in 20 minutes of panic.
John Eldredge (08:22):
Yes. And folks, there’s a lot of data around what that does to you psychologically structure of your brain, emotional health. You’re not meant to be bombarded by the death count in New York, London, Delhi, Tokyo. So constant uncertainty, normal life taken away, fear of death, bombardment of news, and then no clear finish line. There was no finish line. People are still wondering, are we out of this thing yet? Are we clear? Right. Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Myers (08:54):
Okay. Okay. Right. Got it. Okay. This is bad. It’s not ever going to get better. And I’d see no end in sight kind of. And then when we start to turn a corner and people feel, okay, we don’t have to wear a mask on the airplane anymore. We can travel again. How do people in the flesh, so to speak, or just in our nature, try to heal ourselves or compensate for all of that?
John Eldredge (09:28):
Well, we could tell you what they are doing and we could tell you what they ought to do. Both.
Dr. Jeff Myers (09:33):
We’ve got to talk about both.
John Eldredge (09:35):
Okay. Well, it’s fascinating.
Dr. Jeff Myers (09:36):
This is so important. We got to turn the corner on this a little bit because we do, on this show, we talk about apologetics and science and issue, current issues, all different kinds of things, but we have the thoughts of the heart, and we’ve actually done a number of episodes. How do you help somebody who seems inclined towards suicide and things like that, because we don’t ever want to create the impression that there is somehow a distinction between our hearts and our minds that they intertwine together in the way we…
John Eldredge (10:06):
Process everything deeply, that that’s the biblical worldview for the heart and the mind. We were given the Greek model, and everybody thinks thoughts are in the head and emotions that are in the heart, and that’s just not so Right. Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Jeff Myers (10:21):
Yeah.
John Eldredge (10:21):
Okay. So what people are doing is rushing out for relief. Now, we’re going to get to resilience here in a moment, but just to describe, so we got all that happened to us and the high octane politics and the divisiveness and everything thrown on top of it. You tap into your reserves to rally through things like this. Natural disasters, epidemics are considered in the category of natural disasters.
So you get earthquakes, you get wildfires, you tap into your reserves in order to rally. We can make this work, babe. We can get the kids through school at home. I can work in the kitchen while you’re in the, but at some point you have to replenish those reserves. Instead, what people are doing is trying to get tacos and the beach.
Dr. Jeff Myers (11:14):
So they’re just asking, how do I replenish it? And then they’re picking things that don’t.
John Eldredge (11:21):
None of this is conscious right now. They’re rushing out for relief. And relief is different than restoration. Oh, right. Okay. I mean, come on. Two hours of Netflix is relief, but it’s not restorative. Okay. So the world’s gone out and done that. You can’t get a rental car. You can’t get a Vrbo. International flights are absolutely booked. It’s madness out there. So you see the global rush.
Dr. Jeff Myers (11:49):
Sprinter vans are not available for sale.
John Eldredge (11:51):
Yeah. Just give me some relief. Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Jeff Myers (11:57):
Yeah.
John Eldredge (11:57):
Right. So that’s what we are doing. Now, most of why you asked me to come in was to chat about what we ought to be doing, because there’s a difference, and you have to take all this really quite intentionally.
Dr. Jeff Myers (12:11):
And biblically, you’re focusing on it biblically.
John Eldredge (12:15):
Yes.
Dr. Jeff Myers (12:15):
If God’s word is his special revelation to us, then the answer is going to emerge out of the teachings of Jesus, what the apostles said. They’re all of these kinds of things that we’re going to have.
John Eldredge (12:33):
To have to replenish. Yeah. So what it means to be a human being, your humanity is meant to exist sustained by God. I’m the vine. You are branches of this vine. Right. He’s like, if you don’t remain in this dip, deep, rich, live at home abiding. We don’t have the sustenance that humanity was created to have. You can’t live, I think Eugene Peterson described it as cut flowers. Human beings are like cut flowers separated from Christ. They can make it for a while. They can be pretty for a while, but over time, we are meant to be grafted into the life of God.
Dr. Jeff Myers (13:20):
Yeah. Alright, so let’s talk. I know there are some students who are watching, they’re in college right now. They’re kind of listening to this show, maybe out for a walk at the gym writing around how are we going to have scripture help us process through that? I am not skeptical of scripture. I sometimes feel like when somebody says, the Bible has the answer to this that I want to ask, tell me what you mean by that.
John Eldredge (14:02):
Yes.
Dr. Jeff Myers (14:02):
Okay. So the idea that we are in Christ separated from Christ is living cut flowers, but what’s the replenishing? How does that work biblically? I feel like I’m asking my questions in the most awkward possible way today. This is so close to home. It’s so close to home.
John Eldredge (14:29):
Yeah. You’re not for me. I get it. So we’re okay. Ephesians three. Paul prays, I pray that God, our Father, the creator of heaven and earth, would strengthen you by his spirit in your inmost being that Christ may fill your heart, that you would be rooted and grounded in love, that you may be able to know the height, depth, length, breath of the love of Jesus, and then here’s how he ends it so that you may be filled to the fullness of the measure of God. Wow. I know.
I’m like, me, me. Pick me. How do I get that? Sign me up. I’m in. I will put my credit card down. I’m ready. What do you want? So how do we cultivate that? Because as you and I were chatting beforehand, and there is a lot of conversation right now. I mean, I’m not the only guy with a book out on this.
Dr. Jeff Myers (15:34):
Well, I’ve noticed one for kids. One of our favorite Summit speakers, Dr. Kathy Koch, has Resilient Kids, a new book out. So that’s for parents helping their kids, but we’re helping ourselves right now as well. Here we’ve got, I can’t just push all this off and say, as long as I’m helping my kids, because that’s the relief idea. I can deal with my own emptiness if I just help other people not be empty.
John Eldredge (16:01):
Yes.
Dr. Jeff Myers (16:02):
That doesn’t necessarily fill you up.
John Eldredge (16:03):
Yeah, no, it doesn’t, that’s not sustainable. It’s a short-term plan, but it’s not sustainable. So what I was trying to do by quoting Ephesians was recast how people perceive how we access resilience. Because there’s a ton of this. I mean, you can go to wilderness challenges and you can do some of that seal training and that Uber triathlons and all that kind of stuff. Mindfulness is in and hot yoga and all that kind. Right. This is in humanity, looking for resilience.
But what distinguishes biblical resilience above all others, is that it is something that is imparted into our humanity through our union with God, through our union with Christ, and there’s nothing like that out there that is a unique gospel offer because the rest of the stuff is bootstraps. It’s suck it up folks. Tough it up. Get going.
Dr. Jeff Myers (17:07):
Right? Yeah. It’s not so much developing as resilience. It’s showing that I know what resilience is by running a half marathon or whatever.
John Eldredge (17:17):
Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Myers (17:21):
Okay, so that’s all from us reaching out. What you’re saying is from the words of the Apostle Paul, God is reaching into us to fill us to the fullest in our inmost being.
John Eldredge (17:36):
Yes. Yes. Yeah. And so when we are in a, and again, I mean trauma, most folks would say, I’m not traumatized. I’m just worn out. And so that’s okay. That’s okay. Let’s start with that.
Dr. Jeff Myers (17:51):
Okay.
John Eldredge (17:52):
It’s short-term memory loss, right? You can tell me where you went to high school, but you can’t tell me what you had for lunch yesterday without having to think about it for a second. You sit down and email, and for the life of you, you can’t remember why, right? It is in my day to day, I’m good, but if anything extra is asked of me, my reserves are shot. It’s that, right? It’s that condition.
I think that we are severely depleted right now, and I think the anger and the search for relief are just the expressions of, let’s call it mild cases of trauma, of the severe depletion and the forgetfulness. It’s a loss of a sense of time. It’s like, honey, is it Tuesday or Wednesday? I’m forgetting what, that’s all classic trauma symptoms. That’s what it does to the brain.
Dr. Jeff Myers (18:55):
Why I’m identifying things that are traumatic that I just thought were me being silly or yeah, or a little tired. You’re right. A little tired getting off an airplane and asking the gate attendant, what city are we in? Yes.
John Eldredge (19:12):
Yes, yes. I stood outside our office building the other day and I was trying to open, unfortunately, in Colorado Springs, you’ve got to have a lot of security these days just because of all that we’ve endured as a city. And so we have a simple system. Every employee has a card, and you wave it and you get in the building. I’m trying to open it with my car keys. There’s a little fob and I’m clicking it. I’m clicking it, and I’m like, why won’t this door open and I can suddenly hear my locks in my truck going click, click, click, click, click behind me in the parking lot, and I realize, oh my goodness. It’s that absent mindedness. Well, that’s classic trauma effects.
Dr. Jeff Myers (19:52):
Some of it’s physical. I think I’ve heard, I’ve been reading reports about long COVID and the effects on people’s, not only physically, but on their memory. What’s it called? A personality change, temporary personality change, something like that. People actually, you say, I don’t feel like myself. You don’t look like yourself either, and you’re not acting like yourself.
John Eldredge (20:23):
Right.
Dr. Jeff Myers (20:24):
This has been that trauma is at so many levels. It’s scary.
John Eldredge (20:29):
Yes. Yep. It is. It is. It’s physical, it’s emotional, and it’s spiritual. Yeah. I got clobbered by it, by the way, and I’ve been a nutritional guy literally since 1978. Eat clean, green shakes in the morning, all that stuff. I’m into all that health stuff. I like feeling great. I am 62 and I’m going bow hunting next week with my son. I want to be able to keep up. I got clobbered, but it took me three months to get my endurance back. Three months. And it was only because I was super intentional, even in that to go after the nutritional help and the anti-inflammation stuff and that kind of thing. Okay.
So here’s what I want to suggest. I want to suggest that if God wants to do what Paul prays for us in Ephesians three, which is to imbue our humanity, impart to our humanity, his resilience, then we would choose a way of life that repairs our union with Christ daily. Okay. How do you access it? Well, it’s through your union with Christ and not just intellectually, not just emotionally, but your being is literally meant to receive the being of God. That’s the whole gospel joy. Right?
Dr. Jeff Myers (22:03):
Wow. Yeah.
John Eldredge (22:05):
So what do you do therefore to replenish reserves, stabilize your emotions, help your brain get back on track through your daily, what do you do?
Dr. Jeff Myers (22:23):
The rhythms of the day? And as I was preparing for our show, I flipped right to the back too, where I had bent down a page about some specific disciplines that you encourage and that you even help people develop so they can be reminded of the presence of Christ in their lives at every moment.
John Eldredge (22:49):
Yes.
Dr. Jeff Myers (22:53):
I don’t want to just skip straight to what are the solutions? Give us their steps one, two, and three. But what are some of the things that you are finding and wrestling with COVID for three months? I mean, I knew that you had had it, but I didn’t know. I mean, three months. And then of course, the whole cancer battle that I went through, that took months. And I’m thinking now, the summer after I finished chemo was kind of a rebound thing. So I felt really good and I was active and I was excited. I had good goals to build my stamina back up and all of that. This summer was harder.
John Eldredge (23:38):
Yes.
Dr. Jeff Myers (23:39):
A year out was harder than the immediate aftermath.
John Eldredge (23:44):
Yes. Yeah. That’s pretty common.
Dr. Jeff Myers (23:48):
Really?
John Eldredge (23:49):
Yeah. For anything like this, natural disasters, living through a car accident, that sort of thing. Because there’s the initial rally, but then there’s the long-term reserves. It’s like, oh, my reserves are not where they once were.
Dr. Jeff Myers (24:06):
Yeah.
John Eldredge (24:06):
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Jeff Myers (24:07):
Okay, so how do you recognize that, first of all? I mean, we know that we’ve experienced trauma. We talked a little bit about some of the things that happened.
John Eldredge (24:19):
Well, why was drug use up? Why was alcohol use up? Why was pornography off the charts? Come on. Because people were in pain. They were thrown hard by this, by the isolation and the uncertainty and all that. So you saw all that self-medicating stuff just went through the roof along with domestic violence and child abuse. I’m sorry to say, in those indicators as well, they had to reopen the schools in Las Vegas early because so many kids were taking their lives.
So people were feeling the effects. I am not doing great. So now that we’re out of the woods, people are back to school, they are back to work. You can travel, which is good. I’m all for that. Now, let’s take our resilience a little more seriously than we did in the past. Okay.
Dr. Jeff Myers (25:17):
Yeah.
John Eldredge (25:18):
So simple stuff, folks. This is a fascinating thing. Have you spent too much time around horses? Are you a horse guy?
Dr. Jeff Myers (25:25):
A little bit. A couple of my kids are really involved with horses.
John Eldredge (25:27):
Okay. So there’s a maxim in the horse world that says the way you put away a horse is the way you will find him. And so if you have a bad session where there’s mistrust, or maybe there’s an accident, something happens, you put that horse away without any care, you go back the next day to ride that horse and he’s going to go, Uhuh, I don’t trust you anymore. You have to rebuild my trust, rebuild the relationships. That’s kind of a basic thing. So people say, John, what do you do first thing in the morning? Better question. What do you do lasting at night?
(26:06):
How do you end your day, folks? Do you have any kind of rhythm that allows for the healing of your union with Christ at the end of the day? Because the day he probably assaulted it, the chaos, the confusion, the pace, the demands, the panic phone calls, the urgent texts, all that stuff. Most people get home pretty shot, and here’s what they want. I want comfort food. I want a bag of cookies and Netflix. But that’s relief, not restoration.
So for example, I would recommend that towards the end of your day, you say, I am in a time of transition now, and there’s no more technology for the last 20 minutes of my day. Now, I would hope it’d be longer than that, but let’s give people something to shoot for. So phones go face down on the counter, not face up. They go face down. If you walk by it, it’s going to grab you face down on the counter, plug it into your charger and leave it there till morning and no news, no media intake. And here’s a really lovely thing, no decision making. You just say, at this point in my day, I’m not going to ask my brain to make any more decisions.
(27:30):
What is happening is you are bringing down, you’re charged through the day, and it allows you to center yourself in the presence of God. This is fascinating, I wish I could remember the philosopher who said this, but my son was telling me that what happened in the modern era, people were not talked out of their faith. Simply noise drowned it out. Okay. So you got to get the noise down. No media, no technology at the end of the day, no decision making.
And then I would recommend that you have a period of release where you just say, father, I turn everything over to you Now, my exams, my folks, whatever it is, my job, that meeting that went so badly, you just release all things. This is one Peter five, verse seven. Cast all of it on the Lord. Yeah.
(28:32):
Because he cares. He cares for you. He does. He cares. So there’s a period of release, and then Stacey and I will always listen to some beautiful music, usually just instrumental. And what I’m doing is I am coming down out of the high octane world, and now I’m able to be aware of God. I’m like, oh, there you are. Okay. And then we say our prayers and we go to bed in a very peaceful frame of mind, your last thoughts before you go to bed and your first thoughts in the morning shape your mental life more than anything else. Isn’t that fascinating?
Dr. Jeff Myers (29:15):
That is amazing. I think my own routine is better at night than it is in the morning, because in the morning I grab my phone, make sure that nothing terrible has happened, or if it has and it involves me, I’ve got to somehow sort of brace myself for the day.
John Eldredge (29:34):
Yeah. You wake up in fight or flight mode.
Dr. Jeff Myers (29:37):
I do. Yeah. I think so.
John Eldredge (29:39):
Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Myers (29:42):
And I wonder if that’s just part of living life. I mean, I was a single dad for a long time.
John Eldredge (29:51):
Yeah. Oh, it’s learned.
Dr. Jeff Myers (29:52):
I mean, you’re waking up, got to get breakfast, got to make sure they have their homework, got to make sure they’ve got something to eat for lunch. How are we going to get all these kids to all these different schools and what happens after school? And what uniform do you need? And you just get into this sense of, you just fall out of bed and straight into action.
John Eldredge (30:13):
Yes. So what do you do? What is a better morning? What is when you are living well, what is a better morning routine?
Dr. Jeff Myers (30:26):
The better morning is when I just don’t read. I don’t watch the news anymore, but I still read it. I set it aside actually, and maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, but I review my schedule for the next day, the night before, so that I’m not surprised by anything that happens. And then I put the phone away. I don’t like to have any media an hour before I go to bed. I feel like there’s something about the actual screen technology that somehow.
John Eldredge (30:59):
It’s proven.
Dr. Jeff Myers (31:00):
Makes it harder for me to sleep.
John Eldredge (31:01):
It’s proven. Yeah. Blue screens are damaging towards sleep patterns.
Dr. Jeff Myers (31:06):
Yeah. Okay. So set that aside. But then when I wake up in the morning, the better mornings, I get some coffee and I get my Bible, and I read my three chapters, which is how I read the Bible, three chapters starting in Genesis every day, all year, sitting out on our little deck that’s right outside of our master bedroom in the sunshine. I think that there’s something really peaceful and restorative about that.
John Eldredge (31:40):
Yes.
Dr. Jeff Myers (31:41):
Those are the better mornings.
John Eldredge (31:42):
Yes. Because that’s more realistic to your humanity. It’s just more realistic to how you are shaped as a human being and because you are restoring your communion with God in those moments. Okay.
Dr. Jeff Myers (31:56):
Yeah.
John Eldredge (31:57):
So here’s the thing. Everybody has a rule of life. Everybody does. Folks, you have one right now. How’s it working? Is it designed to hurl you into fight or flight mode and keep you there all day so that you just fall into bed at night utterly exhausted? I’d like to suggest, and this is thousands of years of Christian spirituality here, that what we do is we say, I have a rule of life. I don’t need to be convinced to get one. You have one, you have a routine. You have your rituals. Okay?
People get up, they make their coffee, they have their cereal, or they don’t eat breakfast and blast out the door, dah. You need a rule of life that repairs your union with Christ every day so that you can receive the Ephesians three sustaining presence of God in us. So for example, the morning, do not look at your phone for 20 minutes.
Dr. Jeff Myers (32:59):
When you wake up.
John Eldredge (33:00):
Yes. Get an alarm clock. Folks, do not even have that phone in your bedroom. The phone should not come into your bedroom. This is a fascinating thing. Research students do one grade lower on exams if they have their phone in their backpack, not on the desk, not in their hand, in the backpack, because just the presence of that thing, it’s distracting.
So phone was down on the counter 20 minutes before bedtime or more phone stays down on the counter, face down for your morning ritual. Right. And then, yeah, we’re human. So you make coffee, you walk outside, sit on the porch, read your scripture, say your prayers. You get to be a human being. No efficiency, no decision making, no news. Right. None of that. Okay.
I’m going to wing off on something for a second. So fascinating. Do you know about Dunbar’s numbers? Have you heard about Robin Dunbar? Okay. No, British sociologist, not a believer. He did a fascinating series of research. He looked at the size of the cerebral cortex, and he looked at, he did research on the size of villages, human villages throughout human history. And his conclusion was human beings are created to live in a community of about 150 people.
(34:41):
It’s local news, it’s neighborhood news. And then you combine that after nine 11 happened, this is a real mindblower. They did research that discovered that people who watched the twin towers go down live on television, experienced the same PTSD as people who were there in person in New York.
Dr. Jeff Myers (35:06):
Whoa.
John Eldredge (35:07):
Okay. The human brain was never meant to be exposed to global tragedy. Local neighborhood. Yes. Because those are the folk. I can pray for that. I can pray for you, but when you start increasing the size of your empathetic sphere, it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming. And so that’s why you don’t check the news first thing in the morning. Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Myers (35:36):
Yeah. You’re not meant to.
John Eldredge (35:39):
No, you’re really not. You weren’t even designed for it. No, we’re not created for it too much. Am I?
Dr. Jeff Myers (35:44):
Yeah. I feel like I know that in my head. I know that the news is a business. Exactly. That is generating profits through advertising, and you can generate more profits if it’s alarming because people pay closer attention. I know all of that intellectually, but that is a hard habit to break. And I think for me, it started after nine 11. I just had to check the news all the time because I just had this sense of dread that something terrible could have happened, and I need to know about it.
John Eldredge (36:26):
I’m just letting that hang there for a moment, because there’s a lot of people who identify with what you just said, and so we literally become addicted to it. We become addicted to the screen, the news, the information, because the big lie, and this goes all the way back to Genesis chapter three, the knowledge, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil knowing gives us a sense of control and power.
Dr. Jeff Myers (37:00):
And what we need instead is a sense of wisdom and discernment and detachment.
John Eldredge (37:06):
Yeah. You never supposed to know, you weren’t supposed to know about 80, I forget what, it’s 80 million animals died in the wildfires in Australia. That just wrecks me. I’m a naturalist. I love creation. I love the world. I love the beauty of nature. I hear that kind of thing. I’m just wrecked. It’s like, right, John, you actually weren’t supposed to know that this morning. Yeah. Too much.
So we begin to regulate our technology use. We begin to cut down. I tell people, three minutes a day of news, three minutes, get in, get the basics, get out. You really don’t need to know what the cartels are doing to people’s bodies in Mexico City right now. You just don’t need to know that.
Dr. Jeff Myers (37:57):
Yeah. One thing I’ve noticed, because I do a lot of TV interviews and radio interviews, and the TV interviews are the hardest because you get 90 seconds at the most to make your point. I find that I do better on those shows throughout the day if I haven’t paid attention to the news rather than if I have.
John Eldredge (38:21):
Oh, fascinating.
Dr. Jeff Myers (38:23):
Which it just could be a quirk. It’s mental fragmentation. It is. So I come to it with what do I need to think about this biblically, Lord, what do you want me to communicate? How do you want me to represent you as an ambassador today? Those are my questions. Rather than demonstrating a little insight into this or that or why this happened or my sources say.
John Eldredge (38:49):
Or that I’m really up to date.
Dr. Jeff Myers (38:51):
Right.
John Eldredge (38:52):
I just heard the report from two minutes ago.
Dr. Jeff Myers (38:56):
Yeah.
John Eldredge (38:57):
Yeah. So for centuries, the Christian tradition held to the fact that, I’m trying to remember who wrote the book on the desert fathers that said, the world is a shipwreck from which every person has to swim for their life. Whoa. Whoa. That’s been the perspective. This is not friendly to your soul. Okay. So your morning routine, your phone’s still down on the counter, right? You allow beauty, the beauty of nature, the frost on the window pane, the sunlight coming through the kitchen, right? You allow that to minister to your soul. You pray, you read scriptures.
But here’s the simplest thing I could give everyone. I gave you guys the simplest thing in the world. You take a few moments to love Jesus because of the act of loving Jesus. And by that I mean I just sit there and I say, I love you, God. I love you, Lord. I love you Jesus. And then I get specific, thank you for my grandkids, Lord, thank you for my wife. Thank you for the day. I love you actively loving God opens the soul to union with him and allows us to receive that Ephesians three impartation. Nothing else. Nothing else will do it like the simple act of loving God. Wow. Isn’t that awesome? Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Myers (40:39):
I feel that right now in our conversation. I just, yeah. I need to change my morning routine. I need to get back to that starting with my creator, starting with my redeemer, starting with the heart of gratefulness.
John Eldredge (41:00):
And your shared life. Because we can do a study, but it might just be a distraction. We can listen to worship music, but it might actually be overstimulating in the moment. What I need in the morning is God. Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Jeff Myers (41:24):
I think a lot of people, I mentioned that sense of dread, that I know a lot of people share the sense of dread that I’m talking about. And we do anticipate that bad things are going to happen. In fact, I know one of the things you mentioned in the book is you cannot just assume that we’re trying to fill ourselves back up from the last trauma, but we need to recognize that the world we live in requires us. It’s continually pushing us to the edge of all of these things, thinking we might be moving toward the end of time thinking that our nation.
John Eldredge (42:10):
What’s the economy going to do?
Dr. Jeff Myers (42:11):
Yeah. And I know I sense that when I go to fill up the gas tank, but I also sense that there’ve been a lot of times in history where people just couldn’t even get enough food to eat. We can’t assume that we’re somehow beyond that because we’re so advanced. So we do sense that what we’ve been given in this moment is a gift that we can’t assume we will always have. So the disciplines that we’re talking about here are life sustaining disciplines in the sense that it’s not just, wow, we went through a bad time. We need to get filled back up.
John Eldredge (42:52):
Yes.
Dr. Jeff Myers (42:52):
Exactly. It’s that I need the indwelling presence of Jesus all of the time. I have no other resources to handle what I suspect might be coming in the future.
John Eldredge (43:08):
I know that dread, I know that. And so I grew up in an alcoholic home, both parents, alcoholics. I spent a lot of time on the streets, drug houses, arrests, that kind of thing. I lived in fight or flight mode, and I thought it was normal. And so even into my Christian life, so thank God Jesus totally found me when I was 18 and I was in, read all the works of Francis Schaeffer, I was in, I like want this, but I was still in that fight or flight mode because I still assumed something really, really bad could happen today. That is not Psalm 23.
Surely your goodness will follow me, chase after me all the days of my life, even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. You are with me. I’ll fear no evil. Okay. So mental resilience is taking hold of our attention. What has your attention, folks, the war is for your attention. News is a commodity being sold to you. A friend of mine was a cameraman, a very, very, very successful cameraman for the highest networks. He was wanted all over the world. And he finally quit. And he said, here’s the reason why. Because the maximum is if it bleeds, it leads.
(44:35):
Get us the good stuff. I’ll call him Bill, go get us the good stuff Bill, meaning the horror of the world. And he’s like, I just can’t, that’s not kind to people. I’m not going to do that anymore. They literally left the whole thing. What you think about what has your attention has a dramatic effect on your wellbeing.
Dr. Jeff Myers (44:57):
Right?
John Eldredge (44:57):
Yes. So Psalm 23, right? The Lord is guiding my life. The Lord is my shepherd. I will not suffer, lack, I won’t. I will not be impoverished. I’ll not be taken out. And you just go through that. So here’s a really cool thing we built. Do you know about the 30 days to resilience on this? Yeah. I think your wife does it.
Dr. Jeff Myers (45:24):
Yeah. Stephanie does that.
John Eldredge (45:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there’s a section in that. It’s a free online thing, folks. It’s on the Pause app, the one Minute Pause app, and it’s a 30 day morning and evening rescue. It’s about eight minutes long each time. And one section is on mental resilience, and we just help people linger in Psalm 23 with beautiful music and guided prayer to get your attention back. The war is for your attention. Who has your attention?
Dr. Jeff Myers (45:56):
Yeah. Yeah. Man, this is such a comfort. I found myself all summer long praying for students and their anxiety, the growing depression, and it’s real, but not ever connecting the dots back to my own sense of resilience and rooting that in Christ.
John Eldredge (46:34):
Yes.
Dr. Jeff Myers (46:35):
So this is powerful. Thank you, John, for being part of the show today.
John Eldredge (46:40):
It’s really hopeful.
Dr. Jeff Myers (46:42):
Yeah.
John Eldredge (46:42):
It’s really hopeful. God wants to fulfill that prayer in Ephesians three beginning in verse 14. He wants to impart resilience into your life, into your humanity. Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Myers (46:57):
Thank you to my guest day, John Eldredge, for coming on the program. You can find John’s resources at wildatheart.org. We are in a time where we have trauma and recognizing that we do and that Jesus is the one who imparts to us the fullness of life is what makes the difference. I hope you learned some habits today of living, because I sure did. Things I’m going to do differently as a result of the podcast. And isn’t that the cool part of this is that we get to learn and grow? I hope you have a great week. We’ll see you soon.
Listeners, I want you to know that our podcast is on Edifi, which is a truly powerful app that brings together thousands of the best Christian podcasts in one place for your listening enjoyment. You can download it at edifi.app. Be sure to share the show if you have enjoyed listening to it and leave a review if you would, on the site where you download the show that helps more people know about the Dr. Jeff Show, and I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.