Love & War

J and I are pretty good about consulting each other before committing to any thing, but he snuck one in on me last month. He's on a newsletter list for a publisher and receives invitations every now and then to write reviews for books on his blog. We're fans of John Eldrege, so when his new book came up among the invitations, J signed both of us up for it. It arrived about 3 weeks ago, and the instructions asked us to read the book and post our review during the week before Valentine's. Sure, I can read a 200+ page book in my copious amounts of free time during the next 3 weeks.

If I wasn't already an enthusiastic fan, I would have "forgotten." But we finally read Wild at Heart last fall and both found it to be an insightful look into men's hearts. Then my sister encouraged me to get a copy of the companion book, Captivating, co-authored by Eldrege and his wife, Stasi. I'm only a few chapters into that one, but it seems to be a welcome, refreshing look at God's heart for women. So I was pretty excited to see that the Eldreges have put together a book on marriage, Love & War. Their writing style is so natural, conversational, easy to read. I really do wish I had a few days uninterrupted to pore over the book, mark it up with my notes and process the light-bulb moments.

I'm about half-way through the book now, and have this week to finish it. I've already found such great nuggets of wisdom and theology, though, that I wanted to start sharing them. So I'm going to post a quote from the book every day this week as a teaser. Starting with this one:

"Your mariage is part of a larger story, too, a story as romantic as any that has ever stirred your heart, and at least as dangerous. The sooner you come to terms with this, the sooner you can understand what is happening in your marriage.

We cheer on the hero and the heroine because we can see what is at stake--the kingdom hangs upon their success. Yet we haven't anything close to this sort of clarity in our own marriages; we would be hard-pressed to name one thing that hangs in the balance, apart from our sanity and Grandmother's silver....

God is a great lover, and he created marriage to play out on this earth a daily, living, breathing portrait of the intimacy he longs for with his people. Gulp. This is why it has such a central role. It is a kind of incarnation, a passion play about the love and union between Jesus and his beloved.

Which might help you appreciate why the fury of hell has been unleashed against it. God is telling a love story and the setting is war."

Gives me goosebumps every time I think that God would choose me to be part of something larger. Stay tuned for more great pearls from Love & War.