A very happy beginning of the holiday season to you! I pray it’s filled with love and goodness from your God who adores you. 

Hey guess what—Wild at Heart turns 20 in December! Holy Cow!

On the one hand, it’s hard to believe—where did the time go? On the other hand, it is completely believable; we’ve spent a lot of years at the “front” and we’ve seen SO MUCH redemption in the lives of...well...probably millions to be honest. Which is a really holy thing to think about.

It all began with The Sacred Romance—the revelation that your heart matters to God, that we live in a Love Story set in a world at War. That your story matters to God. It has been a massive paradigm shift for many. Wild at Heart and Captivating soon followed—the revelation that gender matters, that God loves your feminine heart, your masculine heart, and he is restoring us as men and women. Which has brought such deep healing to millions all around the world. 

And so we are giving thanks for the favor of God on this beautiful work. Giving thanks for you, our friends, for partnering with us to rescue so many lives. What an incredible story this is!

Speaking of giving, we have a really cool gift for you.

Over the past eighteen months many of these letters have been devoted to counsel and encouragement on how to take care of your heart and soul in this mad world. (Not an easy thing to do, as you well know.) The pace of life has everyone spinning. The inundation of information and technology is assaulting our attention every moment of every day. And then there's the heartache of those we love and the world at large which we must gently navigate. If you've been listening to the podcast you’ve heard my new opening recently: “This is a gnarly time to be a human being. And God cares about your humanity…” 

So here's what we've done—we've developed an app called the One Minute Pause, a sanctuary in the chaos, a lifeline in the stormy seas, allowing us to pause and re-center in Jesus wherever we are in our day. Our team has been practicing this for about a year. It’s been so incredibly restorative that we want to share it with as many people as possible The Pause is built around three simple practices:

Benevolent Detachment, by which we practice 1 Peter 5:7. “Cast all your cares upon Him, because he cares for you.” Learning to let it all go. Learning a loving release of everyone and everything to Jesus. So that our hearts can come up for air.

Union with God, which is the deepest and greatest thing our human nature was created for. In John 17, Jesus prayed that we would be one with him in the same way that he is one with his Father. “One as We Are One” (vs 22). The mad world assaults our union with God on a regular basis, and so we need help restoring it daily. Union with God is what enables us to receive all of the resources of his strength and life in us.

Being Filled, as Ephesians 3:19 promises, “that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Asking for more of God, to fill more of us. 

The app is now available for iPhone and Android. You can get it for FREE in the App Store and on Google Play. Look for the One Minute Pause by Wild at Heart. Then share it with everyone you know! Your soul will thank you every day.

The world has changed so much even in the twenty years since we began this mission. 1999 was a time of profound gender confusion. By 2019 we have seen a complete gender collapse in the culture. Trauma is on the rise; the need to heal human hearts is greater than ever. And so we are planning for the next twenty years. God is moving us to bring our message to a new generation, and to push even further into every country on this broken planet. We have some exciting plans…

We are working to get Basic and Core—our Wild at Heart and Captivating retreats by video—into a dozen foreign languages. We are planning a major campaign to grow our podcast audience. Jesus is moving us to “represent” our core messages to a new generation with some new creative film projects. And lots more!

We are a supporter-funded mission, as you know. We don’t beg or borrow; we don’t create “crises” every month to move folks to help us. We simply reach out to you, our friends, and let you know we have a need.

We need to raise 50% of our budget here at the end of the year.  Which sounds to me like a lot of money, until I remember how faithful God has been every single year for the last two decades. Every year he provides exactly what we need. We have never gone into debt. You have always come through!

We are very excited about our future. We feel as though God has been discipling us, maturing us, teaching us, so that we might be ready for the “more” he has...expanding the already stunning influence of Wild at Heart. He has our “yes!” We are planning for a brilliant future. But we do need your help.

We need your prayers. Really. We want you to partner with us in projects like Basic and Core, bringing healing to men and women in your communities. And we need your financial support. Would you pray, and ask Jesus what he’d have you do? I completely trust him with what he says.

Thank you friends. We are so profoundly thankful for you!

Love,

John

Download the Wild at Heart November Newsletter here.