You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan begins a new series, The Design of Desire, all about the desire that is at the core of our humanity,

and how that desire has been turned upside down.

To begin, we have to talk about the war against desire

and the reality of desires that go unmet.

The next three podcasts will be about the issue of desire and our struggle with it and God's design as to why and how he's made

desire to work within our own body and in relationships and ultimately in relationship with

him and really in some ways woven through all of that is that third issue of what is the

process by which desire comes to peace, to shalom, or another way of saying it. How is it that our

desires that seem to wage war within us

actually are meant to not only bring us into a fullness of being, but also into the being

of the fullness of God? So the task at hand is to think with you about the nature of desire.

But wisely or not, what I'd like to do at first is to give you just a glimpse into how this

came to be the focus for the next three weeks. I just returned last evening from a sweet

gift of being able to fly fish with a dear friend of mine, Steve Call, who's both a dear friend

and colleague at the Seattle School of Psychology or Theology and Psychology. And this came after

really quite a summer, motorcycle filming trip, two broken ribs, three broken ribs, a lung that

slightly collapsed. All that, then the question of whether it was

wise, to go into the backcountry of Montana to fly fish in an environment that I have

fished for over two decades and seldom ever have fished and have not fallen a multitude of times.

So to go into a trip that had some level of increased danger because of the injuries that I procured. All to say, it was a lovely

trip, no falls. The end of the summer, it's done. Summer of 2015 is finished. And with that,

...