What makes a man?

What makes a man?

I once heard a pastor (Pastor D I’ll call him) complain about the men in his church. His exact words were that they were “basically chicks.” He said that the way church is run in our day is only appealing to women and children and that most “men” would rather be out playing or watching football or be working on cars than be in church. While I have my own concerns about men in the modern church it has nothing to do with them wearing sea-foam green sweaters, which seems to be a pervasive concern for Pastor D. My concern is that the anatomical men of the church are not being men of God, as I assume is also Pastor D’s concern.

My intention with this blog is in no way to criticize my brothers, nor Pastor D as his church clearly has a massive blessing upon it. Rather, I hope to put forth this question; what makes someone who is anatomically a man, a man of God? After being blessed to go to a men’s retreat last weekend and having the opportunity to talk with my very dear friend Zak about this, I have some speculations about the qualities possessed by a man after God’s own heart, which I thoroughly believe all men are called to be.

Integrity

One thing I will say for Hollywood heroes, in terms of the “manly” attributes they exhibit, is that the ones that most moviegoers really love and admire possess integrity. William Wallace in “Braveheart,” Maximus Meridius in “Gladiator,” and even, arguably, the McManus brothers in the “Boondock Saints” refuse to settle for what is easy and instead decide to do what they know to be right. While in some sense every man hopes to be this kind of hero in the sort of rebellious yet honorable warrior sense, most men instead find themselves with much more trivial villains in their lives. For example, whether or not they ought to fudge the figures on their tax reports or, maybe, if they should tell their wife about that little lust issue.

If a man wakes up everyday wearing a comportment that lacks integrity he will likely soon find it eroding, much like any creation that lacks integrity. While Nietzsche says, “It is easier to cope with a bad conscience than with a bad reputation” I have not this to be true. I have found dishonesty in my own life to be rather viral in it’s ability to take an inch where only a mile is given. Soon I find myself lying about things not worth the trouble of lying about or lying about things that never should be lied about. Thus Nietzsche’s man of poor consciousness may find himself satisfied for a time with his bad conscience, but when push comes to shove he may find his equivocations undermining his good reputation.

If a man does allow himself to live with a dirtied conscious he will probably find himself dissatisfied when he looks into his bathroom mirror. These blogs (this one in particular) I find to be something of a mirror every time I write them. Reason being that I can’t ask someone else to listen to my words until I have done so myself. If a man cannot look himself in the mirror and see a man after God’s own heart how can he expect another to see him that way? Being real with one’s self is the beginning of real manhood.

Fidelity

Once a man has figured out how to be true to himself, he must learn how to be true to those closest to him. Fidelity is one of the most important traits any man can posses. My understanding of faith and family would lead me to believe that in every man’s life, God should come first, followed by his wife, and next by his children. After these three, how you align your priorities is your business. As such, a man should always put God’s desires and calling above the rest of the desires of his life’s influencers.

I find time to be one of the things that a man most needs to be faithful with. What a man spends his time on obviously represents what he values. Scripture tells us that were one’s treasure is, there their heart is also. In an epoch when “time is money,” one’s time needs to be spent very wisely. While I understand the immense pressure that is on men to be providers for their families, if a man’s occupation compromises his fidelity of time he may soon find it compromising his integrity as well.

Sexual fidelity is something that should go without saying as a huge form of faithfulness to one’s family. Porn and even “casual lust,” or allowing one’s eyes to wander where they shouldn’t, should be rejected both for the sake of keeping one’s self faithful but also for the sake of keeping oneself pure. In many ways sexual infidelity is also infidelity to God as it is a breach of one’s willingness to listen to God and therefore a breach in one’s integrity.

Courage

Courage I find to be a necessary supporter of integrity and at the same time an important counter part. Courage can be had without integrity, but integrity can’t be had without courage. By that I mean one can boldly do something terrifying with wrong motives and be called courageous, but one can’t have integrity without the courage to stand up for what he knows to be right.

Courage is undeniably a dead horse that has been beaten over and again by men’s ministries everywhere and as such I’d like to bring some fresh perspective to it. Webster defines courage as “the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fear.” I disagree with the dictionary here because it says, “without fear.” Few men can decide to be without fear; every man can decide to have courage. Courage, I believe, is the force that pushes us forth in spite of fear. If you weren’t afraid why would you need courage?

It takes courage to stand up to the injustices around us and within us. As I said before, if a man is to possess integrity he must have the courage to follow through with what he knows to be right. Thus, courage is what makes integrity possible. When you find yourself uncertain of whether the repercussions of your honesty will truly be worth the gains in integrity and when fear starts to say, “what will happen when you tell them?” remember this, “the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7). If your heart is not right, do not hesitate to make it so.

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I implore you men of God, be men of integrity. Be faithful and do not fear the costs of your integrity, the rewards will outweigh them tenfold. Even now I find this to be a message to myself as much as it is to anyone else. Join me in trying to become a man after God’s own heart.

Let me love you: Giving and Receiving

We often forget that grace and karma are far from the same thing. We have this idea that as we become better and better people and do more and more church stuff, God will have more reasons to provide grace for us. We all should know that God grants us unrelenting grace upon request, and yet we live as if his love is conditional. We live as if God killed his son just so he could save a bunch of people who deserved it… that’s just silly.

Yet here we are. We won’t accept God’s grace because we don’t deserve it. Stupid pride. Stupid humans. We are stupid Christians.

I read a book that influenced me pretty heavily called “O₂” by Richard Dahlstrom; it is all about the ebb and flow of faith and specifically ministry. He theorizes that most modern Christians find themselves at either of two extremes, where they are either inhaling or exhaling constantly. They either serve constantly and pour out all their hearts into their ministries, or the other way around, they go to church and every small group during the week, but never actually do anything to help others. Even worse, most churches facilitate this by always asking the gifted folks to lead events and by asking the seemingly “not-so-gifted” folks to come to every event that the gifted folks put on. Sadly, when it comes to love I find the church is in much the same boat, with the majority of us being those who exhale and avoid inhaling as much as possible. My Nana gave me the saddest picture of this today.

I was visiting my grandmother (we call her Nana) in the hospital today after church and when we were alone we began talking about some more personal things. She talked about how surprised she was that this stomach problem had come on so suddenly and how she was so surprised that her issue is one that can kill if not operated on quickly. She mentioned she was so thankful for her relatives who took her into the ER and that she could be operated on so quickly. Then she started to change her tone. She said maybe it would have been a good time for her to go. Tears started coming to her eyes as she said that she was worried she was living too long and that she was becoming a burden to her family.

What you have to know about my Nana is that she cared for my Papa (her husband) for years and years before he finally passed in 2004. It was her whole life to care for him and when he passed she hardly knew what to do with her self. For along time she would still sign cards, “From Nana and Papa” and would hardly talk about anything else. When she finally began moving on she started caring for some friends of hers who weren’t able to get around quite as well as she. She would take them to the doctor when they needed or stop by and check up on them.

When my sisters and I were young we were home schooled and we would go over to her house once or twice every week and she spoiled us rotten. She would make waffles and a bowl of our favorite cereal for us and bring it out to us on a little tray as soon as we arrived and plopped down on her couch to watch TV. When my mom was a kid her and my Papa both worked a lot to give her the best they could manage; she was their only child.

And now, after eighty-six years of caring for other people, she doesn’t want us to care for her. She doesn’t want to be a “burden” to us even though she’s cared for our family for so long and she just started having problems last week. She’s asking us not to care for her and it’s a bit like saying, “Please, stop loving me.”

Riding back from my visit with her this afternoon, I wasn’t five minutes from the hospital before the tears came to my eyes. I couldn’t understand why I was crying. We have no reason to think that Nana is going to pass away soon and for the most part our visit was very pleasant. She’ll probably be out of the hospital in just a few days and yet I hurt and I wept. I started to pray and asked God to “soften her heart and to have her allow us to love her.” As the prayer came forth amidst quiet sobs I heard in my heart God saying, “Let me love you my child. I can see that you have tried and that you have suffered and even that you have failed. Now, put down your hands; let me love you.” God was showing me the sadness in his heart that comes from his children rejecting his love because we don’t think we deserve it. Like Nana and like everyone else, I am afraid. I am afraid to accept the words that I myself spoke to her this afternoon; “Nana, we love you too much for you to ever become a burden.”

There is a heart wrenching little children’s book called “Love You Forever” that I have mentioned before. This book depicts a mother who, no matter what upsetting thing her child does, she comes into his room every night and sings to him “I’ll love you forever, I’ll love you for always, as long as I love you my baby you’ll be.” That is our father’s heart… at least as accurately as I’ve ever heard it.

So please, join me. Get over yourself. Let down your guard. You are not good enough and you never will be. God knew from the start that he was going to have to go through so much heartbreak and so much rejection from a bunch of foolish children who thought they had to make it through life on their own. God did not send his son to die for a bunch of people who deserved everlasting life, he sent his son to die for us. I am about as broken as they come, and yet every night my Father comes into my room and sings to me, “I’ll love you forever, I’ll love you for always, as long as I love you, my baby you’ll be.”

Eye contact

We were greasy, cold, wet, tired and quite thankful for a patch of carpeted ground. Each night when we returned to the church after a fifteen-hour day on the street, my fellow Urban Plunge participants and I wanted nothing more than to sleep. I’m pretty sure each one of us had blisters on our feet by the end of the first day and I am absolutely sure that we were all very sore. Despite the discomfort however, each of us ended our time thankful for the experience.

Each of the five days of Plunge my fellow SPU students and I would spend wandering the streets of Seattle looking for homeless people whom we could ask about life on the street and how they ended up there. After that our only real concern was to find opportunities to eat and occasionally to rest and stay dry. Each day consisted of a fair amount of boredom and a fair amount of deciding where to go and what to do. The interactions we did have though were the real gold of the whole experience.

One of the more memorable interactions we had was with the street youth around Westlake Center. They were just like us in so many ways. They had their own outcasts, their own popular kids, many had cellphones, many had no desire to go to school or to work and each one had their own ways of finding, or at least needing, acceptance. One in being the guy who is a “lucrative business man” another in being the craziest guy on the street and still another in being the one who always does well with the ladies. It would be cliché to say that I saw something deeper missing in each one of them. However, I did see that there was so much acting on going and I just wanted it to stop. I understand that when most people in a society don’t want to interact with you at all it’s hard to be proud of who you are. I was just hoping that one day they would understand what their worth is. Last weekend, while doing some homeless outreach on Capitol Hill, I saw one of the kids I met in Westlake. He introduced himself as Garbage. It broke my heart because on the Plunge he had offered me his last cigarette and found cardboard for me to help me keep my stuff dry. Garbage is hardly a name fitting for someone so kind.

The natural extension of thought from the whole experience was to ask how we could help these people. Humans like us. Many of them had been dealt a poor hand and plenty others had just decided not to use their hand well. The question I tried to always ask of people who we met that had been able to leave the streets or who were in the process of leaving the streets was what had given them the motivation to get off. For most it was people they cared about or who cared about them. One gal said she had younger sisters who looked up to her and she wanted to set a good example for them. A married couple said they had two sons, who were then living with friends, and had lost their house so they were just looking for work to help them get back into a life. Another lady said she was tired of using drugs to get her through each day. Most revealing was what one woman at Mary’s Place shared with us. She said that for those who claimed they were fine with living on the street it wasn’t so much that they were ok with the street but that they didn’t believe anything better would ever exist for them.

In Seattle it’s not hard to survive on the street. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are available from shelters, soups kitchens, and the occasional do-gooder passing by. What’s hard is finding hope. Hope that if you pull yourself up from the bottom you won’t slip right back down. Hope that there’s someone who cares. Hope that there’s even a reason to get off in the first place. Due to its abundant resources for the homeless, Seattle is said to be the nation’s best place to be homeless. My prayer is that it can be the nation’s best place to quit being homeless too.

The hardest part about Plunge was partly the people that weren’t on the street who wouldn’t even look at you when you spoke to them. What was even harder were the ones who would look you in the eye when you spoke to them and say nothing, as if to communicate, “I know you were speaking to me, but you’re just not worth stopping for.” It serves to take away your humanity when someone won’t acknowledge you simply because your clothes aren’t quite as clean as they ought to be. For those who would at least say, “Sorry, I don’t have any change” we were very thankful.

With all of this in mind about giving hope and acknowledging humanity I would like to take the time to emphasize two services that seem to me to be especially effective, Mary’s Place and New Horizons. Both of these ministries make a point of being relational in their outreach and having people around who will talk with the homeless that come through not just serve them and get them on their way. New Horizons even owns a coffee shop across the street called “Street Bean” where people have made their way off the street through New Horizons can be trained to work as baristas, an exceedingly useful skill to have in Seattle.

My hope for all the “average people” who read this that may never want to live in a city let alone do outreach to the homeless is this: show them someone cares. If you can, stop for sixty seconds, ask them their name, and show them that there are people in the world who don’t just want to ignore them and who want to see them able to do something with their lives. If you want to be specific and talk about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they have food and some sort of shelter and safety, what they need next is love and belonging and that will ONLY come through human contact, eye contact being the simplest way to allow that to happen.