"I want to live more of my life like that - awake and keenly aware, focused, patient. Determined, but not grasping. Present in the moment. Intentional... We need to remember something essential to the masculine journey - life does not come easily. Not the real thing, anyway. There is far too much at our fingertips in the artificial world made for our comfort and ease. Cable television and air-conditioning and hiring someone else to fix the sink or do your shirts. The masculine soul atrophies under those conditions. And God would have us become men. If life always came easily to us, we wouldn't benefit from it. The things we value are the things we've paid for. The victories we treasure are from the hardest battles. When life is hard or disappointing, we have a new framework for understanding that, a new orientation. We haven't been forsaken. We are not on our own. This isn't just the way it goes. God is treating us with respect, treating us like men. He has something for us in the difficulty. We need to find out what that is, be shaped and strengthened by it."
If we want to become men of God, we have to work for it, plain and simple. And when we do, we'll appreciate it that much more. When we accomplish it, it's ours. We are going to face hardships and difficulties, but in overcoming them we push through the limits we thought we had. We become men, and come to know we are men. Everything in life is working to keep us from the journey, or stop us as soon as we take to the road, but we must endure, we CAN endure. And as we travel on we come to see more and more clearly, that this life is so much bigger than we ever knew.
"All masculine initiation is ultimately spiritual. The tests and challenges, the joys and adventures are all designed to awaken a man's soul, draw him into contact with the masculine in himself, in other men, in the world, and in God, as Father. I make no distinction between taking a boy or a man on an adventure and, say, teaching that man to pray. The adventure - rightly framed - can be a powerful experience of God. And prayer or Bible study - rightly framed - is meant to be the same. Most boys and men share the perception that God is found in church, and that the rest of life is ... just the rest of life... The tragedy of this is that the rest of life seems far more attractive to them than church, and thus God seems removed and even opposed to the things that make them come alive. But as Christians, we believe God embraces the physical world, that he loves Creation as we do, pronounced it very good (Gen. 1:31), that he speaks through it and uses it to teach us many things. We've lost many boys and men from the church because we've given them an unspeakably boring spirituality, implying that God is most interested in things like hymnals and baptismal founts. We've made the spiritual very small, and sanctimonious, robbed and often effeminate. And yet, most of the stories of men encounter God in the Bible do not take place in church(!)."
Ultimately this is about God. This is about becoming who God created us to be, and coming to know Him in ways that we were created to relate with Him. "We have got to recover the wildness of spirituality - especially masculine spirituality. I say this because I know that many of my readers have done a good bit of time in the church, and they're wanting to know 'Where's the Bible in all this? What about discipleship for boys and men?" The question proves my point - that we have lost both a noble view of the earth and how God uses it to disciple us - meaning, to train, develop, and make holy - and we have lost the wildness of masculine spirituality... Everything I've described in these pages is discipleship."
God created our hearts with the longs we have, and He speaks to us in ways that are unique to each of us. And God is so much more than who we encounter in church Sunday mornings (if we encounter Him there at all). God invites us to truly know Him, to see who He is through what He has created. He desires to speak to us in ways that mean something to us. Life, and especially the masculine journey, is not about behaving and looking our best. It is about living passionately from a heart of strength that God has given us.
"I want to say as clearly as I can that the goal of masculine initiation is to endow a man with a strength he knows he has, and knows it is for others. Men need to know that life really is found in God. They also need to know that life at its highest is found when we give ours away on behalf of someone else. You want to present a Cowboy with the question "What good can I do? How can I help someone?" It's a good question for a Warrior as well, and by the time he is a King, hopefully it is what life is all about. Power held on behalf of others."
This is what we after, knowing God, finding our strength, and using to better the lives of others. And this is only going to happen if we are intentional. "You see, we must put ourselves into situations that will thrust us forward in our journeys. So much of our daily lives is simply routine, and routine by its very nature is numbing. Get out of it. Break away... God honors our intentionality as men, and while he will arrange for much of the journey, he asks us to take part as well, to engage. Ask, seek, knock, as the Scriptures urge... Though you man still feel very young inside, and at time our Father will be tender with those places, you are still a man and he will treat you like one. Be intentional about your own initiation into masculine maturity, as intentional as you would want to be toward your own sons, as intentional as you hope God is toward you. This is not a spectator sport."
God is going to lead us, God is going to bring the situations, it's up to us to follow and participate. We can't just watch and expect results, we've got to get up and get moving. We have to keep our eyes open and our guard up. We have to be ready and alert for the moments and seize them when they come. It may be difficult, even painful, at times. "At nearly every stage of our masculine journey, something in us needs to be dismantled and something needs to be healed. Often what needs to be dismantled is the false self, the poser, and the approach to life we've created to secure ourselves in the world. What typically needs to be healed is the fear and wounds beneath it, that fueled its construct."
As we become the men God created us to be, we have to have the wounds stitched up, we have to have the false self torn down, and we need to have the enemies lies removed from our ears. As we journey with God, He will replace the lies with truth, the false self with our true identity, and He will stitch our wounds so they heal. There are moments that do this, moments that heal and define us, and "you've got to have those defining moments in your own masculine journey. They may come in a fellowship; they may come alone, in the wilderness. Even the bravest Warrior and the noblest King need to hear words of validation, words of recognition along the way. Not just once, but again and again. Is this not the heart of our Father?"
This is what God is after, and this is why relationship with Him is central to all of this. Without Him, this journey is pointless, without Him there is no journey to take. We need Him. "For our life is a quest, my brothers, arranged by our Father, for our initiation. There are gifts along the way to remind us that we are his Beloved Sons. Adventures to call forth the Cowboy, and battles to train the Warrior. There is Beauty to awaken the Lover, and power on behalf of others to prepare the King. A lifetime of experience from which the Sage will speak. The masculine journey, traveled for millennia by men before us. And now, my brothers, the trail calls us on."
Let us be intentional. Let us take to the road. Let us become Men of God.
"Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another."
To God alone be the Glory!
Strength and Honor
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