“There will be days when you’ll be forced to make decisions that affect
the lives of everyone you love, choices that will change you forever.
You reach an age when you realize that being a man isn’t about respect
or strength; it’s about being aware of all the things you touch.
Children face inward, wallow in their own selfish needs.
Men face out, take action on the needs of others.”
-Jax Teller
There’s
a fun running joke between the males in my family about manhood. There are four
dudes in my family; my dad, my two brothers, and me. We’re not together super
often, but when we are we joke with dad about the fact that he hasn’t
allowed us to be men yet. For the longest time, we assumed that when a boy turned
18 he became a man. But then, Josh turned 18 and dad wouldn’t give him the
imaginary badge of manhood. “Well, maybe when I’m 21,” I’m sure Josh wondered.
Just three short years later when he stood proudly as a 21-year-old, dad still
wouldn’t give him the honor of saying he’s a man.
Well,
the same pattern followed for both me then Jared. Josh is now 30, I’m 26, and
Jared is 24. Between the three of us male children, we’ve procreated almost 10
times, bought several homes, and husbanded 3 wives for almost 20 collective
years. My dad still won’t “let” us be men!! Ha ha!! It’s really just in good
fun, I hope!!
It’s
tough to know when you cease being a boy and finally become a man. Is it when
you turn a certain age? When you get married? When you can finally bench press
a certain amount? When you get your first “real” job? When you can grow a
beard? When you procreate?
I
don’t really know!
But
I think I have an idea at least of what it means to be a man. It can be
difficult to determine the moment of graduation, but it’s usually easy to tell
the difference between a boy and a man.
The
quote from Sons of Anarchy above is one of my favorite snapshots of manhood. In
the show (which I can’t recommend for most people-but L.O.V.E!), a motorcycle
club/gang is constantly wrestling with other gangs, clubs, law enforcement, drug
dealers, psychopaths, and some straight CARAAAAZY crow-eaters! Deception,
violence, revenge, pride, and hatred run rampant!! The primary character, Jax,
is wrestling throughout the entire show with the tension between being manly
and being a good man. His inner turmoil centers around his roles as a husband,
father, and son; being good in these roles is constantly coming into conflict
with being a leader in his motorcycle club.
Although
the show has a very different conception of good and evil than I have, I have
found that the struggle Jax wrestles with is similar to my own, and, I think,
most peoples. I think at the end of the day, in both the show and in reality,
it all comes down to one idea-responsibility!
Men
take responsibility!
“Children face inward, wallow in their own
selfish needs. Men face out, take action on the needs of others.”
I was chatting with my 10-year-old nephew the other day, and
the concept of debt came up. He was very surprised at the idea that any adult
would have debt. “You have debt?!” he gasped. I went on to explain that a lot
of adults have debt and in reality it’s kind of because they’re like children.
I showed my nephew that anything he didn’t pay for, but someone else did
instead, created a sense of debt. He owes someone for the shoes he’s wearing,
the soda he’s drinking, and the baseball game he was at. Now, obviously that’s
not how I look at that specific situation and of course he doesn’t have to pay
me back for getting those things for him because he’s just a boy.
Just as my nephew didn’t worry about how much a soda costs,
so all children don’t worry about how much something costs or who it costs. In
a completely acceptable and expected way, children are just plain selfish!
Men take responsibility. They recognize that everything
costs something and they take ownership of that reality and find a way to “pay”
for things themselves. It’s so much deeper than money though, responsibility.
Taking responsibility for the cost of a soda is easy-like
elementary manhood. Taking responsibility for the way your decisions affect the
people around you, the people you touch, is way WAY harder! Good men take
action for the needs of others, voluntarily give up their own comfort so others
can be comforted, immediately seek forgiveness if they fail, graciously give
forgiveness when others fail, regularly choose to be thankful, bravely protect,
diligently work, faithfully keep creation, lead and follow as servants, freely give,
fervently pray, humbly seek wise counsel, willingly sacrifice, and selflessly
love.
This kind of responsibility is extremely difficult. Only one
man did it perfectly, and few men do it consistently. It’s not popular to be a
good man; the one man who did it perfectly was brutally murdered and hung on a
tree for all to see. It’s so hard to stop being a child and to choose manhood.
I wish it were as easy as turning 21! But since the way up is down, I guess
it’s appropriate that the Designer made something as unique as being a good man
so difficult to do yet so rewarding in the end! After all, look what He gets
for being a perfect man!!
Dare all the more to be good men [or women-I just don’t know
much about that ;)], to take responsibility for others and the many ways your
decisions affect them!
