Becoming a man...

Sometimes, I wish that becoming a man was as easy as our culture makes it look. Sometimes, I wish that becoming a man was a simple as some treat it. Sometimes I envy those who spend their life as boys, never having to actually step up to the proverbial plate before them. It's so much easier! It takes so much less time. Get a job, get a car, get a wife. Have kids. Presto, man. Like, making money and obtaining things automatically brings us to some kind of maturity. Like having a women is more effective than loving a women. Like working a job is more important than effecting a life. As if when we learn to focus on ourselves, we suddenly reach the pentacle of our earthy existence.

I'm so tired of hearing about it. I'm so tired of seeing it! Watching people just blow themselves up over it. I watch young men fall apart every day over it! Then, when they get there they fall apart again. Realizing that everything they had hoped they'd get when they reached that goal isn't even there. That being a "man" isn't even the same thing as being a man. They get that cheap taste in their mouths and they don't even know how to cope with the lie they've been told for the last couple decades of their life.

It's really not surprising though. This life is so hard. This route I've decided to take is so long. It's drained years. Its drained emotions. Its drained patients. Its brought me to the edge of myself time and time again. Its caused me to stretch and become more than what circumstances have left me as. I've spent many sleepless nights crying out to God. I've shed enough tears to revitalize the Sierra desert. I've made mistakes. I've gotten hurt. It just isn't easy. But, even all that would be easy if only the path was clear. But it's not, it's wild. It's overrun with the unknown. It's an adventure. It requires more endurance and perception than any boy is capable of possessing. It forces us into men.

Real men are kind. Real men are patient. Real men are not self seeking. Real men are not puffed up. Real men don't envy. Real men aren't provoked. Real men think no evil. Real men don't celebrate iniquity. Real men celebrate truth. Real men bear all things. Real men believe all things. Real men HOPES all things. Real men endure. Real men are Love. And love doesn't fail. Love goes to the places other people don't want to go. It does the work, most men deem too difficult. It deals with the situations people don't want to deal with. Love is hard.

So I'm learning to put away childish things. To set the video games, the fantasies, the delusions aside. To focus on the things that are not just important to my Father, but to me. Honestly.

I am so far from being a man. Each day takes me no measurable distance closer to becoming one. Its a process. If it wasn't, we wouldn't need seventy plus years to do it. So, I sit here. Screaming in the night. Fighting in the day. Desperately trying to look forward. Trying to learn from my mistakes. Trying to learn to be kind. Trying to learn to be love. And even though I usually feel unqualified, ill-equipped and stacked against... I take Hope that the same spirit that raised Christ from the dead is working in me. Teaching me to be in this world and not off it. To work. To use my passions for glory. To love. Bringing me hope when in the dead of night it all just seems so hopeless.

This video by Trae Elijah says it pretty accurately.