What it Really Means to be a Real Man

Men are getting a lot of shallow advice about how to be men, and a lot of it is coming from the church.

Avoid passivity!

Embrace accountability!

Take charge! Bring your family to church! Bring your wife flowers! Just do it! Do active things followed by lots of exclamation points!!!

Does anybody else feel like Brick Tamland might be behind this whole thing?

What’s empty about all the “just do it” challenges that men are receiving is that they’re all about trying harder to control what is spinning out of control. Control your temptations! Control your anger! The problem is that control is rooted in fear, and fear will not lead us into freedom.

We fear failure.

We fear getting it wrong and being wrong.

We fear that we’re defective.

We fear appearing soft and weak.

We fear being afraid!

We fear criticism, especially from our wives.

We fear that our version of what it means to be a man is not the version of what it really means to be a man.

So we flail around, trying to control whatever we can, only to panic when we still fail, still get criticized, and still get it wrong.

(Thank you, Brene Brown, for chapter 3 of Daring Greatly, which helped to form that list).

The truth is that most of us need to release the grip on control, so that we can get at the root of our fear, which is shame.

What we need are flawed men who begin to tell their raw stories of losing control. We need to hear about how they’re naming and moving through their pain and loss (death), and how they’re embracing a radical grace that is setting them free (life). This kind of courage will slowly eradicate the culture of shame in men.

I’ll never forget the time when Dave Busby (a pastor who died of cystic fibrosis almost twenty years ago) told a huge room full of men and women that he had recently watched porn in a hotel room on a ministry road trip.

He talked about the process of feeling empty, then bored. He talked about making the decision to turn it on, then watching it for the next thirty minutes. He talked about the even deeper emptiness and the pit of deep shame into which he tumbled afterwards. Then he talked about the phone call he made to his best friend in the middle of the night, to whom he laid it all out. He talked about the process of losing control and what he did about it. He talked about what happened when he named it out loud to someone else. He talked about the grace that he received.

I’ll never, ever forget that.

Men need to hear that they will feel empty, and that they shouldn’t try hard to avoid feeling empty. The question is: What you will do when you inevitably do feel empty? How you will respond when you’ve done something stupid because you felt so empty? Can we hear some stories of normal men who get empty?

Now, if you’re a pastor and that is your story, please don’t stand up in your congregation on Sunday and tell them about your porn addiction. That wouldn’t be a good first step. But tell someone. Tell someone about how close you are to doing something stupid. Tell someone about how angry or bored or frustrated you are.

We are afraid of telling the truth about what’s really happening in our lives because we have a long history of hiding what’s really happening, and talking about what really isn’t happening.

“So how many girls have you guys slept with?”

This was the question that the tall, good-looking senior guy threw out in the locker room during the winter of my sophomore year of high school.

We all shifted uneasily and a few of us mumbled some very tentative responses. One of us finally asked him how many girls he had slept with. He thought hard about it, obviously working out some really advanced mathematics.

“About a hundred,” he finally answered.

We all sat there, stunned. It didn’t occur to me until years later that he might have been lying. Isn’t it interesting that of the millions of things that happened to me in high school, I have a vivid memory of this very short, seemingly insignificant scene?

Fast forward to every pastor’s conference I’ve ever attended. The same question gets asked, every time: “So how many people come to your church?”

We need to see that this question is actually the same question that tall, good-looking senior asked in that locker room.

So what are men supposed to talk about, and what can we quit talking about?

Can we start with some baseline assumptions?

You’re going to feel empty. You’re going to be attracted to people who are not your spouse sometimes, and it doesn’t mean you’re a terrible husband. You’re going to be bored with your life, and you’re going to be angry about it. You’re going to feel like a failure at work. You’re going to find yourself on the edge of doing stupid things. You’re going to do some stupid things. You’re going to be a bad listener (sometimes) and feel defective about it.

Men who are walking towards maturity are finding ways to talk about those things so that they return to who they are. These men are releasing control and becoming expansive. They are creating wide spaces for others to become who they actually are.

We can quit comparing ourselves to each other, endlessly berating each other, and acting like there is one kind of ideal man. I have a friend who loves to hunt and smoke cigars, and he’s a great man. I also have a friend who loves musicals and baking, and he’s a great man. There are so many ways to be a great man.

Now, a word about men who crash and burn.

Over the past several months, I have heard stories four pastors who have had affairs, lost their jobs, and wrecked their marriages. Each one of them doubtlessly knew that they were supposed to avoid passivity and remain accountable.

They needed something more. We need something more. These men are not monsters. They are good men who just stayed hidden for way too long. They are men who are losing the battle with fear and shame.

Dallas Willard once explained the five-step process that he saw men walk through on their way to destroying their lives. He said that it didn’t matter if it was drugs, alcohol, sex, overworking, or something else; it was always the same journey.

First, they got really busy. Then they get unsettled and restless. Then, they got angry. Then they felt entitled. Then they acted out.

Where are you on that journey?

Can you take the courageous step to tell someone about where you actually are? Then, try to be still long enough to ask this dangerous question: What do you want? When you dig underneath the anger and the entitlement, what do you really want? Who might be able to help you move towards that?

It might take a while to cut through the shame and the fear. It is slow work. But this is the work of becoming a real man. And it is worth it.

I want to be a real man. A flawed, growing, honest, expansive man with an easy smile, who is learning to create wide spaces for the people in my life to become who they actually are.

Source: The Actual Pastor