12/26/2023 0 Comments David roper psalm 23And anyway, he argued too loud and too long in his own defense. Yet it was hard for me to believe that he had jettisoned all his old values out of some strange moral principle that he ought to deny himself nothing. At least nothing I’d read on the subject sounded convincing.Īnother friend explained his great escape by speaking of the need for self-fulfillment and personal well-being. But I could think of no hard, medical evidence for that conclusion. What causes this forty-year itch? Maybe it’s a kind of male menopause, a time in a man’s life when his hormones run amok, and he acts as though he’s been dropped on his head from a great height. And then I recalled other friends who had done the same thing. But the way he went about it, so joylessly, so resolutely, so methodically, made me think further. Nothing more than high jinks or highhanded sinning. I keep thinking of Nicodemus’s question, Can a man be born when he is old? (John 3:4). I have nothing against perms, tans, or sports cars, but I wondered why he did it. He left his wife of twenty years, got a perm, a Porsche, a synthetic suntan, and moved in with his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend. When can I go and meet with God? (Psalm 42:2)Ī friend of mine turned forty recently and immediately took leave of his senses. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. I share them because I love men and I want to see them come into their own. I offer some thoughts on that Book and what it reveals about man. He wrote the Book on the subject, the manual that goes with man. But there is One, the manliest Man of all, who invites us to learn from Him. I doubt that many of our hunting and fishing buddies, for all their high jinks and good humor, can help us much. In the beginning it took God to make a man, and it still does. Few of us understand that true manhood is not a matter of power displays and aggressiveness it is a function of the activity of God. Our ignorance must be a measure of our confusion. But what impresses me most is that it’s done-that we find it necessary to be told what it means to be a man. Avoiding quiche is a good symbol of our uncertain sexuality. They spoof the affectation and humbug with which we support our sagging male egos. These efforts to define our manhood are funny. Real men love John Wayne, Monday Night Football, chain saws, and Coors. And rarely do they think about the meaning of life. We have to be told: Real men don’t eat quiche. None of us seems to know for sure what it means. Yet for all our machismo, we men are uneasy about our manhood. But to hear him tell it, it was the thrill of a lifetime. He almost broke the sound barrier on the way down he did break two ribs at the bottom. I saw another ride a log down a canyon wall. I have one friend who pulled a grizzly bear off his wife with his bare hands. They hie themselves across the desert in 4x4s at what I consider terminal velocities. They hang their snowmobiles upside down under the snow cornices on West Mountain. Most of my friends consider themselves real men.
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