Youth and Young Manhood

When does a man become a man? When he can grow a quality beard? When he can roundhouse kick like Chuck Norris? Most men’s magazines and pop culture will attest that the benchmark is once a person is financially independent. Sadly, during my stay on the fire department, I saw many thirty-year olds with the ethics and self-discipline of a teenager; I don’t think finances are the best barometer. Since I left my undergraduate studies at UF, I have often felt like a drifter on a wide-open field—I’m biologically, legally, culturally regarded as a man, but at what point do I “feel” like a man? Why do I still feel sometimes as clueless as I was in high school? Is this something I work out within myself or is it bestowed on me?

In this African culture, you are culturally not accepted as a “man” until you have left out into the unknown—be it for a hunt or for a great journey—and returned with a true inner transformation. You leave the status quo. You take responsibility for your actions and the consequences. You recognize the fear, but you recognize that there is something greater than that fear. Three years ago, I was more willing to run into a burning building than to allow God to have total control of my life. Now I am sitting in an African town where I have lived for the last six weeks, having taken nothing along but my clothes and laptop—I’m pretty sure God is now in control.

There’s a certain men’s magazine that my Dad and I have read for many years (whoever gets the magazine first tears out the cologne ads and subscription cards, and puts them in the other person’s bed; I have brought this practice with me into the seminary). They have good fitness and health tips, but I’ve noticed the magazine’s recent trends are now trying to convince me what kind of man-purse I need for this season and all the different hair and skin products I’m missing out on. Without getting into THOSE issues of where manhood is going, I do want to point out the scarcity of articles they run on the necessities of self-discipline, loyalty to your commitments, and sacrifice in the face of fear—those traits I’m sure any woman wants out of her man. I have fallen in the past to brief moments of supposing that I’m not a “man” because I don’t make the salary this magazine requires to own this gadget or that suit (even though I don’t need that pink-striped suit because, let’s be honest, it looks like black will be my color of choice for a very long time). But when I walk off that plane back into Tampa International Airport, no magazine can tell me that I didn’t face the unknown of Africa with every last bit of courage and faith and I had in me.

“What is to give light must endure burning.”—Viktor Frankl

-Bob
written 07/06/11