Manhood

At the 34-year mark of his marriage, Tim Keller shared the following insight about his marriage:

Neither my wife nor I are particularly gender-stereotyped. Yet you get into marriage, and you find you see the world differently, and you see each other differently. She sees things in me I would never see. But she sees because she’s a different gender and she’s in close, and I see things in her, and I see things in the world.

After 34 years of conflict, of arguing, of head-butting, now every single day when I get out into the world and things happen to me, I have a split second to react. What am I going to say? What am I going to do? What am I going to think? For years, even halfway through my marriage, I only thought like a man, but now, after years and years of head-butting, here’s what happens.

Something happens, and for a split second, I not only know what I would do, what I would think, how I would respond, but I know how Kathy would think, and I know what Kathy would do. For a split second, because it’s so instilled in me, I have a choice. Which of these approaches would probably work better? You see, my wisdom portfolio has been permanently diversified. I’m a different person, and yet I’m me. I haven’t become more feminine. In fact, probably in many ways I’ve become more masculine as time has gone on.

What’s going on? She came into my life, and now I know who I am. I’ve become who I’m supposed to be only through the head-butting, only through having a person who’s like me, not me, opposite to me, in close.

Yet another study shows what should be obvious: teenagers need to spend time with dad. The study tracked over 200 families and found that time with both parents starts to decrease when kids reach the age of 15. But the University of Pennsylvania study also found that the time teens spend with their dads has critical benefits.

A CNN article stated, "The more time spent alone with their fathers, the higher their self-esteem; the more time with their dads in a group setting, the better their social skills." The article also said that time with mom helps too, but there's just something special about time with dad.

The researchers conjectured that one-on-one time with dad "may develop higher general self-worth [in teenagers] because their fathers go beyond social expectations to devote undivided attention to them."

The message is clear: dads can make a huge difference in their kids' lives.

Living in Hollywood is a challenge. Growing up as a child actor almost guarantees a life of dysfunction. Without a strong father, Ron Howard could have taken the path of least resistance. But his father was there from the beginning, protecting, loving, guiding.

There was a time when Dennis the Menace was a hit as a troublemaking, mop-headed boy. “Leave It to Beaver” featured boys who rubbed adults the wrong way. The wisecracking, annoying trope was all the rage. It’s also how the character of Opie was originally written.

After the first reading, Rance Howard, Ron’s father, sat down with Andy Griffith and gently encouraged him to make Opie’s relationship with his TV dad a little more tender and innocent, a little more real, like his relationship with his own boys. Andy listened and took the suggestion to heart. When shooting started, Opie emerged as a new kind of television boy, a kid who had a special relationship with his father, who helped his son through life’s challenges.

Seeing a boy own up to his mistakes and a father own up to his — traits influenced by Rance and Ron — created an honest relationship that families still look to today. Ron Howard says of his father, “He stood for something that people could recognize as integrity. And we benefited from that.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Looking up to your father is a powerful force. We need wise fathers as role models in life. Fathers who love us and help us learn from our mishaps.

Michael Hoffen is a new author, and like him, the central character of his book is a teenager. But there’s quite an age gap between them—about 4,000 years. That’s because Hoffen translated an ancient papyrus from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom and brought to life the true story of a young Egyptian from ancient times named Pepi. In the papyrus, Pepi’s father, Khety, is intent on getting his son a job in the royal court.

Young Pepi wonders what career path he should choose, an important matter still contemplated today by millions of teenagers forty centuries later. His father Khety takes him on a long journey up the Nile to enroll him in a school far away from home. Along the way, Khety explains 18 other terrible jobs Pepi could end up having to work at if he is not hired as a scribe.

Hoffen, who has been translating ancient texts since middle school, became fascinated by a 4,000-year-old or so piece of literature from ancient Egypt’s Middle Kingdom known as The Instruction of Khety.

Under the guidance and collaboration of his two co-authors, Egyptologists Christian Casey and Jen Thum, Hoffen spent three-and-a-half years translating hieroglyphics into modern-day prose and gathering images to tell the story of Kheti and Pepi.

He then published a book called “Be A Scribe! Working for a Better Life in Ancient Egypt.” In the book he describes just how little the human condition has changed in thousands of years and shows readers that working for a living has never been easy!

Possible Preaching Angle:

Parents still want the best for their children, and teenagers face important decisions as they set out on their career paths. This story shows how little parenting has changed across thousands of years. The record of an Egyptian father giving life advice to his son mirrors the same instructions that Solomon gave to his sons in Proverbs, “Listen, my sons, to a father’s instruction; pay attention and gain understanding. For I give you sound teaching…” (Prov. 4:1)

In a fascinating article, writer Tim Grierson walks us through the history of the TV dad and shows how each dad reflects the values in America at that time. Below you will see the summary of each era of TV dad.

• Mid 1950s - Jim Anderson (Father Knows Best): Father Knows Best preached a wholesome, slightly square domestic normalcy that placed the dad at the top. His job is to go to work and make a living, enduring his little tots when he comes home at night. Everything's perfect, and nobody has any major problems.
• The 1960s - Steve Douglas (My Three Sons): Steve Douglas was the friendly, noble single dad to three growing boys. What was mildly edgy about the show was that his character was a widower, allowing Americans to see a nontraditional family dynamic on TV. My Three Sons at least started to reveal the cracks in the idealized American portrait of father-mother-and-cute-kids.
• 1970s - Archie Bunker (All in the Family): This was a father who definitely didn't know best—more accurately, he represented an outdated worldview that was quickly being shoved aside by a new (and, for him, frightening) order.
• Late 1980s - Dan Conner (Roseanne): Dan was a new kind of father: vulnerable and sweet, henpecked by his bossy wife but still hopelessly devoted to her. Dan was a man constantly ashamed of his inability to give his family a better life, but always trying to compensate by being as good a guy as possible.
• 1990s - Homer Simpson (The Simpsons): In Homer, The Simpsons found what is, to this day, the perfect modern-day TV father: drunken, well-intentioned, utterly worthless, prone to anger, always at a loss for the right thing to do or say.
• 2000s - Tony Soprano (The Sopranos): Tony Soprano is the prototypical breadwinner and head of the household; except he's so hobbled by inner turmoil and “business” concerns that he's on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
• 2010s - Bob Belcher (Bob's Burgers): In Bob we see the overextended modern dad in all his rumpled glory, just trying to keep his head above water in all aspects of his life.

High fives, fist bumps, and words of encouragement are given freely by the Flash Dads. The Flash Dads program was launched seven years ago by Jefferson County Public Schools in Kentucky, and there are now several dozen members. The men go to elementary schools across Louisville and line up to greet students, cheering them on and getting the day started on a positive note.

Participant Roger Collins said, The Flash Dads are "community members showing up for students who sometimes don't have anybody showing up for them." Another member of the Flash Dads, James Bogan, heard about it through his grandson, and signed up so he could surprise him one day at school. "It's contagious and I've been doing it ever since," he said.

The Flash Dads take their duties as role models and mentors to heart, and Bogan said the students know "we're not just there that day. We're there whenever you need us. It's not a one-day thing, it's a lifetime thing."

Picture this: you’re nestled comfortably in your airline seat cruising towards your holiday destination when a flight attendant’s voice breaks through the silence: “Ladies and gentlemen, both pilots are incapacitated. Are there any passengers who could land this plane with assistance from air traffic control?”

If you think you could manage it, you’re not alone. Surveys indicate about 30% of adult Americans think they could safely land a passenger aircraft with air traffic control’s guidance. Among male respondents, the confidence level rose to nearly 50%.

We’ve all heard stories of passengers who saved the day when the pilot became unresponsive. For instance, in 2022, Darren Harrison managed to land a twin-engine aircraft in Florida – after the pilot passed out – with the guidance of an air traffic controller. However, such incidents tend to take place in small, simple aircraft. Flying a much bigger and heavier commercial jet is a completely different game.

Takeoffs and landings are arguably the most difficult tasks pilots perform, and are always performed manually. Only on very few occasions, can a pilot use autopilot to land the aircraft for them. This is the exception, and not the rule.

Landing is complicated, and requires having precise control of the aircraft’s direction and descent rate. To land successfully, a pilot must keep an appropriate speed while simultaneously managing gear and flap configuration, adhering to air traffic regulations, communicating with air traffic control, and completing a number of paper and digital checklists.

Once the aircraft comes close to the runway, they must accurately judge its height, reduce power, and adjust the rate of descent – ensuring they land on the correct area of the runway. On the ground, they will use the brakes and reverse thrust to bring the aircraft to a complete stop before the runway ends. This all happens within just a few minutes.

Both takeoff and landing are far too quick, technical, and concentration-intensive for an untrained person to pull off. So, if you’ve never even learned the basics of flying, your chances of successfully landing a passenger aircraft with air traffic control’s help are close to zero.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Pride; Self-confidence; Self-exaltation – This illustration speaks to the overconfidence of the human nature. We have been encouraged to overestimate our abilities and underestimate our shortcomings in today’s culture; 2) Criticism; Pastor; Minister – This could also apply to a church setting in which members criticize the performance of the pastor and leadership and often have the thought “I could do their job so much better!”

Why are so many young men so angry online?

Men are trailing women in college and in the workplace, fewer of their relationships are leading to marriage, and many men feel masculinity is under attack. When young men turn to places like YouTube and X (formerly Twitter) seeking male solidarity, they often find more rage. “It may look like we have an epidemic of male anger, but under the anger is loneliness and sadness,” says Justin Baldoni, a filmmaker and actor behind Man Enough, a podcast about masculinity.

Often the result is depression, and sometimes worse. The suicide rate among men is about four times higher than that of women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Approximately 65% of men in the US say they’re hesitant to seek professional help for stress, anxiety, or depression, according to a study this month from Cleveland Clinic. And the respondents who expressed such reluctance were twice as likely as other men to spend several hours a day on social media.

Lew Wilcox and Bobby Rohrbach Jr. met in the summer of 1962, riding their bikes together in a small southern Ohio town.

These days, every Saturday, one picks the other up and they go out for breakfast, run errands, and talk about families, home repairs and how the world is changing. If one can’t remember a place or name, the other can fill in because they so often lived the same story. They didn’t outgrow the other or leave the other behind and still live within about five miles of their childhood homes. “I have a lot of friends but there’s something special about our friendship,” says Lew, 75, of his friend, Bobby, 73.

Yet as important as they are, people have fewer close friendships than they once did. Forty-percent of Americans say they don’t have a best friend at all, up from 25% in 1990. The best-friend gap is more pronounced for men, who typically have fewer close friends than women do. The percentage of men without any close friends jumped fivefold to 15% in 2021 from 3% in 1990, according to the May 2021 American Perspectives Survey.

Michael Addis, director of the Research Group on Men’s Well-Being, says, “We were taught for generations to focus on work, family, and productivity. Don’t share what is really going on inside with other men.”

Time together deepens bonds. Becoming a best friend takes 300 hours of togetherness, one study reported. Those fortunate enough to have friends through the decades develop a common history that fresh friendships often don’t.

Researcher and author Rodney Reeves has been studying trends in how men are faring in America. Here’s how he summarizes one of his troubling statistics:

One [statistic] stopped me in my tracks was from a 2018 survey conducted by Pew. The sample size was small, and made use of a word-association methodology, so I haven’t cited it in most of my work. But I still wonder about it. Every single respondent thought that “masculine” was a negative term when applied to women. That’s not surprising.

What was shocking was that most people—four out of five—thought the term “masculine” was negative when applied to men. (The term “feminine” was not mentioned often enough to make it into the analysis.) This finding is consistent with another survey finding that half of men, of all races, think that society “punishes men just for acting like men.”

Author Brené Brown was at a book signing where a woman and her husband approached her with books to get autographed. After Brown signed the books, the wife turned to leave and said, “Come on, hon” to her husband. “No,” he replied, “I want to talk with her for a second.”

Uncomfortable, Brown just waited. The man then looked at her and said, “I really love all this stuff you're talking about, this shame, and being perfect, and having to be someone we're not, and having to reach out. It is really powerful. But I never heard you mention anything about men.”

She felt relieved and said: “I don't study men.” He immediately responded, “That's convenient.” Nervously, she asked, “Why convenient?”

“It's convenient you don't talk about men,” he said, “Because when we reach out, when we tell our stories, when we share our shame experiences, we get the emotional s____ beat out of us.”

Brown was about to reply when he added, “Before you say anything about those dads, and those coaches, or about those bosses and mean bully friends, let me explain this to you. My wife and my three daughters, you just signed books for, they would rather see me die on top of my White Horse than see me fall off.” And then he just left.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This story reveals the stresses men face today—the pressure to stay on your “white horse,” to maintain your image of strength and invulnerability, rather than to trust in God’s grace and be vulnerable in Christian community.

After being in rock music for a season, Bob Carlisle's mood began to change in the mid 90's. He said, "I like anything that's done honestly and genuinely. Right now I'm more introspective and trying to write my own music." This led to Bob writing more about his family on his third solo album, Shades of Grace. Carlisle said, "I wanted to reveal more of myself as a father and as a husband. If I'm not nurturing my family, I have no business traveling."

The most inspirational song Carlisle recorded on the album Shades of Grace was a sentimental ballad about his daughter titled “Butterfly Kisses,” written for her 16th birthday. The song itself takes the listener through different stages of his daughter's life--of first being a child, then a teenager, and finally becoming a wife. The lyrics are extremely poignant and meaningful for all fathers.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Bible teaches the importance of nurturing and guiding our children through the different stages of their growth, including the more challenging seasons (Prov. 22:6; Eph. 6:4). Let's ask God for wisdom and strength to nurture our children through all their stages of growth and development. Let's ensure we give quality time to understand them, walk with them, and to pray for them.

Editor’s Note: "Butterfly Kisses" by Bob Carlisle is still a popular song today, even though it was released over 25 years ago. As of 2023, the song has over 100 million streams on Spotify, 200 million views on YouTube, is the 14th most played song on Christian radio, and is the 22nd most played song at weddings.

At one point, U.S. Men’s Soccer Team star Christian Pulisic was dropped from the starting lineup by head coach Gregg Berhalter. Pulisic said, “There were moments when he benched me and I wanted to kill the guy — I hated him, I was so angry. But then the next game comes along, and then I find myself in a better place. The way he handled a lot of situations, I have to give him a lot of credit.”

Pulisic said that he developed an understanding for Berhalter’s coaching methods during his first camp under the coach. In that camp, Pulisc suffered a slight injury. After getting a scan on the injury, Berhalter summoned Pulisic for a meeting. The coach suggested that the injuries may have happened because Pulisic wasn’t training with the intensity at which he played in games. Pulisic was taken aback at first, but eventually he took in the advice. He said:

It changed the way I look at training, even today. ... Listen, it wasn’t easy, and it took me a little while, but I said “Let me take this onboard,” and since then I’ve been in a much better place. It’s things like that. The way that he deals with players, you can tell he is passionate, and he cares about his players. He’s not going to tell you it easy, or what you want to hear, he is going to tell you what he feels is going to improve you.

Men have fewer friends than women and are at a greater risk of isolation. The gap has widened in recent years. A 2021 report identified a male “friendship recession,” with 15% of men saying they have no close friends, up from 3% in 1990.

The researcher of this study concluded that in 1990, nearly half of young men reported that when facing a personal problem, they would reach out first to their friends. Today, only 22% of young men lean on their friends in tough times.

In his novel Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck’s character Crooks pinpoints why this matters so much to men. At one point in the novel Crooks tells another man, “A guy needs somebody … To be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody … I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”

The writer and actor Daniel Beaty recalled a childhood game he played until he was three. When Beaty’s father knocked at his bedroom door in the morning, Beaty would pretend to be asleep, before jumping gleefully up into his father’s arms. Until the morning his father did not knock, because he was in prison. Three decades later, Beaty performed his poem “Knock, Knock,” which includes the following lines:

25 years later I write these words for the little boy

in me who still await his papa‘s knock …

Papa, come home cause I miss you

I miss you waking me up in the morning and telling me you love me.

Papa, come home, because there are things that I

Don’t know and I thought maybe you could teach me:

How to shave, how to dribble a ball, how to talk to a lady, how to walk like a man …

In his book Of Boys and Men, researcher Richard Reeves notes that until around 2015, the phrase “toxic masculinity” was just mentioned a few times in academic articles. But by 2017, there were thousands of mentions, mostly in the mainstream media.

The term is almost never defined, and is instead used to simply signal disapproval. Lacking a consistent definition, the phrase now refers to any male behavior that the user disapproves of, from the tragic to the trivial. It has been blamed, among other things, for mass shootings, gang violence, online trolling, climate change, the financial crisis, and an unwillingness to wear a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lumping together terrorists and delinquents, the phrase ultimately poisons the very idea of masculinity itself. The book contains interviews from dozens of adolescent boys about what they like about being a boy. Most boys couldn’t even answer the question. One college sophomore told the author, “That’s interesting. I never thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.”

Sis Vivian Richards is a legendary cricketer who represented the West Indies in their years of undisputed cricket dominance from the late 1970’s to the mid 1990’s. He is considered one of the greatest and most entertaining batsmen in the history of the game. During a time when many fearsome fast bowlers were playing international cricket, Richards never wore a helmet to protect himself from injury. He depended only on his skills, eyesight, and reflexes, to establish himself as one of the greatest of all time.

In a glittering career, Vivian Richards played in 121 international cricket test matches scoring 8540 runs at an outstanding average of 50.23. In spite of his extraordinary talent and the fame he found as a cricketer, Richards displayed a simplicity about his very humble beginnings.

In his autobiography, he spoke of the time when he was not well known and trying to establish himself in league cricket in England. In gratitude, he drew reference to the fact that a lesser-known cricketer from Sri Lanka, Shandy Perera, was a major influence on his cricket development with valuable knowledge and insights about the game.

It is commendable that a man who achieved such greatness in the sport would remember his humble beginnings and show gratitude to someone who had been an early influence on his successful career.

Similarly, the Bible tells us to, “Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith” (Heb. 13:7). Let’s always be grateful for those who have guided us spiritually along life’s journey.

The Glamour magazine YouTube channel has 4.43 million subscribers. It covers a wide variety of lifestyle topics. The one entitled "70 Men Ages 5 to 75: What's Your Greatest Fear?" has over 84,000 views.

Here are there top 8 fears, listed in ascending order of times mentioned:

8. End of the world due to climate change

7. Clowns

6. Heights

5. Evil people causing me harm

4. Being alone/Dying alone

3. Spiders/Snakes

2. Death of loved one

1. Failing to live up to my potential (most often mentioned)

You can watch the video here.

In his book Of Boys and Men, researcher Richard Reeves writes, “Men are much more likely to commit suicide than women. This is a worldwide long-standing pattern.” Reeves quotes an article from 2019 in Harper’s Magazine that talked about the sense of purposelessness among modern men. The author of the article states, “Several of my male friends struggled with addiction and depression, or other conditions that could be named, but the more common complaint was something vaguer …. A quiet desperation that, if I were forced to generalize, seemed to stem from a gnawing sense of purposelessness.”

Another study on male suicides tracked the words or phrases that men who have attempted suicide most often used to describe themselves. At the top of the list were two words: useless and worthless.

Writer Abigail Shrier goes in depth into the serious harm being caused to American pre-teen and teenage girls in her book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Numerous interviews of girls who desire to transition reveal some of the causes are not just uncertainty with their gender, which is experienced by many and soon outgrown.

The other primary causes she lists are:

• Low self-esteem because of impossible beauty standards.
• Depression and anxiety.
• The postings of cool social media influencers who advocates passionately for kids to choose to transgender at any sign of ambivalence.
• General media pro-transgender advocacy.

Surprisingly, a large part of the problem is excessively coddling parents who give their young daughters no reason or opportunity to rebel. She wonders:

Whether this transgender craze isn't partially the result of over-parented, coddled kids desperate to stake out territory for rebellion. Whether it is no coincidence that so many of these kids come from upper middle-class white families, seeking cover in a minority identity? Or is it the fact that they overwhelmingly come from progressive families - raised with few walls, they hunt for barriers to knock down.

The teen years are naturally tumultuous. Teens get emotional as they learn and mature. Parents are supposed to set limits. If you have a fight with your teenager, she might be angry with you, but she'll feel the presence of a guardrail. Sometimes, just knowing it's there may be enough. Your teenager may tell you she hates you; she may even believe it. But on a deeper level, some of her need for individuation and rebellion may be satisfied. If you eliminate all conflict through endless agreement and support, it may only encourage her to kick things up a notch.