Reforming FamilyLife & Public Culture

What I’d like to do first thing today is summarize where we’ve been the last few days because we have been exploring the struggle of becoming an authentic man. It seems it’s harder and harder to get there today, so I just want to remind you of some of the reasons why we find that journey so difficult. Here are some questions to reflect on today:

✅How many of you all attend your son’s games?

✅How many of you help him with his homework?

✅How many of you have taught your son what it means to be a man?

✅How many of you taught your son how he is to relate to a woman? How he dates and how he interacts with the opposite sex? How many of you taught him what his role is going to be in marriage and how he’s going to interface in that intimate setting with a woman?

Some of you may have grown up in a home that was hurt by favoritism. You grew up where maybe the older brother, or the older sister, or the younger son seemed to get all the attention. You kept playing off of that and it made you mad and angry because you didn’t know how to deal with it. So you defined your whole life there, in those early years off of a sibling; off of the older brother. Your life has been defined by that experience. Maybe your life is still, in some ways, defined by that experience.

Some of you grew up in a home where there were unholy alliances. Maybe because of the broken marriage that your parents had, your mom “married” you. She brought you into her world to be her chief companion. Or maybe, there was so much friction in the home, you as a son were drafted in to be the mediator between two parents. This caused you to become something that you didn’t want to be, but somehow you found it thrust upon you.

Some of you grew up in a home where there was abuse, or betrayal or abandonment. Or maybe there was just poor manhood modeling altogether. It wasn’t that there was anything necessarily wrong in the home, but it was just that your dad did a poor job of modeling manhood for you.

There is one very important reason for looking back at your family dynamics and that is because you can’t change what you don’t understand. It’s very important that you understand your family dynamics in order to change the things that need to be adjusted. So some of your behavior has to do with family dynamics.

Some of your behavior – even in a closer way – has to do with just dad himself. “Dad is destiny”, science has shown that it’s dad’s chromosomes that determine whether the sex of the baby is going to be a boy or a girl. But even more importantly research shows that it’s the presence of the dad in the family that determines whether the boy is going to be masculine or whether he’s going to be passive, or effeminate.

It’s dads presence in the family that determines whether the daughter is going to be feminine or whether she’s going to be overly assertive, promiscuous, or have a masculine look to herself. It’s dad’s presence that does that; because dad is destiny. And yet, in more and more homes, whether you know it or not, we’re in a society in where dad is AWOL- Absent Without Official Leave or MIA (Missing In Action).

Many of the families are fatherless. Dad is destiny and without dad, men struggle. Much of a son’s struggling – we’ll be talking more about it in the next few days – has it’s roots right back in the life of his dad.

So, I mention those three things; society, family dynamics and dad. How do you rise above those kinds of issues? How do you resist the temptation to submit to those forces or do you consider yourself the victim of those things? I don’t want you to play the victim. How do you rise above those issues and seize the kind of authentic manhood that we are going to be talking about in the next few days?

I believe that authentic manhood revolves around 3 critical issues. We’re going to spend most of our time on the first one. I’m just going to briefly mention the next two.

But here’s the first one, the one that we’re going to break down today. It’s this: Addressing the unfinished business of my past. Please note that I’m not talking about blaming my past for who I am. This is not a ‘blame game’ that we’re addressing here. It is much more important than that. I’m talking about getting in touch with my past and understanding it, so I can be the man I need to be, and I can change the things that I need to change. And that is critical in altering a man’s focus and stabilizing his stance so he can move forward in an empowered way to be the kind of man that he needs to be.

Every man carries baggage in his life. And how he unpacks that baggage will determine the kind of man that he’s going to become.

Inside a baggage is unfinished business. I call this unfinished business “manhood wounds.”

What do we mean by wounds? “A wound is any unresolved issue where a lack of closure adversely impacts and shapes the direction and dynamics of a man’s life now.”

Physical wounds leave physical scars, but the deepest wounds of a man’s life are not physical, comrades. This is so important for you to hear this because we men are pretty fragile. The deepest wounds a man experiences in life are the wounds of his soul, because many times they don’t heal up. They’re inflicted by circumstances. Those circumstances may or may not be of our own choosing. Regardless, these experiences leave open wounds that continue to affect the way we now live.

The natural instinct of a man, who has a wound of his soul, is just simply to pretend it’s not there; to bury it and just go on with his life. But the truth is, what happens is when we have a wound that we don’t deal with, some kind of unfinished business of the past, it does affect us and we tend to compensate for it. Just like we would if we lost the toes of our foot. We’d begin to live to compensate for it. The wounds of your soul are compensated for in the way that you live your life. For instance, if you grew up in a home where there was a lot of turmoil and you experienced a lot of pain. You know what some guys do in that? They compensate for that pain by learning not to feel. They just simply take a lid and put the lid on their feelings. That helps them get through those difficult years, but it’s very difficult, for instance, to have a warm relationship with people or an intimate relationship with a wife – or a warm engagement with children -- when you don’t feel. For some guys, when they put a lid on that pain, it keeps wanting to open. To compensate for that lid wanting to come up, they have to find coping mechanisms, like chemicals, drugs or alcohol Or pleasurable experiences like sex and pornography to offset the pain that they don’t want to deal with. That’s what I mean by an open wound.

I see five common wounds in most men today. here’s the first one; The “Absent Father Wound.” By “absent father” I mean either a dad who wasn’t there altogether, or a dad who was there, but he wasn’t there.

A lot of young men have never, ever finished this business with dad. It’s so easy in the midst of that wound to either get angry and close the lid on my feelings or pretend this is going to go away. But it doesn’t go away until you deal with it in an appropriate way. Then you can put it to rest so you can go on to live an authentic manhood life. That’s what I mean when I talk about this Father Wound. It is so important in men.

Then secondly, there is the Overly-bonded with Mother Wound. This looks pretty silly, doesn’t it? This wound often occurs when you were growing up, and mom – for whatever reason – invested too strongly in you. She didn’t mean to hurt you; that was not her intention. Many times she rushed in because she was trying to compensate for the dad that wasn’t there. Or maybe he was there, and not involved – but she got over-involved and she overly nurtured you, and overly controlled you, and she touched your world too much. She bonded with you too deeply and she took care of you too often.

You know what the results are? The results are that a guy goes out in life wounded by being overly-bonded with his mom. Many times, he has one of two reactions in that kind of environment. He either resents that control and fought with that control, and didn’t like that control and so he goes out with an image of ‘I’m not going to be controlled by anyone, particularly women’! So he always has a difficult time with women, because he either has to dominate them, or he’s scared of them, because he sees the shadow of mother in all of them. Or else, like a lot of guys today, he succumbed to this control and he succumbed to this power that bonded with him too deeply and so here he is at 25 or 35 or 45 or 55 – I see guys like this all the time, and mom, in whatever way – from whatever distance – is still dictating the terms, controlling their emotions, and violating the boundaries of his family. She calls up a 40- year-old businessman named Tom and says to Tom: “Tommy? Tommy, you and your family are coming to our house for dinner, right?” And his wife hates that but he can’t say ‘no’ because he has no boundaries with mom. He doesn’t know why. It’s because he has an Overly-Bonded with Mother Wound in his life.

Then there’s a third wound. It’s called “The All-Alone Wound.” Every man is supposed to be climbing a mountain, the Mountain of Manhood and just like Mountain Climbers, he’s supposed to have his rope attached with some other guys real tight. We were made to be attached to other men, so that we could climb that high mountain of authentic manhood.

But, you know, a lot of us have our ropes cut and we’re all alone. We have no close friends connected to us who have access to our inner life. Oh, they are connected to our outer life, but I’m talking about our inner life. So when we’re going through turmoil, we do so all by ourselves. We have no close friends connected to us who can cheer for us in the noble things of life. Those things we would like to tell somebody else, like how we stayed pure on that business trip with that female associate, or how we took our wife out to some special romantic evening, or how we’ve been investing in our sons or daughters in some special way. We need other guys to cheer for us. We want to tell them about those significant things, but there’s nobody to talk to about that. Who would listen to us?

One of the ingredients in modern life that’s so desperately missing, is older men attaching themselves, in friendship, to younger men. They are older men who get with younger men to encourage them and mentor them. Mentoring seems to be missing in our world today. Most young men have no older man around them who’s just admiring them and encouraging them in their life. The whole power of mentoring has been short-circuited. Do you older men know what it means for you to walk up to a younger guy, kind out of the blue, and put your hand on his shoulder and say, “I’ve been watching you. You know what? You’re good! I mean, you’re really good.”

That changes a young man’s life! Just those few words from an older veteran. Yet, we are disconnected in that regard. The switch has been pulled out and cut. And you know what? Both the younger men and the older men lose. The younger men lose the wisdom of the ages to help them, and the encouragement, and the admiration that comes – that causes them to walk taller, and climb higher. And the older men miss the energy and the deep sense of purpose mentoring a younger man will bring to their life, because we were wired to do that. So what happens in this All-Alone Wound is that we both lose. I want you to know, you’ve got to be connected and we will talk about how you get connected.

The next is what I call The Lack of a Manhood Vision Wound. It’s where you have no vision about who you’re going to be, all you’ve got is a short-range view, only as far as you can see. You have no help to carry you for the long haul.

And so, what happens is, most men are living in the ‘now.’ That’s the range of their vision. What’s the range of your vision? Tomorrow? Well, how about the week-end? You haven’t thought that far out yet. Haven’t got there. Then our current culture comes in - and it offers a stunted, short-sighted vision of manhood.

We’ll expand this term later, but for now let's look at ‘a conventional vision of manhood’.

In a short summary, here is what a conventional vision of manhood is all about. It tells a young man in high school or as he moves out to the work force or into college/University, it tells him, “Listen, if you’ll put your warrior face on. If you clamp down the armor tight and you work really hard, I know it’s going to hurt you, and it’s probably going to hurt your family, too -but if you’ll work really hard, in the end you’re going to get what you want and then you won’t need anybody. You’ll get there! You’ll be on top of the mountain!”

It tells you that in this insulated – isolated - self-sufficient, state-of-prosperity vision, you’ll be happy and satisfied. So, generation after generation of young men launch out with that warrior face on saying, “that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to take that hill!” At about 35 or 45 or 55, most of them finally burn out and say “it’s not working; I’ll never get there.” Then they feel disappointed with their lives. And the few who make it – the few who get to the top Then they find out the awful truth -- the conventional vision of manhood is a lie! It creates a great wound because we have no vision that will take us over a lifetime into a noble masculinity.

Finally, I want to mention the last one. It’s what I call The Heart Wound. Now, you may have gone through the first four of the wounds mentioned, and as you were reading, you were saying, “I’m sorry guys feel that way; I don’t have that wound.” But this wound – everyone has, because this is not a wound of nurture; this is a wound that we’re born with. This is a wound of nature.

Since the beginning of time, man has questioned why he feels drawn to do evil. Now, you don’t have to be a philosopher here today to think about this one. Just think for a moment . Have there ever been moments in your life where you just sat back and said to yourself, ‘Why do I find myself at times doing the things that I don’t want to do? That I know are wrong? Why do I keep investing myself in things that I know are going to hurt me and my family, and yet I keep doing it? Why do I get out of control? Why I can’t I do the things that are right? Why do I give in to temptation? To anger? Why is it that the things I know are right, and I know would help everyone – I can’t find the power to do?’ Have you ever asked those questions of yourself?

Sure you have. We’ve all experienced this particular wound at one time or another. The answer to all those questions is this, we all have a wound of the soul and spirit that no counselor can fix. It’s just part of our birthright, unfortunately. And it’s a wound that requires a deeper answer. Now, we’re going to address that deeper answer later on in the series, but here’s what I want you to know unless you’ve learned how to fix it, this problem will continually – every day – undercut your masculinity and your attempts at authentic manhood. That’s what the wound represents.

So here we are, with a baggage of wounds – some of us with a Father Wound, some of us with an Overly-Bonded with Mother Wound, some of us are just All-Alone; some of us Can’t See and all of us have a Wounded Heart. It’s all a part of the baggage we carry with us as we go about daily life.

How a man addresses this unfinished business will determine the kind of man he will become. So, the first issue in authentic manhood is addressing the unfinished business of my past.

Here’s what I want you to know today. I want to be real honest with you. Starting tomorrow, it’s going to be like we’ve been in a raft/wooden-boat. When you’ve taken one of those rafting/boat trips – you’ve been in with a group of people and you’ve been floating down the river having a good time, and then the guide says, ‘Get ready! We’re about to go into some white water.’

That’s where we’ll start tomorrow -- starting to move into that white water of masculinity to deal with this kind of unfinished business. It’s what we’re going to do for most of coming days.

Then, secondly – remember I said there were 3 things? I’ve only mentioned the last two briefly. I said the first thing that’s critical to authentic manhood is addressing finished business. The second is this; establishing a clear and compelling manhood vision.

In the coming Sessions, we’re going to carve out a vision that is clearly superior to the conventional vision of manhood that I just pointed out to you. You’re going to be excited about this vision.

And then, finally – I want you to know authentic manhood revolves around creating a high impact, workable plan for my life. We shared that plan yesterday. You need to start looking it over, especially Part I, because – if you notice on your plan – is called “Looking Back.” I want you to begin to answer those questions, but you need to start asking those questions now and thinking about your life in relationship to those questions. More importantly, that sheet – that first part that says “Looking Back” starts asking you to write down specific goals that you are going to set for yourself to address the wounds in your life. How you come up with a plan to address those Wounds in your life is going to determine – in part – the kind of noble, authentic man you will become.