Why Christians must reject “M.A.I.D”

I remember Christmas Eve of 1998 like it was yesterday. My Grandmother hadn’t been quite herself so she had been to the Dr. weeks earlier to investigate the problem. And that afternoon she got the phone call. She was informed that she had a stage 4 glioma in her brain, that it was cancerous, non-encapsulated, inoperable, and incurable. In other words… on Christmas Eve, 1998, my Grandma found out she had 3 months to live. She made it almost four. She was 60 years old.

Our family watched her mind completely disintegrate over the course of those months. From paranoia about her own sister trying to kill her, to not being able to even use a bathroom or eat food. Little by little, ability by ability, she got further and further from sanity and the dignity of self-reliance and became a care burden for both my Grandfather and her children.

One day, about a month before she passed, I was sitting in her living room near the foot of her hospice bed, watching my late mother try and fail through tears to get her to wake up and eat something. After a few minutes of frustrated effort I watched as my mother’s shoulders slumped, her face fell, she crumbled into tears and then said something that seared into my memory with force and something like malice… “Mom, just let go”… . Then Grandma did the ONE thing that I remember even more starkly than my mother’s request. She opened her eyes, halfway sat up, looked my mother squarely in her eyes and said “NO”.

It wasn’t what she said… it was HOW she said it. I heard more belief, more conviction, more determination in that single “no” than I have heard in the sum of a thousand sermons. I had never heard a tone of voice like that come out of any human being before or since. It awed me. Although, at the tender age of 10, I had no idea why.

Now I’m 37. And I DO know why it had that effect on me. Because my Grandma’s conviction to live resonated with that part of my soul that is designed to recognize that which is right, and true. In the same way that my Mom asking her to give up and die made me recoil in horror, her refusal made me say to myself…”I wanna go out like Grandma. Fighting”.

It wouldn’t be difficult for ANY of us to understand what motivated my Mom’s request. It’s plainly obvious. She didn’t want to see her mother suffer any longer. She knew the end was near. She just wanted it all to be over. I’m pleased to report that I have a lot more grace for my Mom’s moment of weakness now than I did then.

But… what was it that drove my Grandma’s “NO”? Where did that come from? While we were struggling to make sense of her bull-hearted determination to continue living, essentially grieving her before she had truly passed, she was fighting a fight we couldn’t see or percieve. Grandma was in the trenches with one of those truths that God writes onto the code of our spiritual DNA. ‘Life… is precious indeed, and we must always fight to preserve it’.

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All that took place in 1998/99’. Just 7 years removed from Dr. Jack Kevorkian famously losing his medical license in my native home of Detroit MI for providing pharmaceutical means for over 100 patients in what was (back then) referred to as “physician assisted suicide”.

As little as 35 years ago, one of the more liberal states in America took away a Dr.’s right to practice because he provided terminally ill people with the means to end their life on their own terms… things have changed.

In 2016, Canada (a country that is always 10-15 years ahead of America in their decent into moral insanity) legalized what they now call “MAID”. For the uninitiated, that acronym stands for “medical assistance in dying”. They arrived at this decision by their agreement with the idea that terminally ill people ought to have the right to choose the time and mode of their death. In the first year of legalization, MAID accounted for just over 500 deaths in Canada, the vast majority of which involved patients either very near the end of their life or diagnosed with a terminal prognosis. And in the decade following that decision, Canada has reached the point where, now, 5% of their population dies when they choose to die… with the ‘help’ of a doctor. READ THAT AGAIN… FIVE PERCENT of all people who will die in Canada in the coming year will die by suicide. To place the shock of that in context: in 2024 just 1.6% of American deaths were ruled a suicide. MAID has helped Canada better than triple America’s numbers.

And if you think that number is as high as it is because Canada more than triples the global average in terms of its population of people who have received a terminal diagnosis, you would be dead wrong. The number got that high because the standard of “terminally ill” didn’t last but a few years. Then the standard that qualifies a person to seek out MAID was lowered, and then lowered, then they lowered it some more.

Today, if you are Canadian and you simply believe that your life is no longer worth living, you need only to express that to your primary care physician, and tada! You’re qualified. I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating or mongering in fear. That actually is the reality in Canada. They no longer require that minors have the support of their parents in the decision, either. Canada now has a society in which a teenage boy of 14, experiencing his first heartbreak, can have tax-payer funded medical intervention that results in his intentional demise, and if the parents try to intervene, they can be arrested. That actually happened. And now their son is dead.

This is the culture of death on full display in all of its ugliness. This… is a moral disaster.

In the last 8 days, both New York and Illinois have introduced potential legislation to bring this madness to our country. The idea that I would not see this insanity make its way to America in my lifetime has proven to be faulty. And now? Here we are. Standing right on the precipice of opening the most lethal “Pandora’s Box” imaginable. Right here. In the US of A.

This issue deserves the attention of every single person who believes in the sanctity and intrinsic value of human life. Because we’re rapidly losing ground in the fight to protect it. The culture of death is winning and I fear that those of us who live out of a pro-life position are woefully unprepared to have this argument. And the unsettling truth is that should America begin moving in the direction of legalized MAID we might very well find out that “pro-life” doesn’t necessarily mean “anti MAID” for everyone.

Every one of us needs to ask ourselves where we stand on this issue. Because much like the revolution of western worldview in terms of sex and marriage that has taken place over the last 4 decades, the destructive arguments here begin with transgressive questions that require a well thought out and serious answer.

What will you say to someone in your family who is suffering, REALLY suffering, who tells you that they simply do not want to keep fighting. What will you say when they tell you “I can’t keep doing this”…”I have the right to die with dignity”… “Why should you or anyone have the right to stop me from making my own choices”.

The thing that makes these questions so difficult is that they seem so reasonable to the modern sensibility, saturated as it is by the conviction to elevate autonomy without boundaries. And the issue is made even more complicated by the reality that, to some extent, freedom and liberty are elevated and affirmed by a biblical worldview.

My fear for the more ‘libertarian’ conservatives will be that they lack a sufficient category for God’s authority over life and death in every respect. That they will be more likely to fall for the seemingly sensible arguments made in favor of allowing anyone and everyone to simply decide that their life is not worth continuing. And I fear for how rapidly that standard of ‘worth living’ is declining.

The Word of God is in NO WAY ambiguous about who rightfully claims sovereignty over life and death. Spolier Alert: It isn’t us. The maker of heaven and earth claims that authority only for himself, and part of “joining Christ in his suffering” (see Phil 3:10-11, Romans 8:16-18, 1st Peter 2:20-21) is our willingess to suffer with dignity, and our refusal to cave to the temptation that WE know better than HIM with respect to when and how we die.

Romans 8:18.

“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” (ESV)

Regardless of what we suffer, we can choose dignity in HOW we suffer, because no matter what we suffer the God of heaven has such rapturous beauty, such glorious peace, such eternal pleasure in store for his people that we are simply wasting breath and energy when we seek to compare it to what we endure during our short time on earth. And we make much of Jesus by our declaration that he, not we, will determine the moment we breathe our last.

Even in the face of the grim pall of death…. He is no less sovereign, he is no less good.

In Memoria: Gabe Guzman

I arrived at Ft. Benning GA on Sept. 1st 2006. I was a scrawny, arrogant, plucky little punk from Michigan whose social skills left a lot to be desired and I didn’t have a CLUE what I was getting myself into. Between that and being far and away the youngest member of 1st platoon (Shout out ECHO 1/19) I wasn’t doing terribly well at making friends. Much like high-school, I had made myself an easy target for being the butt of jokes and pranks. I even survived a few physical assaults! (humble brag). Early on in the experience I had serious doubts about whether or not I was going to make it through OSUT. But I had one thing going for me in a major way. I had an EPIC battle buddy. A battle buddy is the man to whom you are CONSTANTLY attached and do not do anything beyond shower and shit without. And due to the Army’s love of organizing absolutely everything with the alphabet, my battle buddy happened to be Gabe Guzman. (Guzman/Hampton=bunkmates)

Gabe Guzman was a 23 year old Honduran born blue blooded bad ass. He was crazy motivated and high speed as they come. If you gave him a task to complete he would do it immediately and with a high degree of excellence and proficiency. He was extraordinarily well liked by our entire company and even though they would NEVER admit it, the Drill Sgts. had a pretty broad soft spot for Gabe and his legendary “impressions of white people” too. It didn’t take Gabe more than a week to see that I was really struggling (in every way) and it became clear to him that if I was to survive this 14 week ordeal, I was gonna need a lot of help. And help he did! Gabe spent every spare second helping me square myself away. He forced me to do extra PT during down times. He forced me to eat the stuff I didn’t like because he knew I needed the calories. He forced me to write people back home even when I didn’t feel like writing letters because he knew that correspondence would be a good thing for my mentality and would help keep me tethered to what mattered most to me. He helped me study for tests and no big deal but I WOULD NEVER HAVE MADE IT THROUGH LAND NAV without him holding my hand. He showed me by example that the calling placed on a soldiers life… is excellence.

After the first couple of weeks I started to hit my stride. I saw myself needing a hand from Guzman less and less. The platoon noticed too. Guys who would have otherwise been choking me out or hucking MRE snack bread at me or calling me names I won’t repeat began to treat me with the same dignity and respect that Gabe had been getting from pretty much day one. I began to feel less like a pupil, and more and more like a peer. By the time graduation day rolled around Gabe had turned me into a physically fit, self motivated, bright futured Infantryman in the U.S. Army.

The next time I saw Gabe after we graduated was at Ft. Myer VA. I was stationed with The Old Guard (the Army’s official ceremonial unit). The majority of my duties were firing party. We performed the 21 gun salute during funerals for Army personnel in Arlington National Cemetery. One August day after we had finished our mission (funeral) we were taken back to the Chapel on post to help police up the place and get it ready for the next funeral. I reached down to pick up a eulogy pamphlet off one of the pews…. and the photograph staring back at me belonged to Sgt. Gabriel Maria Guzman. He was killed on May 28th 2008 in Kabul Afghanistan during an ambush after being struck multiple times in the head by enemy small arms fire. I held it together until I got back to my barracks room a couple of hours later and the proceeded to fall completely apart. I sobbed into my pillow for over an hour. I had lost someone who had elevated my personal threshold for admiration and respect. I had fired the salute at the funeral of one of my closest friends… and I hadn’t even known it until it was over. I would go on to walk to his grave every Monday evening until my time at Ft. Myer came to a close.

Gabe left behind a wife and son (who graduated high school yesterday btw). And he left behind a legacy that I have tried to embody every day of my life since the day he physically carried me the last half mile of a ruck march. He showed everyone he served with what it meant to be selfless to a fault. And he gave his last full measure of devotion on the altar of liberty. Fighting to eradicate an oppressive and wicked ideology that drove him to join the Army in the first place.

It has been 15 years to the day since Gabe Guzman died. And as we enjoy our Memorial Day weekend, may we also say a prayer for the thousands of our countryman who have a story like mine, because they loved and lost someone who had a story like Gabe Guzman’s.

How God saves Muslims… and everyone else

Social media can often be a trainwreck. This has been well documented over a long period of time. But occasionally something amazing happens and you’re forced to remember that when God said that he can take things that human beings do or create with evil intent, and use them to accomplish his purposes (Genesis 50), and when he said that he was “sending forth the word from my mouth, and that it would not return void but will accomplish its purposes” (Isaiah 55) he wasn’t blowing smoke.

As I was poking around on Reddit today I came across a post in a sub I hang out in where the original poster had questions and was seeking help with respect to converting to Christianity. As much as I would love to link the sub reddit so you can see the post I’m not going to because this is the internet. And people are nosy. And the man who wrote this post lives in a country and social context that is much different than mine, and if you’re reading this, more than likely yours as well. In my country I am free to gather in a pretty big building on Sundays. That building is filled with so many other Christians that we need to have the service twice. Nobody is ashamed or afraid to be there. We can sing loudly while a 5 piece band plays songs about Jesus through amplification. And there is an actual police officer who volunteers his time to stay in the lobby, armed and ready to protect us from any threat that might come through the doors with intent to do us harm. In Elijah’s country, the few Christians there are meet in small rooms, in secrecy, fear, anxiety and usually under the cover of darkness… because for them being a Christian may very well mean that a uniformed official from their government may kick the door in and arrest them, prosecute them, and maybe even execute them for no reason other than they have followed Jesus Christ in faith, and are not ashamed of the Gospel. They will have no legal recourse, no rights, and at the absolute best they will be shunned by their families, and excommunicated from their societies.

Rather than leave this poor soul to the comments section I sent him a DM and asked, “has anyone helped you yet?”.

“No”, He replied.

He asked if we could talk via facetime because English was smoother for him being spoken rather than written. So I downloaded WhatsApp since I don’t have any other social media by which we could communicate from 7,600 miles apart. And after a bit of me struggling to get to grips with the app (I am officially getting old at 35, hooray!) We were speaking to one another… we spoke for four of the most thrilling hours of my life.

We got to know each other fast and discovered we had a ton of common interests. He told me about his love for cricket and all things United Kingdom. I told him about my deep affection for golf and all about my family. He told me about his background and what he has been wrestling with. We discussed and educated one another on some of the differences between the faith tradition that he was raised in and the one I was raised in. He was brutally honest with me and clearly desperate to know more about Jesus. To be honest I really don’t know that I had ever heard more thoughtful questions from someone his age. He was obviously in the fight of his life over guilt that he could not place and was failing more and more to understand. He knew the doctrines of Islam well and had found them to be unhelpful, unsatisfying, and restrictive. And he was so tired of being where he was spiritually and emotionally that he had formulated, and prepared for a plan to take his own life. Completely dead… Just like I once was… in his trespasses and sins.

I answered question after question to the best of my ability. Respectfully addressing and correcting what he believed about Jesus that was false, and even helping him to develop a sort of framework for how to understand what the Bible actually is and how we arrived at the canon of scripture. And then the conversation took on a much more personal tone. I shared MY story with Elijah, and as I began to tell him the details of how I came to my saving faith… the picture began to take shape. He began to express to me the deep and very real fear that was attached to this proposition for him. I could tell… ‘the Holy Spirit is after this mans heart, he knows it, and he’s scared’.

“If I become a Christian, I cannot tell my family, I cannot tell my friends, I don’t know where I will go to Church to learn about Jesus”

“Elijah, Jesus said that the only people who were worthy to follow him were those who would hate their mothers, their fathers, and even their own life. The cost of following Jesus for you will almost certainly be very very high. But the promise of the Gospel is that if we lay down our life we get his. And his is eternal and better than anything this world has to offer. The deal is that we give up our life, and we get Jesus, and Jesus will be enough come what may.”

After a pause he asked, “will you teach me how to pray?”

“Of course man.”

I explained to him the basics. You don’t have to be somewhere special to pray. God can hear you wherever you are no matter what, and there are no magic words, and so on. I did show him the Lord’s prayer because that’s just a good one to know. And I told him that when you pray you just talk to God honestly with whatever you have because he already knows everything that’s in you anyways. And then… we prayed.

I’m not going to try and transcribe the prayer but essentially, Elijah and I went into the throne room of the Most High and I asked Jesus to save him…

Jesus already had. Because after I said “Amen”…

“How do I convert?”

“Buddy you’re already converted! If you’re asking me that question and you’re telling me you want to be a Christian then that literally means that you are one! You have a whole new destiny, a whole new identity, and God has opened your eyes to believe. Welcome to the kingdom of light!”

“SERIOUSLY? THAT’S AWEOSME! Can I have a new name?”

“Well The Bible tells us that when God redeems us he gives a new name that only he knows, and you don’t get to know it until you meet him and he calls you by that name for the first time. But there isn’t anything unbiblical about changing your earthly name. Do you want a new name?”

“I’ve always been obsessed by the name Elijah. Can I be Elijah?”

“Sure bud! Do you want me to call you that?”

“I wouldn’t mind it”

When I saw a Reddit post that came from a Muslim asking questions about my faith, the idea of engaging did not feel safe or unscary. Some of the thoughts I had before I pressed send on that message were: “But what if this is a scammer who just wants my phone number so he can rip me off” – “What if he judges me? What if he hears the Gospel and it offends him so terribly that it turns him off to Jesus rather than drives him towards Jesus?” – “What if he asks me something that I just don’t have an answer for?”: It would have been a lot easier to just scroll on. I would’ve kept my plans for that Saturday afternoon and not given up most of a beautiful day to be on the phone. But because I didn’t, because I said yes to Jesus again, I have a brand new friend and co-heir with Christ. His name is Elijah and God saved him using Reddit and Whats App and just a little bit of my obedience and he started ALL OF IT…. by dropping a little vibration in my spirit that said ‘hey, I’m up to something incredible over here… you wanna come play?’

Our faith has not moved forward through the generations by our wealth, our intelligence, our stature in society, or any other thing we try to claim as our own or take credit for. No… OUR faith, once for all delivered to the Saints, has moved from Judea and Galilee to the ends of the earth on the blood of martyrs, and by the day to day little acts of obedience of God’s people who loved him more than they loved their own comfort and safety. Today God saved a Muslim who had never heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ and who did not own a Bible. That’s something worth remembering the next time you receive an invitation from the King of Glory to be a part of his unstoppable plan to seek and save the lost. Jesus didn’t die for those who might believe. He died for those who WILL believe.

You ARE being discipled

What does it mean to be a disciple? It really depends on who you ask. So for the sake of a common reference point, let’s ask Merriam Webster for their take on the definition.

 Disciple : one who accepts and assists in spreading the doctrines of another. . . On this occasion I would say they have it spot on. Here’s why…

Discipleship isn’t a reality exclusive to Christians. The world is teaching, shaping, whispering, wooing, influencing… all the time. Everything you watch on Netflix or read on Reddit or Twitter has some kind of message or narrative that it promulgates, supports, or defends. And even if you’re not aware of it, you are constantly being discipled. Don’t miss that, ok? We’re talking about something that is by definition an external reality. This happens to us, no matter what we think or do.

What we do get to choose is who and what we allow to disciple us. We make decisions every day about what we read, what we watch, who’s podcast we listen to…etc. And to some degree or another regardless of our level of awareness, all that we take in bears it’s own specific effect on us. It all teaches. It all shapes. It all adds to or removes something of how we see and understand both ourselves and the world around us.

We should view our relationships with people through the same lens. It seems like the generally held belief is; ‘people only influence me to the extent that I allow’. This may be a common assumption but it’s a wildly arrogant one. We are nothing like as good as we think we are at throttling back the input from the people we surround ourselves with. In his 2005 book “12 Pillars”, entrepreneur and motivational speaker Jim Ronh famously wrote that “we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with“. While I tend to think he’s overstating the point just a little, let’s consider these passages together:

Corinthians 15:33 Do not be deceived: Bad company ruins good morals.

Colossians 2:8 See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.

Proverbs 4:14 Do not enter the path of the wicked, and do not walk in the way of the evil.

This is a warning from scripture to be careful who has a voice in your life. And you will not always nail that. Somewhere along the line you will have a well intentioned fool try to lovingly speak into your life only to lead you astray. I have been both he who was led by fools, and the fool leading someone.

Once you have considered the realities surrounding discipleship, and once you begin to get your head around what’s really at stake… the lines become very stark. The world is not only trying to disciple you but they are doing so in direct opposition to the creator, God, with the end game being your ultimate destruction. The messaging isn’t even subtle anymore, it wasn’t all that subtle 100 years ago! In the poem Invictus, William Ernest Henley sums up quite nicely the overall message of our post enlightenment society.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

      Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

      How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.

How’s THAT for a Twitter bio? This touches right on the message of our day… You are all you need. Happiness is found in the best version of yourself NO MATTER WHAT that looks like. You have the right to determine what’s right for you and nobody else. There is no authority higher than your deepest desires, and therefore you must satisfy those desires…. It all sounds good, it all sounds like it makes sense, and every word of it down to the punctuation is a soul damning lie.

Having people in your life who have your permission to say hard things to you, confront your idols and call them out for what they are, and enter into uncomfortable spaces with boldness and loving kindness is a powerful defense against the lies of our enemy. Satan desires many things for you but he wants nothing for you like he wants you spiritually isolated. Having a robust relationship with another believer is how you say “no” to that and reject it not just in word, but in practice. It’s THE best way to develop your spiritual muscles and reflexes. Like a sparring partner in an MMA gym, it trains you to make violence against your flesh while also training you to feed your own soul with the word. Things like confession and repentance become less abstract and ideological and more on the ground and practical. And in time you get to see real victory over once dominating sins. All while enjoying the companionship of another Christian who can celebrate your wins, console and encourage you in your losses, and experience the wondrous joy of growth in Christ.

We have to be serious about this. We have to be deliberate about it. Because no matter what we tell ourselves; the shaping of our hearts and minds is a constant and primarily external thing. And if it’s going to happen to us one way or the other, it falls to us to chose the direction in which we will be moved. The ways in which we will be discipled… Like it or not, the default posture of your heart will drag you towards the lie, towards isolation. The truth is in the other direction. The one that doesn’t look as appealing. The one that will cost. Friends, hear me… Whatever it costs you… it will be worth the cost.

On Mentors: Introduction

The temptation to isolate is often powerful. Even the most extroverted of us have the tendency to dive inward and put the walls up around certain parts of ourselves. Regardless of who you are or what stirs up in you the impulse to hide, one thing remains true across the spectrum of personalities… we are not designed for isolation.

God created us to be social beings. In the beginning, God makes Adam in his image, and in this moment the brokenness of sin is only a future reality. All is right and good with creation and yet…

“the LORD God said, “It is NOT good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for[fn] him.” (Gen. 2:18 emphasis added) And so God gives him Eve. Thus begins the first human relationship. The cherry resting neatly atop the sundae that is God’s then flawless and unbroken creation. Even before sin came into the picture and shattered the shalom of the universe… we needed each other to do life the way God designed it to be done. Community wasn’t a fix for something, it was the plan all along!

Obviously, not every relationship is designed to be as intimate or carry as much weight as that of a husband and wife. However, there is at least one relationship that should come pretty close if you want it to achieve the purpose for which God designed it. I am of course speaking of spiritual mentors.

This is the first in what will be a series of essays meant to encourage you to press hard into the kinds of relationships that go deeper than mutual hobbies or small talk. I was moved to write this by my dear friend, Brad Clay, who requested that I write on the mentor relationships I’ve had and how they shape me. Because my main goal in everything I write is to be helpful and to connect deeply with those of you who read this, I will be approaching this a little more broadly than to simply write on me and my own journey. Hence… a series of blogs/essays on the topic of mentoring and being mentored. I hope that you’ll read all of them. But more than that, I hope they are received not as a holier-than-thou lecture, but as an invitation into a life free from the bondage of isolation and pretense. You were designed by God to have deep, honest, loving relationships built around growing in intimacy and holiness. The relentless refrain of the New Testament is “one another”.

In later blogs I will cover my own mentors in detail. But my first mentor after I became a Christian was a guy named Drew Hildenbrand (you’ll hear much more about him later). The way I see it Drew taught me 5 or 6 things that added up to a paradigm shift for me. One thing he told me as he tried to impress upon me the weight of what he intended for our time together the very first time we sat down together in June of 2010 was; “to be 99% known is to be unknown”. My intent is to make that statement the heart-cry of this series of essays. Something deep inside of you knows that you were made for real relationship, and I want to be honest with you… these are hard relationships at times. It is not easy to let someone in and lift the vail on the darkness in you that you think is so dark it means God can’t love you or use you. It’s not easy to be honest about your doubts. It’s not easy to be honest about your pain. It’s not easy to be honest about your sin, but it is ALWAYS worth it.

We place different labels on these relationships. Mentor-mentee, accountability partner, “life coach” (yuck), teacher-student, pastor, counselor, elder… people we go to when we need advice or counsel. Other humans we feel we can trust and confide in. But how many of us actually have that on a regular basis? There is a lot of objective evidence to suggest we are losing our skillset for developing this level of intimacy in our lives with anyone at all (particularly since social media and then well… COVID became a thing). This is not just a “church thing”. Our whole culture is all in on “you do you”… even when it means you doing you… alone. The Church writ large has not come away from this shift unscathed.

More than ever we are socially awkward and spiritually frustrated. More than ever our churches are filled with Christians who are getting absolutely worked in their war against their flesh. Living a cheap imitation of the life of adventure they’ve been made for. Sitting on the sidelines suffering in silence and utterly bored by their faith. I am just as guilty. I can recall occasions when I led worship in church on a Sunday morning while languishing in a kind of voluntary loneliness. We all know how to put on the mask and roll into church like we woke up floating, glowing in the effervescent hue of the Holy Spirit… meanwhile, our house is burning to the ground behind us. Maybe some of us don’t even think about developing the kind of bond with someone that would allow us to tap them on the shoulder and say ‘I’m not ok…my house is on fire’. For many of us the deepest relationship we have is surface at best. We are treading water and tired and can’t articulate how desperate we are for something more meaningful, something that might stand a chance at actually producing some growth in us that spills out onto the lives of those around us.

Of course… these conversations and relationships happen all the time. Do you know a mature believer? Someone whose life just looks the way you desperately want your life to look? I can promise you that if you ask them about the role the kinds of relationships I’m describing have played in their growth they will ALL tell you they were of utmost significance. Every Christian in history can point to someone who mentored them. No Christian in history has seen God’s ultimate purpose and good design become a reality in their life without them.

What’s the answer? How do we even begin to address this? The answer isn’t simple or short. And that’s a tough thing for us these days. As our attention spans have collectively shrank, it will require more of us if we want to see real growth in this area of life. But my sincere hope is that what you read in these blogs will inspire you to seek out men/women who will walk alongside you and speak into your life. Jesus purchased you with his life so that you could have the fullness of life. But that fullness lies on the other end of a long and vulnerable road. It is my honest prayer that you will decide to walk it with me. Let’s go!

Genesis: Drew Hildenbrand

I remember the day I met Drew Hildenbrand like it was yesterday. I had been saved a few days before (June of 2010). Jeremy and I (one of my oldest friends and the person most instrumental in my conversion) were walking through Brownsburg talking about Jesus with anyone who would listen. Then out of this little alley comes a minivan, seated in the drivers seat was Drew, 31 years old and just the most “youth pastor” looking dude I’d ever seen… given that Jeremy was carrying an 8 foot cross on his back… Drew had questions. We talked for about 10 or 15 minutes and he heard my story and Jeremy’s. He invited us to come to Church @ Main the following Sunday morning and speak to the high school kids he pastored (WILD move in retrospect considering he barely knew us. I mean we could’ve said literally anything in there). We accepted the invite. And thus began 2 years of some very intense discipleship. This is how I met my first real mentor.

The very first time Drew and I sat down in his office I knew there was going to be something different about this. His tone was serious. He never broke eye contact. He sat behind an open Bible (the very Bible he would later pass on to me that I still use to this day) and told me… “Shane, we have an opportunity to do something real here. And I’m in if you’re in, but I need to know that you’re really truly in“. I wasn’t sure that I knew what he meant and I told him so. So he explained… “The only way to get to Godliness is through all your junk. Which means if you’re going to sit in this room with me every week and ask me to counsel and teach you, you’re not going to be permitted to hold anything back from me”… Nobody in church had ever been so direct with me so immediately. The idea that I wouldn’t even have the option to be guarded was terrifying to me. At that moment I realized my entire 21 years had been lived never really being completely honest with anybody. Everyone I knew only knew the version of me I wanted them to see. And Drew wasn’t about to tolerate any of that nonsense.

I actually had to go outside and smoke a cigarette (a habit I would kick 11 years later), I needed to really think about whether I wanted to do this or not. I could tell there was something different about Drew and what he intended for our time together, the road ahead looked scary. But I was SO compelled by and drawn to him. There was something of him that I wanted to rub off on me. And for the first time I got my head around the idea that maybe, JUST maybe, there was something to be gained from being truly known.

So… I went back into his office… Sat back down…. Looked him in his face and said…. “Drew, I’m in”.

For two incredible years I sat with Drew almost every week and let him speak into my life. I let him tell me what to do, what to read, I got permission from him before I started dating again, we sat together in church, we ate meals together…He counselled me through reconciling with my Dad, He never once stopped trying with me. I was not then (and probably am not now) a particularly easy person to mentor. Even less easy to love. But what Drew saw when he looked at me was not a ‘project’ or a job. He saw me as a hurting and very messy brother in Christ. He saw an opportunity to step into a difficult space and love me like Jesus loves him… unconditionally.

This is a photo of the page in my Bible that separates the new and old testaments. A decade ago I wrote the 5 most important things I learned from Drew on the page. I refer back to it often.

Near the end of 2012 I began a relationship with a girl that Drew warned me strongly against. I didn’t take his advice and the relationship he and I had changed. For a while he just kind of kept me at arms length. The air between us was thick and full of tension. I had convinced myself that what I was getting into was permissible (not ‘right’, a very important distinction) and when I had made it clear that I intended to pursue this relationship even to the point of living in sin… Drew did something that, in hindsight… must’ve felt absolutely impossible and heart wrenching at the time, but was 100% right. He called me one last time to plead with me to do the right thing, and then he said “Shane, if you’re going to do this than I’m going to have to ask you not to call yourself a Christian”. It felt like someone had punched me in my soul. And after that Drew just let me go. He let me chase what I wanted more than I wanted God. 4 years later it all came crashing down and I still remember thinking…”I should’ve listened to him, WHY didn’t I listen to him?”.

I can say pretty definitively that I would not be who I am today if it hadn’t been for the years i got to spend with Drew. His unrelenting faithfulness in the face of my inexhaustible foolishness must have been so wearisome for him at times. To watch me trail off onto the heavily trodden path of pride and self-indulgence again and again and again. To put his arm around me and invite me to sit with him when I showed up for Church one Sunday still a little drunk from the night before could NOT have been comfortable. He must’ve been SO tempted to frustration and discouragement when I would take 2 steps forward and 7 steps back… But as long as I was striving for faithfulness, he absolutely refused to leave me and watch me die. I cannot help but wonder what it’s like for him to watch my life now? Now that we’re both far on the other side of our time in the fray together. I pray that he sees the juice as being well worth the squeeze.

Drew is a constant presence in my mind. Rarely does a day go by when I don’t hear him in my inner dialogue reminding me to be careful what I’m looking for, and that I will always have much more to be humble about than I do to be proud of. And largely because of the impact he had on my life… one thing I am always looking for are young men who are like I was at that stage in my life. Foolish, arrogant, ferocious, but starving for more of Jesus. So that I can sit across from them, look them in the face, and tell them … “The only way to get to Godliness is through all your junk. Which means if you’re going to sit in this room with me every week and ask me to counsel and teach you, you’re not going to be permitted to hold anything back from me”…

One last note on Drew… He’s still doing the same thing today. Young men like Matt Mugumya who is now a pastor himself (and who KNOWS how many countless others over the years)Luke, and Rashad are over there at Church @ Main sitting humbly at his feet and learning how to be disciple makers. So you see how this works? Because 12 years ago, a ~relatively new to ministry~ youth pastor obeyed the promptings of the spirit and struck up a conversation with a lunatic with a cross on his back (I cringe HARD at that now)… I (a humble ape) am writing to you as well as mentoring other believers on the topic of Christian discipleship. Isn’t that bananas??? This is the fruitful harvest available to you if you are willing to take the risk that Drew and I took and commit to being known deeply. Oh and BTW… This past Sunday (9/19/22) my oldest son Roman made a profession of faith and took communion with me for the first time…. in the sanctuary of Drew’s church. How amazing is that? What an extraordinary gift. I have so much to thank Drew Hildenbrand for I could fill pages. But I’m most thankful for his ferocious commitment to care for me on God’s terms and not on his own. And as I have struggled to be known more and more in my walk with Jesus, I count it one of the great honors of my life to have been so well loved… despite being so well known… by someone like Drew Hildenbrand.

A tiny blog about tiny prayers

I write you from a very frustrated place tonight. A place only spoken of in hushed whispers and frightened tones. A place that has claimed the sanity of many and driven legions of otherwise stable adults into fits of simultaneous tears and laughter. The place from which I write?….. The terrible twos. I have to confess that I am on about 3 hours sleep thanks to a random and unexplained bout of insomnia last night coupled with a toddler who decided that 3 am is definitely the time to wake up and ask us how we’re doing (It’s 3 am I must be lonely… sorry, had to). It’s been a tough week and I haven’t been feeling myself. Mainly, I’ve been really angry.

I’m angry because my week isn’t going exactly the way I want it. I’m angry because Owen is getting to a stage where he tests me on EVERYTHING. I’m angry because I’m worn out. Like all of us, he’s a sinner. The bent towards rebellion is just deep in him and I am weary of the work of training that out of him as best I can. It has made my interactions with my son much more tense and a lot less fun. More and more I find myself having to breathe deep (more often than not I get a loving reminder from Megan to do so) and calm myself down deliberately so I don’t say or do something I’ll need to repent of and seek forgiveness for later. I am now somewhere near the limits of what I feel like my psyche can take from this kid. Every door in my home has crayon on it. There are 14 different varieties of snack smashed into the carpet. And I’m pretty sure he moves my stuff around just to mess with me. The fact is… I have a 2 year old in a 4 year old’s body. And mathematically that makes him twice as exhausting to try and contain.

So… just minutes ago I was putting him to bed. No big deal, right?

FALSE!!! (In my very best Dwight Schrute).

The calm, orderly, dignified process that was bedtime for the first 28 months of his life has been replaced by a cacophony of chaos and wrestling and shouting and crying. Have you ever tried to put training underwear on a 40 lb. 2 year old (not even exaggerating a little… this kid weighs 40 lbs) who, by the way… does NOT want to wear them? If you haven’t been blessed with that experience, just imagine trying to defuse a bomb while it’s detonating. The list of things I would rather do includes things like falling down stairs whilst wearing leg braces, being on fire… stuff like that. Getting him down nowadays is a full fledged war complete with strategy, tactics, alliances, weapons… it gets real. Rarely am I not bitten or choked at least once during this nightly ordeal and while bedtime was once a highlight of my day… I now get literal anxiety over it.

IN THE FACE

However… Every single night…

When I put Owen to bed…

I pray over him…. and the prayer basically never changes. It goes something like this. “Lord, thank you so much for Owen. Thank you for giving ME the privilege of being his Dad. Help me be the kind of Dad that never stops pointing him to you and trying to convince him that you’re the most beautiful thing in the universe. Help me to always see him how you see him. Help me to remember that he’s not really mine, he’s yours. Please protect him from my sin. God… please save my son at a young age. Please let there never be a day in his memory that he didn’t know, love, and follow hard after you. Help him to sleep well and have dreams about what you’re like… amen”…

Something like that.

Because we pray as a family over meals and together at bedtime, Owen has caught on to the routine. He folds his little hands, bows his little head, and starts speaking to the God he cannot yet comprehend in toddler gibberish that only he and God understand. He always mentions food in his prayers (because… he’s just a big fan), and he almost always remembers to mention his mommy. I have not yet earned a spot on his prayer list. Now, when we sit down for dinner Owen makes it a point that HE gets to say a prayer. That’s always what it is. Just a tiny little prayer… that ends in the cutest “amen” you ever heard in your life. I try my very best to cherish every single one of those prayers. And I am pleading with the Lord that one day he’ll breathe life into them.

Tonight as I dragged my way halfheartedly through our bedtime routine, utterly exhausted from the day and the sleepless night before it, I felt more than anything like I was failing. I was failing to maintain a good attitude in my frustration, I was failing to have a stronger will than his. I was honestly pretty done with him and I couldn’t wait to get out of his room and into my chair for the evening. As I forced out a yawny “goodnight buddy, I love you” and turned to walk out. He cried out “WAIT… pray?”, I had totally forgotten. He had not. Then he folded his hands and scootched over so I could kneel down and pray with him before he went to sleep. As always… he went first. He mentioned mommy, then some gibberish followed by a distinct ‘food’… then some more gibberish followed by “aaaand Daddy, amen”. I left my sons room with tears of extraordinary gratitude welling in my eyes, and a much lighter heart.

Every once in a while, your kids will do something to remind you that maybe… just maybe, you’re not doing half as bad at this parenting stuff as you think you are. And without even knowing it he reminded me that I can fight with him, discipline him, train him up, teach him, all the things that we do as parents to compel them into Jesus. But only HE can save my boy. Only HE can do the work in his heart that he did in mine that June day 12 years ago. So when I get those little glimpses… those tiny little windows into what God may be up to in there… boy does that go a long long way to keep me in the fight.

Hang in there Moms and Dads. You’re not defeated. You’re not alone. He’s with you in the mess.

Guns, Grief, and Growth.

In the screenshot above you can see 2 things clearly. The first clear thing is that gun violence and shootings are not a new problem. The second clear thing is that 8 years ago… I was an idiot. Because 8 years ago I actually thought it was appropriate and fitting to blow right past the correct response to death and violence and go straight for the political jugular. This was less than 24 hours removed from two human beings (Police officers none the less) having had their lives taken away from them and their families, and I thought the most helpful thing I could do was add political commentary to the situation despite being asked to speak on the matter by exactly nobody.

This has now become a sort of cultural reflex. The pattern looks something like this… A mass shooting occurs, we blow straight past grieving, and we jump right into trading blows and bickering about policy. Striking while the iron is hot and the pain and anger are still fresh. Creating a cauldron of bitter fights and division over how we would solve this problem. This goes on for a week until the next grand display of evil happens and we all go “SEE? WE NEED TO ARM THE TEACHERS”… or “YOU’RE A MORON!!! WE NEED TO MAKE GUNS ILLEGAL”. Rinse… Repeat.

One after another the incidents of mass death keep happening and with each new headline, with each new body count… the continual failure to grieve the dead compiles on itself leaving us a mountain of unprocessed emotion and frustration. We are a nation of numb, we have forgotten that the correct and immediate response in the face of all this brokenness is not rage or rhetoric… it’s grief. Outrage is proving to be an awful substitute.

It really isn’t that hard to understand how we got here. It’s perfectly consistent with how we experience and respond to everything. If something happens often enough we just become numb and cold to it. I am speaking both from the observational and experiential, it’s not like I’m not one of you. Two days ago 7 people were murdered during a parade in Chicago and dozens more injured. I didn’t feel a thing until it came out that 2 of the dead were a married couple and their 2 year old son had been made an orphan instantaneously, THAT broke me a little. My heart recoiled from the thought of it being Owen (my two year old) because along with the grief comes an acknowledgment of reality, the reality is this could happen to us like it happened to them.

I write this as an encouragement to all of you to join me in the deliberate act of grief. And in seasons like this when the repeated loss of life has just become some twisted combination of exhausting and mundane we’ll have plenty of opportunities to practice. Grief terminated upon itself isn’t particularly useful. But when directed towards the one who can actually DO something about all this evil it becomes more than just an outcry or a lament. It is pregnant with the potential for an honest conversation with God. And we absolutely should be talking with him about this.

The prophet Habakkuk was witness to both the rise and fall of his nation during what many historians agree is one of the only real ‘golden ages’ Israel ever knew. He watched helpless as a wicked king led the people of God back into rebellion and idolatry. Facebook wouldn’t be invented for another 2500 years give or take so he only had one place to go with his complaint… The Lord. Read this, but REALLY read it.

Habakkuk 1:1-4 …

1 The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet saw. 2 O Yahweh, how long shall I cry for help and you will not listen? How long will I cry out to you, “Violence!” and you will not save? 3 Why do you cause me to see evil while you look at trouble? Destruction and violence happen before me; contention and strife arise. 4 Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice does not go forth perpetually. For the wicked surround the righteous; therefore justice goes forth perverted.

That just about sums it up… doesn’t it? Does that resonate with anyone else right now? Anyone else turning on the news or opening up social media and feeling their heart cry “God, when are you going to DO something about this? When will you step into the chaos and say ‘enough'”. We’re allowed to do that. We’re encouraged to do that. We believe that the prayers of the people of God move the heart of God. OH that we might become a nation of people who turn our faces to God in our grief, rather than turning our voices to the comments section with our outrage and blame.

I have learned with age that nobody is looking to me for answers about gun laws. Nobody cares what I think about the 2nd amendment or bump stocks or what I have to say about extended magazines. But everywhere you look you’ll encounter people who are DESPERATE for someone to tell them there’s hope. I’m pleading with all of you, when you open twitter and find out about the next mass shooting… grieve. Learn the names of the victims and pray for their families. Be the last one to rush in screaming about answers and accountability and be the first one to rush in with grace and the love of Jesus. If we’ve learned anything at this point, we know that this can simply happen to any of us. And that’s what makes our immediate response to the devastation so important. Because one day… it might be our turn. And I’m sorry, but I just have to believe that if it’s your kid that doesn’t come home from school or becomes an orphan in the blink of an eye… “arm the teachers” probably doesn’t feel particularly helpful. What will be helpful in the face of unimaginable grief? unimaginable hope. Everywhere we go Christians carry both an explanation for the violence and the promise of seeing it fully and forever brought to an end. Let us step in with that instead.

Don’t begrudge the wilderness:

The Bible and our lives have a lot in common. There are familiar themes, experiences and ideas in the word of God that feel inherently right and good. It’s easy to celebrate and relate to them. For example, everyone can relate to the impulse to rejoice. So when we encounter rejoicing in scripture by example, or by instruction… we can feel that. We can almost see ourselves joining in with the wedding guests in awe and amazement at the realization that Jesus had turned the water into wine and that the soiree could continue after all. We can picture the joy and celebration that must’ve broken out in the crowds around Jesus after healings and miracles. We see the value in it. We understand it in the context of our own lives. We (generally) get it.

There are also recurring themes in the Bible that don’t seem to resonate so naturally. They don’t fit into our worldview very well. We just have no category for them at all. And so they are more or less lost on us. One such theme… is the wilderness.

The word wilderness appears 280 times in our Bibles. It shows up again and again. From Abraham to Moses. The prophets and Jesus himself. There is a clear emphasis God places on the wilderness and what he accomplishes there. All of these and countless others had their time in the wilderness. And with the exception of Jesus, all of them had questions. All of them wondered ‘why me’? ‘Why this place’? God isn’t going to call many of us to forty years in the desert, but all you need to do is live long enough and you will find yourself in the wilderness. Alone, terrified, angry, destitute in spirit… unsure if you will escape with your life.

Generally when you or I think of the word “wilderness”, our mind rushes to images of desolate or wild places. Miles from civilization. But in the abstract, we should understand the concept of the wilderness in our culture a little bit differently I think. Because for us, the wilderness is usually a place we go to fulfill our hobbies. But in ancient Israel? In Samaria in the first century? The wilderness meant something different entirely. It was the place you found yourself cut off from any familiar thing whatsoever. You would’ve been completely without hope, alone, terrified, angry, destitute in spirit, unsure of whether you would make it out alive.

My son Owen was born in September of 2019. Not long after, my wife started getting beat up pretty badly in her fight against anxiety and depression. A fight she very nearly lost on the night of June 29th 2021. And when she finally came to me and said “I need help” I knew I was absolutely powerless to help her in the way she needed. And through a series of events that could have only been ordained by God I found myself driving to Lafayette IN the morning of July 1st to leave my wife in the hands of strangers who I hoped would be able to help her in ways I could not. After a very short ‘see you later’ I kissed my sweet wife goodbye in the conference room at VOH and got back into the car to head back to Brownsburg. Back to a home without my bride. I was driving into the wilderness. And I knew it. What followed was an absolutely spectacular implosion… a long train of failures on my behalf to walk through it all faithfully.

I ran to projects. I ran to my work. I ran to drugs (like… real ones), I ran to alcohol, I ran to everything I thought God had saved me out of. Surely I knew better than this. Before I knew it I was in a place I thought I would never be again, addicted and hiding it from everyone who loved me. Terrified to deal with it because I was more afraid of people than I am of God. More afraid of “I thought he was a Christian”…. “This guy serves in his church?”… “What a hypocrite”.

Thank God for the conviction of the Holy Spirit that stopped letting me sleep until I would confess. Thank God for the brothers who came alongside and helped me drag it into the light and kill it. Thank God for my wife who never made me feel anything but loved and forgiven as she nursed me back to health when I lost 20 lbs. in 48 hours. Thank God for the love that he lavished upon me that I should be called his son. Thank God that he didn’t let me stay there.

I had taken an opportunity to make much of Jesus in my pain and suffering, and instead made much of my pain and suffering. Rather than walking in the identity that had been purchased for me and in the power of the Holy Spirit that indwells me… I walked headfirst into a trap. I believed the same old lie. I leaned into lesser gods that had no power to accomplish in me that which I had asked of them. The idols of my heart will never be able to sustain the weight of my lament any more than they can sustain the weight of my worship. Both were designed for God and God alone.

I had once again wrestled with the Lord as he tried to lovingly cut out of me that which robs him of glory and me of joy. He had brought me into the wilderness to love me faithfully… and I wasted it. I cannot believe I wasted it.

Despite our tendency to convince ourselves otherwise, God never takes his children into the wilderness to punish them. I don’t know that there is a clearer or better picture of God’s actual intent for the wilderness than what we find written in Hosea 2:14-16

“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her. And there I will give her her vineyards
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt. And in that day, declares the LORD, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My Baal.”

God tells his beloved bride (that’s us, Christians) that he will bring her to the wilderness, and there we will stop calling him master and start calling him husband. The wilderness becomes a vineyard. This is where we are made into who he has already declared us to be!

My wife is home now and our family feels whole again. I keep catching myself staring at her because I just can’t believe the worst is really over! I can’t believe everything God accomplished in her over the last year. I can’t believe she’s mine. Owen is potty trained. Work is going awesome and I have the first job I’ve loved in a long long time. Life is looking up! The wilderness seems to be in my rear view mirror.

Friends… Don’t waste your wilderness. Learn the language of lament and speak it in honesty to Jesus because he knows how scary it is to be us. And when you find yourself in the desert, don’t cave to the temptation for self pity or to numb the pain. The goodness of God will be enough to sustain you as it was for me. Gather around you brothers and sisters who will wet the floor with their tears and weep with you, pray with you, plead with God for you, hold you to obedience and faithfulness…. and then enter the fray. Your time there will be arduous and painful. Saturated with lament and praise. But know that on the other side of all that travail and upheaval is a harvest of holiness and a heart more prepared to be gospel light in a world that desperately needs it. God does some of his very best work … in the wilderness

Masquerade: my season of depression.

Over the course of the last year I have seen some significant changes occur in my life. My wife and I bought our first home, we welcomed our son Owen into the world, I graduated from my apprenticeship after four long years of work and schooling. I have much to be grateful for! And yet… I find myself in a prolonged season of depression.

It’s actually kind of hard to account for. You would think that with all of the progress I’ve made and the joyous addition of our youngest son that I would be on cloud nine. You might look at my circumstances and decide that I should be all smiles all the time. Sadly that just isn’t how it’s played out for me. There are other things going on that cast a dark weighty shadow over my soul. Things that make it hard to get out of bed in the morning. Things that make small things feel like huge things. Things that give the enemy all the ammunition he needs to accuse, to ridicule, to enslave me.

I know how it feels to be depressed. I know how it feels to carry the weight of guilt and shame because I can’t bare the thought of playing with my kids or go grocery shopping or open the mail. I know how it feels to be tempted to turn on the car and close the garage door because my goodness, that life insurance money might make all the difference for my family. I can barely make ends meet, and part of the problem is that I spend money I don’t have on a decade long addiction to nicotine. As a man who was taught that men provide and hold their own I always wanted to give my wife the gift of stay at home motherhood. It’s what she wanted and it’s certainly what I wanted for her. So, when we found out Owen was coming we made the decision that she wouldn’t work anymore after he arrived. The adjustment has been difficult for us. We are a single income family trying to learn how to get by in a two income world. All of this was made more difficult by our expenses increasing at the same time our income decreased. Math is math, it is unforgiving and it doesn’t care about your problems.

As I have struggled to cope with the pressures of being a father, husband, and a provider I have realized something important. Life is not fair or easy, and the Bible never promises that it will be. Scripture is jam filled with suffering and loss and trial and difficulty. Men like David who God called ‘a man after my own heart’ are constantly revealed to be cowardly disobedient fools. David knew and loved God’s law and failed repeatedly to obey it. He had his friend murdered shortly after having an affair with the man’s wife. Jesus told Peter that he was ‘the rock on which he would build his church’ just months before he denied Christ three times. In both of these cases, we see men of God who had been given identities they did not earn and would often fail to live up to. Men who were given a name that didn’t reflect the content of their character. My last name is Hampton, and when I look at the other Hampton men I feel more than anything like I don’t measure up.

But… I have been ministered to in deep and profound ways by the Holy Spirit in the midst of this season on life. I have often been pointed back to the truths of God’s word which admonish me to not give myself over to fear and anxiety. I have been reminded that even the lillies are clothed in splendor and that Solomon had nothing on them. I have had my attention drawn to the birds of the air which eat by God’s soverign provision. I have been reminded that Jesus taught Paul how to live in plenty, and he taught him to live in want. And in true David/Peter fashion I have learned slowly and with great pain that my identity is never in how I’ve failed, but rather it is set firmly in how Christ has succeeded!

I often fall hard into the trap of comparing myself to other men around me. Based on what I see it doesn’t seem like any of the other Christian men I know struggle with feeling like they’re being crushed under the weight of their various responsibilities and obligations. To my eye they all handle it swimmingly! They pay the bills, they parent their kids, they love and lead their wives well, they serve in the church with zeal and consistency. Oh, how the enemy uses their seemingly natural abilities and strength make a mockery of my smallness and woeful insufficiency.

But I wonder; how much relief and rest I might find in knowing that I’m not alone? What if some of the men around me who I see as such unshakable rocks were to approach me having shed their facade and their stoic guard only to reveal that they are sometimes just as depressed and afraid and weak as I am right now? What if the fifty somethings told the twenty and thirty somethings their story of how hard learned faithfulness produced hearty, long lasting fruit, and that it had been well worth the struggle? Then wrapped them in a hug and let them cry a bit without an iota of judgement. What might that do for the men like me who are still learning how to talk to themselves more than they listen to themselves?

I wrote this blog (my first in two years) because I am weary. Not simply with my circumstances, but with hiding them as if they are going to get better on their own. I am weary of my fellow men constantly acting more put together than they actually are. I’m weary of not being serious about someone discipling me because I’m too afraid to admit where I’m weak, and ask for much needed help. So… consider this an invitation to the party, whatever the opposite of a masquerade is. It needs to be that kind of party. Because the masquerade is killing us. I’m taking off my mask and letting those closest to me see the battle worn lines of a tired face. I am waiting patiently to look into the unmasked eyes of another.

Shane.