I long for young men to realize how much they can be accomplishing. They wouldn’t be satisfied with sacrificing hours and hours to build a stupid video game character if they realized they could be building things that will influence people, bless people, and last for generations. Build ministries, build families, build churches, build organizations and institutions. Think about the hours represented by a high score or an advanced character on a video game. Now think about what a motivated person could have created with the same time invested elsewhere. The Man House project I’m working on won’t take nearly as much time to set up as it would take me to beat a video game. If I manage that house well, train people to come after me and take it over, it could be around in 50 years still influencing this community.
The world is so bursting with opportunities to take life by the collar and shake it. Carpe Diem baby. How could a kegger or a video game or a bag of herb ever be enough to satisfy somebody? I’m going to be old and weak one day and I’ll be damned if I’m goint to spend the few days of youth and health that I’ll have on something that will be gone forever even before I fall asleep at the end of the day.
I wish young men would start thinking of families not just as a wife and possibly kids, something that slows you down, holds you back and keeps you from accomplishing what you want, but rather as a multi-generational thing once begun that never dies; a thing that grows and multiplies even when you’re sleeping or at work. It reproduces and continues reproducing even after you die. It influences people, builds relationships, accomplishes work, sometimes for hundreds of years. It begins with a couple and a dream and grows and spreads multiplying and stretching into the future. If a family is managed well, then it will be continuing the work we have begun and carrying forth Christ’s kingdom after we’re long gone. Far from inhibiting us, a family is a means to magnify our capacity and influence beyond our wildest dreams to accomplish the work God has called us to.
I wish young men would catch a vision of the preciousness of human life and what can be done with it and that the vision would inspire them and whet their appetites for the real stuff of manhood.
I don’t know how I would live with myself as an old man if I don’t do more with my youth than eat sleep and look at boobs.
