Sorry folks, but this one is for men only. Everyone else, please come back next time. :-)

I remember seeing her for the first time in 1983…and oh, she was sweet. It was instant seduction. The Porsche Carerra 911. I don’t know what it was about her, but that exotic European styling nearly stopped my heart. Years have passed and I have tucked her away in the back of my memory (still haven’t told Gana about her yet), but perhaps when I retire I will get my hands on one. Until then, she’s just a passing dream.

I think most men know what I mean, that feeling of what it would be like to be out on the race track…no, on a mountain road, the top down, the wind blowing through your hair. It just gets your heart going. But imagine having such a treasure, a gift, and just leaving it sit in your driveway. Or to take it out, but only on trips to the grocery store, and never going above 30 mph. Ah, the shame! It would be a crime.

Or imagine this: suppose you were destined to be the greatest pitcher ever, to have the golden throwing arm, but you never discovered baseball. Imagine if all you used your arm for was typing on the computer or repairing cars.

Or who knows if the one destined to find a cure for cancer avoided the medical field because he was squeamish of blood?

Scary thought, eh? To have an incredible gift, but to not use it? And yet it happens all the time. All the time. As men, we have a powerful gift to speak words of encouragement and blessing to our wives and children. I’ve seen the powerful effect it can have for changing lives, the way it builds people up. But it is something we do not use often enough, not nearly enough. It’s nothing magical or supernatural, and yet when you see the way lives are affected by the right words spoken from a father, or the gaping void that results when those words are withheld, it’s amazing the effect it has.

John Eldredge described the longing in the hearts of women in his book, Wild at Heart:

“…the deep cry of a little girl’s heart is am I lovely? Every woman needs to know that she is exquisite and exotic and chosen. This is core to her identity, the way she bears the image of God. Will you pursue me? Do you delight in me? Will you fight for me? And like every little boy, she has taken a wound as well. The wound strikes right at the core of her heart of beauty and leaves a devastating message with it: No. You’re not beautiful and no one will really fight for you. Like (the male) wound, hers almost always comes at the hand of her father.”

And does it not make sense, when we see how the most beautiful young woman can be drawn to the most unlikely of scoundrels, simply because he is the first show interest in her, to act like she has something desirable in her? Unfortunately, we men tend to forget this powerful factor of attraction as we get older, and words of love and affection are replaced with complaints about dinner and the shifting of affections to “toys” and sports.

In like manner, children need to hear the powerful words of encouragement that a father can offer, words to build them up, and describe the dreams that they may not yet see. “Yes, you can do this!” “You are doing great!” “I’m so proud of you, and how you hung in there.” These are such powerful messages into the soul of a child.

So many men simply do not realize what power they have, to impact their loved ones. They stand there watching helplessly, wishing they could help, much like a mighty warrior standing before a dragon, not realizing he has a sword at his side. “Pull out your sword! It’s there at your side! Use it!”

Then from Hollywood and popular culture, we hear the message again and again that men are useless, little boys concerned only with their own pleasures. It’s a terrible tactic of the devil, and oh so successful: to make men forget what a powerful weapon (for the good) that they possess. Just recently I watched a man choose to pass up the opportunity to compliment his daughter, unable to speak the words, as she looked on so longingly for those words of affirmation. What a loss. And then I think of the times I myself have spoken harshly, when I could have built up. What a loss.

Our children need this, so desperately. It’s “the blessing” that fathers passed on to their children since biblical times, that Gary Smalley and John Trent describe in their book, The Blessing. Without the words of blessing from a father, there is a painful gap missing in the hearts of their families. Even after they are grown, so many men and women desperately long for this blessing from their fathers. I’ve seen it happen in grown men, stuck in holding patterns and unable to make crucial advances for their families, while they await the blessing from their fathers that never comes. That message of affirmation, belief, and trust. For a father to say, “I’m proud of you son”, and to mean it. How powerful.

But for most of us men, such a day may never come. Too many of our fathers were never trained much in the way of fathering sons, or they abandoned their roles prematurely, or perhaps they are no longer alive to make that connection. In those times, we need to stretch beyond them, to the greater purpose in all of this: the connection with our heavenly father. It’s hard to see it, in the ups and downs of this life, but He has been reaching out to us all along:

“For I am confident of this very thing,
that He who began a good work in you
will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus”
Philippians 1:6

Learning to see God at work in our lives, fathering us where there was a gap, is a difficult process, but worthwhile. And from that power and confidence, we can turn to those around us, and pass on this wonderful gift, the blessing. As husbands and fathers, this could be the greatest work of our lives. To see those around us as priceless works of God, it makes for a good investment, to pour our lives into them, to build them up. And that’s the work of “the blessing”. Otherwise, we stand as helpless knights in armor, watching the dragon attack our families, but unable to lift our swords. Or the pitcher with the golden arm, who never steps onto the field. Or the Porsche owner, who never makes it past Krogers. We were meant for more than that.

I am reading through John Eldredge's book "The Way of the Wild Heart", and the farther I get into it, the more it grabs a hold of my soul. Extending on his book "Wild at Heart", Eldredge digs farther into the male heart, laying it all out bare as I've never seen before. He writes to fathers learning how to lead their sons into classic manhood, at the same time explaining how to find for ourselves the manhood that so few of us were led into. It's an fascinating topic, that completely shatters the visage of overgrown Peter Pan boys you see on TV, and that we are so readily led to believe.

I just finished a chapter talking about the "Vision Quest" year he led his 13-year-old son through, a time of growth and initiation into manhood, ending with a ceremony. The ceremony, like the year leading up to it, involves a group of men, close friends, with whom the boy has seen adventure and learned lessons of true manhood, speaking encouragement and conviction into his heart & soul.

His narrative just thrills my soul, as I think of the adventure to come with raising my own son, pouring into his life and teaching him what manhood is about. This concept, of intentionally teaching your son about manhood, is something I never had growing up, and wish I had learned years ago. But I am so excited to be learning about this while Josh is still young. So much to learn, so much to do. The adventure of life just keeps getting better.

One common thread through this, which rings true with the lessons I've had to learn the hard way, is that good parenting is more about investing, than molding. Invest in the child, pour into them, rather than focusing on just behavior or forcing them into a mold of what you envision. God's vision is so much bigger than ours.

Silent Bugs

One of the hardest bugs to fix in software is the "silent" bug: a bug that produces the wrong results, but does not provide any information about exactly *where* things went wrong in the code. And in most business applications, that leaves you with thousands of lines of code to sift through; the veritable "needle in a haystack". But it does not need to be that way: a simple coding technique is to wrap each function with something we call a "try/catch" block, which allows the function encountering the problem to tell the world, "Hey! It's me! Look here! I'm the guy with the problem!" That little technique makes a world of difference in tracking down bugs.

Now, if you are not a software geek, you're probably wondering what the significance of that is. Well, I'm finding more and more of life is like that. When we do not anticipate the problems in life (the ones we KNOW will come), we don't tend to handle them well. We bury them, hide them, and/or just ignore them. HOPING they will somehow just "go away". And like a software developer, a simple philosophy goes a long way to dealing with that: "Yeah, I know problems are going to happen, so here is how I will handle them when they do."

We see the same issue played out on the national level. How did the U.S. do so much better than the Soviet Union? Both started out with revolutionary concepts that, on paper, sounded good, but had yet to be fully played out on the national level. And, as history books show us, one went on to be the leading world superpower, while the other struggled with corruption and fundamental flaws throughout it's existence. What's the difference? I'm sure historians could give lots of answers, but I would propose one major factor: American forefathers *anticipated* things going wrong, of corruption and tyranny. In fact, it horrified them. Hence, the balance of powers, written into the fabric of our government (congress vs. executive vs. judicial). They did not know who would lead the country 200 years after them, but they wanted to make sure that person could not be a tyrant. On the other hand, the communists were fully optimistic that their system would bring out the best in people. Few, if any, safeguards were written into their system. They simply did not anticipate tyranny...and that is just what they got. Had they PLANNED for things to go wrong (i.e. power corruption), and planned for ways to deal with that (balance of power), who knows how different the world would be today.

Now bring it back down to the personal level: we men, like programs and nations, are subject to flaws. And unfortunately, we are often the last to realize it. After all, we make our choices, and who wants to go second-guessing their every move? That's fine, but we also need to be cognizant both of our flaws, and our own tendency to overlook them. That's why it is important to be sensitive when red flags are raised by objective parties. And who does that better for us married men, than our wives. They may have their own flaws, but they also have an uncanny ability to see ours a mile away. With incredible accuracy, too.

Or maybe for you that person is a friend, or a parent, or a brother. Regardless of who it is, we all need to be aware and cognizant of our own humanity. We need to be very cautious before disregarding the warnings of those around us who care for our wellbeing. That little change in viewpoint can make a world of difference in how you handle problems when they arise, whether they are quickly dealt with, or if they become long-term bugs in our system.

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye
and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
How can you say to your brother,
'Let me take the speck out of your eye,'
when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?
You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye,
and then you will see clearly to remove
the speck from your brother's eye."

Matthew 7:3-5 (NIV)