Speaking Truth with Love and Cultivating Resilient Masculinity

Introduction

It’s so easy to fall behind, this post is a week behind, and the post for this week has yet to be written. I find it so interesting how easy it is to develop bad habits compared to good ones. I started this blog to share what I am learning and how I am trying to grow within my own life. What’s funny is despite the fact that I love to write and I love to use this medium to organize my own thoughts on certain subjects and ideas, it is still so easy to procrastinate and leave it for tomorrow. There seems to be a natural bent within each of us to always stray from things that are productive. I always find that when I finally sit down and take the time to write, I can spend hours doing it without flinching. So often, for me, the hardest part is taking the first step, and so it seems to be with many things in life. So often, the hardest part of anything we do is taking the first step.

As I was pondering how to write this week’s post, which is technically last week’s post, I found myself thinking about what kept me from writing it last week. I was actively thinking about writing it, but I just never sat down and took the time to write it. Not because I didn’t have the time but rather because I didn’t make the time to write it. This, in my experience, is the vice of many. We often have the time to do the things we know we should or have committed to doing, but instead, we procrastinate, and we do the thing which takes only slightly less effort.

So today, I am committing to catching up with my weekly posts. I am committing to not procrastinating it further. Fortunately, I even took notes from the podcasts I did listen to so that I can once again share what I learned.

What I learned this week (Last week)

Speaking Truth in Love

This idea of learning to speak “truth in love” has been an idea that has laid heavy on my heart for a few months now. My pastor had a sermon on this idea a while ago now, and I can’t stop thinking about it. To take a quote from his sermon once more

“Love without truth is hypocrisy, and truth without love is brutality”

This is an idea that I can’t escape because I know where I land in this equation. I have no issue speaking the truth, and I find comfort and security in the truth. I am someone who will speak cold hard facts, and often I will present them exactly so. I am not afraid of speaking the truth, and where I struggle is learning to present this truth with love.

My internal battle in this is that I always want to speak the truth no matter how it makes me or someone else feel. I don’t want to compromise on the truth for the sake of feelings, and so for me, this often means that I present the truth without love. I wrestle with this idea. I often think that if I hurt someone’s feelings, then I have failed to speak with love, and I think this is a culturally popular idea. And yet when I read the stories of Jesus, I find that He often hurt the “feelings” of those He spoke to. He often offended those who were listening to Him. So where is the line? How do I know when offending someone is loving and when it is brutality? I ask these questions without a clear answer, and I ask these questions as I continue to wrestle and learn. I have asked others these questions of others, and I don’t really have an answer.

All I know is that with each day, I am trying to learn how to speak the truth with love better. I have often spoken the truth with the best intentions and then later looked back and realized that I spoke without love, and I have tried to seek forgiveness for those moments when I have spoken carelessly. But then I have also had moments of speaking the truth, knowing I have offended someone, and I believe that what I said was right and true.

The truth is offensive, oftentimes very offensive. My hope is simply that I can learn each day to speak it with love better and then leave the results to God. And for now, that is the best answer I have.

Why does the left not care about men?

I found this to be a very interesting podcast episode, as anyone who has spent any time reading my work understands I am fascinated by our cultural climate and how we see so much division between the sexes, and depending on where you land, you can find someone to support your ideas. And if you spend any time on the internet, you will hear terms like “toxic masculinity” or some other idea that men are the problem, and more specifically, white men are the true villains of the world because they have all the power in the world and they have always had the power.

Yet despite all this messaging, what we see is many young men today are failing; they are failing to graduate, and they are failing to find their place in the world. Here is a simple truth that I believe.

The problems of this world are not a result of all men being bad, but instead, the problem is a lack of good men being willing to step up and stop the bad men. For all of human history, the only time bad men were stopped was when good men stood up and opposed them. Today the only time a bad man is stopped is when good men stand up and oppose them. There is an epidemic of cowardice among men. We need to teach today’s young men how to be heroic defenders of those things that are good and right.

We need to raise a generation of young men who have been taught how to control their passions, how to be masters over their desires rather than to be mastered by them. We need a generation of young men who can control their appetites, who can say no to the siren call of the world for things that are easy.

It is easy to sit all day in mom’s basement and complain about the hard hand life has given us and how it’s not our fault. It is easy to turn to the screen in our pocket for momentary gratification rather than becoming a man who is emotionally, mentally, and physically attractive to women.

“It is okay to be weak as a man, but it is NOT okay to stay that way”

We can all either be victims of our circumstances or masters of them. When I was younger, I had a bad victim complex. I looked at my past, and I felt bad for myself because I didn’t have a solid, stable family. I was mad that I didn’t get to go to school; I was mad that I had to go to work instead of being able to enjoy high school, the parties, and the proms.

Today I am grateful for it; through this, I learned lessons school would never have taught me. We can either be broken by the failures of this world and its unfairness, or we can be molded by it.

We can each sit in our misery and our brokenness, or we can take the broken pieces of our story and ask Jesus to make something beautiful, to make a unique masterpiece of the mess.

In the end, victim or victor, the choice is ours!