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8/14/2019 Chapter One My Story
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CHAPTER ONE: My Story
Kit McDermott
I have always been someone willing to poke around in stuff offering the promise of fresh
air. The unusual or atypical or even the avant-garde never failed to appeal to me. What would I
find or experience? Exploring in areas that just drew me seemed in my bones. Not that I would
try anything, mind you, because I wouldnt, even before I became a Christian. Hurtling down the
Interstate at 125mph on a cycle without a helmet didnt appeal to me then, and it doesnt now.
What did appeal was that much of lifes zing for me promised to be discovered on the less trod
paths.
When I surrendered to Christ in 1973 by myself in a friends VW Beetle hurtling up
Interstate 84 back to Boston, the draw to discover lost little potency. I came into the faith a
zealous jazz musician and stayed that same course for the next 7 years. During those early years
in Christ, I also got involved with Christian music and influenced the band I was playing with to
explore modes of musical expression Christians had not associated with music ministry. We
pushed the envelope. People did not know where to fit us. I loved the discovery and rigor and
wildness of pushing into new territory even when it proved a struggle.
In my 30s, God apparently decided it was time for me to make a new discovery I would
have never made on my own. I was blind-sided by the One who cannot be planned for. He pulled
the ground out from underneath and yanked me toward the unfamiliar. I have felt lost many
times in my life, but never this lost. I was enrolled in the school of his sovereign re-tooling and I
wasnt auditing the course, thank you very kindly.
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As it turns out, the years of my third decade were to be a time of personal, spiritual
upheaval: sometimes bewildering, often excruciating, occasionally overwhelming. I would
abandon the creative life of the jazz musician I was nuts about, begin a family, receive the gift of
tongues and other spiritual gifts, pray with 4-5 brothers in the wee hours of the morning 3 days a
week for 2 years, hear a call to ministry, find and leave another career (equipped with tools for
the ministry ahead), go back to college, wrestle through deep healing to my masculine soul for a
year, begin Klesis Ministries, assume the leadership of the Center For Renewal retreat ministry
and move with my wife and family to the retreat center, and go back to college to study religion.
All the while God was tearing up the hard ground of my soul, breaking clods into a growing
medium that could receive the seeds of genuine godly masculinity. To tell you the truth, I would
have been happy to stay in boyhood, if left to my own.
Somewhere near the age of 37, I also learned to listen to God. My brother-in-law, Steve,
a painter, told me about a book (Mark VirklersDialoguing With God), he was reading that
revolutionized the way he had been praying. Steve had been a man of prayer for many years. He
had credibility with me. He told me that through listening prayer he had been able to dialogue
with God about, among other things, the frustrating problems he would encounter in his artwork
and God would help him, sometimes in ways that were breath-takingly new and creative. He got
my attention because my prayer life was wilting in the noonday heat of sameness. I knew
praying was essential to a relationship of any substance with God, but hadnt gotten there with
any real depth.
There were times when I yearned to know Jesus in a way that drew Him far into my life
where I really lived and made him a partner in how I sorted out each day. I was eager to test
whether listening prayer would be a way to find that. So I read the book, got myself a light blue
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spiral notebook, and began listening on November 19, 1986 in my pre-dawn living room on Pratt
Street. I was not sure what I was looking for as I sat in the silence on the couch, but I began to
get the intriguing sense that I was being invited into something fresh and alive. It felt as if I was
coming to God in trust like a young boy with his papa, not afraid, but believing he had good
things waiting to tell me. I was eager to know him better. At the same time, I also came to him as
a young man seeking to set my life squarely in his will with no looking back. The trail was
cleared and I was on my way.
Virklers book described a process whereby a person could sit in Gods presence and
converse with him as with a friend. He helped me see that God spoke quietly through my
spontaneous thoughts in response to questions I had or concerns I brought to him, and that it was
possible for me to discern him in those thoughts. Virkler showed me how to write out my
dialogue with God and his responses to me in a journal. He gave me a simple tool for learning
how to take time with God in the quiet and actually commune with him in way that felt
authentic. Although simple, it was not easy or simplistic. I would still have to battle with
laziness, a mind filled with noise, occasional doubt, and the need to develop discipline with
prayer. But I had something tangible to grab onto.
The first entry in my journal, solemnly named Communion and Dialogue, Volume One, is
dated November 19, 1986. It begins with my prayer to the Father avowing my love for him
because of his character and ways. I move to thank him for the life and family he had graciously
given me. I end by affirming that because he has given me a hope and a vision in Jesus, I could
move out from the sorrow of a world in dread of its death. I am not sure why I said that, but
over the years I would revisit the themes of life and death in its varied forms. Becoming a man as
God ordained from the beginning a man should be, would be a formidable struggle for me, and
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listening prayer would be the vehicle through which I would wrestle with God as he called me to
leave emotional, spiritual, and relational boyhood behind.
What God said to me that day in response to my prayer, put in place life themes that I
have run headlong into countless times over the years in my battle to yield and accept the
daunting responsibility of godly manhood. His response in the quiet that morning was:
My son, my love is boundless. My liberty is vast as the space of the deep. Surely, your
place is secured in me. Your music is from my heart and it is a song waiting singing.
Your days will be filled with my music, your thoughts with my words, your dreams with
my countenance. I will yoke you to my burden and you will soar. Dont leave my side for
it is there that your days will find rest. My words will spring from my covering. Stand.
Abide. Be firm in me.
I wasnt sure if I was to take all the references to music literally or that God was saying
something about the essence of my being through the metaphor of music. But in those gentle,
fatherly words, God pulled me to himself, and told me to go forth into the world as he had
uniquely made me needing no ones permission. He had already given it. He called me to
resound his life through mine; that I am his and he knows me in way no one does, including my
wonderful wife. I am his idea, and his life saturates mine, making mine full and real. I was
stunned by his metaphorical use of music to talk of our relationship. One of the ways I began to
uncover and test the call to masculinity was through music. It was a language I adopted
vigorously and relished. God, in effect, was saying I know how much this means to you, and I
care about that because you are Mine. I had left music because he required it of me, yet here he
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was saying that I had not lost it after all; I had just needed to walk with the Composer and be an
instrumentforhis music as he chose to express it through me.
For me that first day of listening was a monumental start. I had connected intimately with
the Living God. He chose to speak words to me that were intensely personal and important. He
demonstrated that he cared to know through what lens I saw life and it mattered. Through the
next days and months, he would keep speaking with me about how he wanted me to walk with
him as a son, as a man who was a husband, father, leader and friend. Sometimes he would be
tender and compassionate, other times he would reveal sin and correct bad attitudes or
cowardice. There were occasions when he would instruct me in how I was to do my work for
him in leading retreats, teaching a class, preaching or working with a person in counseling. There
were times when he would not respond to a question I asked. There would be silence, or he
would move the dialogue toward something I needed to hear. God was not the Great Answer
Man in the sky, there to do my bidding. He was the LORD, but I was one of his sons and he
wanted to show me many things on the way to walking as a man.
In short order, Jesus answer in the wilderness to the Tempter that Man does not live on
bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God (Mt. 4:4), made personal
sense in a new way. It framed my life in the context of a God who has spoken and still speaks in
a way I can hear. Christs declarations in the Gospel of John that the sheep follow him (the
shepherd) because they know his voice, (Jn. 10:4), and as the good shepherd, The fact that he
knows his sheep and they him because they recognize his voice (Jn.10:5, 11) opened for me the
possibility that it was normal to hear his voice from a quiet heart turned to listen because by
being born into a filial relationship with him, I was given the ability to recognize his voice. I just
needed to pay attention with diligence.
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If you were to look at my prayer journals since that November morning you would see
days, even weeks separating periods when I would be listening regularly. I found that as I
pressed on through the days he gave me, I would not be faithful to sit down with him day after
day. I noticed that when I would be overtaken by a cold or flu or some other physical affliction,
for instance, it would be hard to get back to the discipline (odd that the opportunity to be with my
gentle Savior, majestic Lord and good-beyond-hoping King who seemed to delight in my
friendship required discipline on my part, but it did). Another problem I had to face was that
occasionally I would mis-hear him or he seemed to say that something would come to pass and it
didnt when I thought it should. If I was not careful I could slip into doubt and pull away. More
common to my learning process were distractions of all sorts that would cause me to postpone
being alone with him: I cant seem to find the time these days. You know the drill about
finding time to pray or study Gods Word. Listening to God turned out to not be a surefire
technique for me as a man, and I had to come to terms again and again with my sinful
weaknesses and love of putting me-myself-and-Iat the top of my favored guest list.
* * * *
One of the gifts on board when I came into the world was the analytical ability to discern
patterns of all sorts. They could be rhythmic patterns of drumming. They could be habits of
behavior that I saw in myself or in others. They could be patterns of words, visual design or ways
of accomplishing tasks. I just seemed to notice how things were woven together and collected in
discernible shapes.
Similarly, I had also become aware of a pattern in the unfolding of my life: transitional
change arrives about every 10 years in my training under my Lord. The decade of my 40s
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confronted me with whether I would embrace fully his challenge to godly manhood and spiritual
maturity, or throw off my responsibility and retreat to the comforts of hiddenness and
dependence on others in areas that intimidated or threatened me. Emasculating safety poked at
my heart more than once. To read my journal entries during many of those years is to often
witness a struggle between God who would not relent in calling me forward, and me seemingly
bewildered by it all, ready to bolt at the least opportunity because I was confused, hurt, worn out,
fed up or just plain scared. My words are still painful for me to read today in that they reveal
how thoroughly flawed and unmanly I was (there is still miles to go, make no mistake, but God
has built momentum in the right direction). I gave the Father an earful and he let me in on the
truth, trying to cut me free and make me fit for something more than a pleasant ride to the end of
the line with me planted firmly in the drivers seat.
In the middle of my 40s I ran aground and was washed overboard by a deep, crippling
depression. Emotionally I felt like I was being buried in sediment at the bottom of a murky sea.
My arms were pinned and I wasnt going anywhere to get away from it. I was a middle-aged guy
whose manhood became entombed in a rapacious darkness like a moth encased by a hungry
spider ready to suck its life juices away. If God was speaking to me regularly, the lines were
often down on my end. I felt so emptied out inside that had God given me some of his words to
keep, they would have fallen right through me. Or so I thought. I did use my journal to cry out to
God all the pain that filled my thoughts. And because I had to, most of my listening times were
focused on what Jesus wanted me say to lead a retreat, give a teaching, preach a sermon or attend
to the work of Klesis and the Center For Renewal. I knew I could not do any of that stuff just by
gifts or experience. I couldnt rely on me because I was fading out of view. There were many
gaps of time during those years because I was walking empty of heart. The barren, numbing
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stillness in my soul was eerie and exhausting. God faithfully held onto me (I asked him not to let
me slide into oblivion), and spoke, as I needed to hear Him to fulfill my responsibilities. He was
truly aParaclete to me.
What surfaced over time in my understanding was that clinical depression spiritually
eviscerates a man. It takes his masculine initiative and anesthetizes it. Slowly, his strength to do,
to make a way, drains out of him as if spilled blood oozing unstaunched from a mortal wound.
He doesnt return to boyhood, he just becomes a shell man, a walking carcass seemingly out of
fuel before his time. His fire cools to embers. If you look closely, you will notice the vacant
hollowness in his eyes. He sits alone in a tomb and words of life or hope fail to penetrate.All
men need to hear words of hope from God. Such words give them vision and courage to face the
battles and allurements waiting on the path marked for them. Depression waylays those words
before they ever find their mark like the seeds sown on stony ground.
I lost real time to the depression, a number of months were gouged out. But by Gods
stubborn, healing grace I gradually found my way up from the slime and headed back toward the
foothills of living. I was able to hear God again in ways other than what he wanted to do in my
next task for him. Faith and hope took their seats again in my heart.
The latter half of my 40s and first few years of my 50s have given me plenty of
opportunity to be alone with God to listen to him. I have not always taken advantage of the time
(and I live and work at a retreat center!), Jesus has made available for us to talk with one another.
The battles I have faced all along in becoming and staying a praying man have never
disappeared. The world, the flesh, and the devil are formidable foes requiring every gram of
masculinity I can pull up. Nevertheless, over the last almost 30 years I have never seen the desire
to pray be silenced entirely. There is always the tug in my soul, however slight at times, to lift
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my concerns to God and receive his touch in some way. I know I do not walk as an orphan even
in the most desolate of seasons. I am convinced that I walk before the face of God.
* * * *
Listening prayer has shown itself to be a spiritual anchor for my masculine soul. Along
with reading and studying the Scripture, it has beckoned me far into Mystery, the mystery of
living with the wildly transcendent, yet surprisingly immanent Triune God from one day to the
next. I am not the same Christian, nor the same man because of what God, through listening
prayer, has openhandedly given me. I could not be truthfully called an expert in this type of
prayer even though I have been muddling along with it for 16+ years. I am not convinced
expertise in such things can exist. But neither am I a fresh-out-of-the-box beginner. I imagine
that I am somewhere on my own Emmaus Road -- he speaks to me and I dont always recognize
it, but my heart burns within me when he breaks through and reveals himself, penetrating my
distractions and defenses. I know when I hear him. I recognize him more now than I did at the
first. As he did on that day with the two disciples in the village, he seems to disappear from time
to time as I try to listen. No matter. I have learned to listen afterhim and know that he will return
as he sees fit.
I am a disciple in the root sense that I am continually learning how to fill the big loafers
of manhood in light of what God reveals to me through his Spirit in the Scriptures, in the rigors
and responsibilities of life, and through other men as I observe them and they teach me. I have
grown to see that there are no formulas to master in communing with God such that once you
discover and practice the right hermetic formula God becomes more manageable and less
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dangerous. He is no genie in a bottle responding to my three rubs. While I have learned a process
that helps me sit with my Lord and seek to hear him, it ensures nothing other than I am in his
presence, available to him as he pleases. His terms of engagement rule the day here as with the
rest of the universe.
In the sixteen years I have been working at this, God has undeservedly let me in on how
listening prayer blesses men. Being a man who has learned to listen myself and having the
benefit of teaching other men over the years how to listen to God, then seeing them wrestle with
it, has taught me how to tackle the call to mature masculinity, and what that looks like from
Gods heart. There are four truths that I want to look at more closely because they will
demonstrate how I have been changed, and how important it is for men to learn this foundational
part of praying:
Listening prayer will open a man to Gods invitation to intimacy with him, flowing
from his passionate love for him as a son.
Listening prayer will open a man to how God wants him to single-heartedly embrace
masculinity in all the roles he will play.
Listening prayer will teach him to see God as the sovereign Senior Partner and Lord in
the enterprise of living and serving His Kingdom.
Listening prayer will show a man that he is not an orphan in the world; his life is not
solely up to him.
Listening prayer will open a man to Gods invitation to intimacy with him
Beginning with the very first words he gave to me in 1986 and up to today, God has
convinced me that he wanted me to come near enough to know him well (as much as he chose to
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reveal). None of this walking at a safe distance was going to do in the relationship if it was to
be a relationship of any substance with him. Over the years, God has revealed a passion for me
as actually one of his sons, a part of the family, so to speak, a bona fide saved-by-the blood
relative. He is not cool and distant toward me. He wants intimacy, meaning he wants me in close,
deliberately trusting him, unabashedly hungry to seek and know his nature, being
uncompromisingly willing to go because he sends me when I havent the foggiest how to get
there, or when I want to avoid like the plague what I know he wants.
Jesus showed me again and again that in his mysterious compassion and friendly grace
he is tenderhearted toward the likes of me. As a man I have had to come to grips with the fecund
passion of God. Men get nervous around passion directed at them unless its their own, they
solicit it, or they can be in control of it. To tell you the truth I was, at first, unsure of what to
make of how intimately and freely God revealed he saw me. He seemed to make himself
vulnerable in relationship to erratic me, and yet, I could sense behind it an unshakable strength
and authoritative integrity. The One who spoke to me was no needy Jesus; this was the LORD of
all, the Most High God telling me I had found favor with him and he delighted in me.
I was listening to a God who loved me beyond what I could hold, but also to the depth
that he would not spare me from healing and convicting truth. He addressed me as a man, not a
boy even when I acted the latter. Many times he commanded me to face down my fears, quit
hiding or throwing off the mantle of responsibility and leadership he had given. He corrected me
with the rebuke of One who knew me thoroughly, was merciful, but also challenged that I walk
in the light without compromise. He showed me through his words that a man is to learn
intimacy with his Lord and King so that his life can besacrificially authentic: he can live from a
heart broken by the cross and healed by the shed blood of the Lamb. He can let Christ live
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through his life for others because he knows his Masters fondness for him, and is thus set free to
be an instrument of his love other broken and hidden ones. Intimacy with God heals masculine
wounds and creates the courage to go forth in his Name, to make a way for God through a life
lived well under his guiding, one rich in grace and fruit.
I have recognized that intimacy with God learned through listening to him also enables
a man to embrace his essential mandate to generate and protect what is right and true and good in
every sphere of his life regardless of personal cost. To do so is the most noble and fitting thing a
man can do with his life. He called to holiness (radical separation unto God), and that means
knowing the truth, then battling any falsehood that sets itself up against Gods truth. More than
likely, this battle will rage first with his own sinful flesh: his selfishness, cowardice, lusts, greed,
fear, shame, laziness, arrogance and pride. But as he learns to move in the grace God supplies to
battle well, the struggle will inevitably break out into all of lifes enterprises and relationships
because sin threatens to corrupt everything he touches if left unchallenged by him.
Listening prayer is a key way that a man can seek his Lord for counsel and truth-telling.
God will remind any man who seeks him this way where he actually lives from one day to the
next and where he needs to be. Such reminders are treasures beyond measure. Listening prayer
fosters intimacy with Jesus that shapes a man through love that heals him and truth that
strengthens him. He learns to know his Masters voice, to trust it and to follow it. As he learns
this way of praying, he will come to realize that the same God who has revealed himself in the
Scriptures also reveals himself in the quietness of the heart to those eager to walk in his ways and
do right as a man.
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Listening prayer will open a man to how God wants him to single-heartedly embrace
masculinity.
When I was learning to read the Bible, beyond those early months of just trying to
figure out who was who and what was what, I would experiment with different ways of
approaching the text, everything from reading about a certain theme such asfaith orcovenant
wherever it showed up in the testaments, to studying a particular book for many weeks to glean
everything I could from it. I wanted to go deep, one way or the other. I wanted to understand
(readstand under the truth of) the text and be changed by it. What I discovered over the years
was that it was important for my way of grabbing hold of the world to get a grand scale overview
of Gods revealed story in order to make any sense of the ways the story was expressed in the
different chapters he chose to write.
The same principle of seeing from the top down has held true as I have listened to
God about this masculinity business. He has repeatedly beckoned me to assent to his call to be a
man in attitude, character, and action. Many of my dialogues with him have been opportunities
for him to teach me, from the experiences of my own story, what essential and redeemed
masculinity is. He has shown me many times over that I must choose to be masculine in response
to lifes struggles and obstacles. Often he has called me to virtues such as courage in the face of
fear or uncertainty, trust when I want to control people and escape situations, decisive action
when I will to procrastinate, Christ-like sacrifice when I choose self-enhancement, perseverance
when I want to quit and do something else, love in the face of hurt, and pressing forward when
the way seems hopelessly blocked, or I find myself so utterly lost I couldnt find my way back to
where I am!
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In listening prayer, God has confronted everything about me that remained
destructively immature and boyish and continues to reveal areas I was not aware. His call to
manhood has been relentless. Many times, his responses came to my anguished cries of
frustration or despair over life throwing me a set of pitches I couldnt hit. I didnt want to be at
bat any more. He would resolutely point me to how I was supposed to respond as a man,
reminding me what he had already told me in the Scripture, or bringing to my attention that I had
failed to hold up my end of the bargain in some way and nothing would change until I did. His
charge remained for me to be single-hearted in this task of learning to be masculine as one of his
disciples. He has been patient, forbearing, kind and firm.
God knows beyond a shadow, every man he has ever made. He knows what makes him
tick and what makes him tock. He knows thoroughly the masculine path he has set for each and
how to lead him to, and down that path over the years he will give him. He is ready to help at the
least hint that we are ready to go. But men respond to his call to masculinity in different ways
depending on a complex set of forces and circumstances. Some of us just seem to get in the
masculine groove fairly quickly; others of us take their sweet time sauntering through safe
emotional boyhood before we put a shoulder to the task of becoming a man as God has deemed
it. A deeply damaged few of us will never really leave the emotional fortresses we have created
to ward off the monsters in our worlds that would make us men if we would confront them on
Gods terms and with his help.
Through listening prayer God speaks to his sons about what it means to adopt single-
hearted masculinity as he moves through life. He will counsel a man when he faces crushing
defeats, devastating losses, perplexing trials, overpowering sin, and afflictions of every stinging
stripe that threaten to destroy him and those he loves. He will invite a man deep into masculine
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initiative and courage when fear blocks the road like a behemoth with no seeming way around.
God will remind a man to take the high path of masculine integrity and perseverance as he walks
through bone-dry deserts of mind-numbing drudgery, excruciating disappointment, and dreary
discipline evidencing little fruit. When covenant relationships eviscerate, bore, or dishearten him
through the years, the Father will break in quietly with truth and summon him to masculine
faithfulness, sacrificial love and resolute patience every time. Even when his own successes and
the copious yields of his intellectual, physical or professional prowess threaten to lure him into
falling in love with himself and the world he has created, God will whisper in listening prayer
that authentic Christian masculinity stays put, humble before a majestic and resplendent
Sovereign who has given him every jot and tittle he has been blessed to produce or achieve.
The Father leads sons to mature manhood if the sons will listen and obey. Listening
prayer opens the door to the heart of the Father for his sons, and invites them learn the glory of
their inheritance discovered only by being godly men. Single-hearted Christian masculinity is
holy by its nature. It desires only to walk in Gods ways as he has ordained it uniquely for those
who bear his image as men. Listening prayer deepens the transformation of turning a mans heart
to the heart of the Father and the Son because he hears them challenge him into masculinity
while he wrestles with real life through the days, months and years. Listening prayer is not the
sole means of grace God has given to accomplish this transformation, but it is one of the most
intimate and compelling.
Listening prayer will teach a man to see God as the sovereign Senior Partner and Lord in
the enterprise of living and serving his Kingdom.
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As I grew in listening to God, gradually accumulating the many words of our
conversations, I noticed his consistent desire to walkwith me through my days. The
relationship that he was unfolding in the quiet had the friendly feel of a partnership, not of equals
by any stretch, but of Friend to friend engaged jointly in an unfolding enterprise vitally important
to both. It dawned early on that I was ushered into a partnership where my gross limits and
besetting sins were exposed often, but in the respect that they impeded the work we were doing
in his Name. Clearly, he was the Senior Partner in the work of living the Kingdom life, so senior
as to be Lord, one to be listened to and obeyed. His hand was never heavy with me nor his tone
sharp. He was firm and authoritative. He meant business, but he was fond of me as a partner, and
was patient with my false starts, rabbit trails, rebellions and carryings on. I was to be about his
business, to walk in his way, but as one accepted and loved.
In the context of my questions about what to do in a particular retreat or teaching, or
when I had a problem that knocked me off the path, he would point me toward building the
Kingdom as I lived it and helped others do the same. His wisdom and knowledge are without
equal in the universe. He is never wrong or confused or worried about what to do. He was to be
listened to and followed in each instance. At the same time, he was not there at my pleasure
when I needed an answer. There was still plenty of mystery and paradox that I had to traverse
without a divine road map orOnStarsystem for every turn in the road. His sovereignty was
demonstrated by his silence at times, or by changing the subject when I wanted him to respond to
me about what I thought I needed to know. As the Lord and Senior Partner, his silence forced me
to press ahead into the unknown armed with faith and trust and hope (ample provisions!). His
changing the subject turned me toward more important concerns, usually about me and sin and
the pressing need to dump my attitude.
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Through the years my journals affirmed that we were busy jointly working his
Kingdom. His voluntary partnership with me has called forth the man in me more than once. As I
led retreats, taught, preached and shaped how I thought Klesis should press ahead, he would
respond to my questions about the way he wanted it done. Clearly, he was in charge, and I saw
that was so by what he led me to do in all sorts of ministry activities. I wanted to hear from the
Lord of life, and not my big ideas because he took me to places I would never find on my own
and made me able to get there. His way of doing what he asked me to do has always been so
miles-high superior to my ways that I have learned to trust what he directs with deep confidence
even when he takes me way into the woods where I cant see out. I have learned that masculinity
is authenticated in the deep woods of life.
In the work of listening and following, I see I am little by little being made fit for the
task of living the Kingdom more freely and resolutely. The Lord Christ is always talking to me
about how he wants me to change to be more fit. Many times I cannot grasp his will in this
retooling. I dont respond, chicken out or forget to persevere. He keeps after me anyway. I have
sinful attitudes and habits that hide behind virtues and well-practiced sleights of hand designed to
fool any observer, including me. They have to be exposed and cast off. Otherwise, I am
neutralized for the work of really living the Kingdom, useful for beans in partnership with Jesus.
While he graciously turns my helpless brokenness into bread he breaks to nourish and serve
others in ways unexpected by me, I continually need to be made fitter for the light yoke of
shining his light more brilliantly into the stubborn darkness of the world I face from one day to
the next.
Any man who presses forward in listening to God will run smack dab into Christ the
Lord, but he will also find himself called into a partnership with One whose demonstration of
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lordship includes allying himself with remarkably broken vessels. Jesus will never shy away
from being the Lord when he speaks intimately to one of his own, but his words never diminish,
deride or mock a man who trustingly comes in close. Jesus tells us the truth because he is the
truth, but even if the telling stings or spreads the ribs and exposes heart like a surgeon, He goes
after authentic freedom in us. As Jesus teaches a man the dazzling magnificence of his lordship
in the quiet place of listening prayer, he treats him as a brother of promise. He always invites him
to be truly masculine by yielding (with courageous abandon), obeying (without hanging back
safely), serving (without a stutter-step), and glorifying (with abiding happiness), him as we live
our but-a-breath lives on earth. When I learn to trust and assent to the lordship of Christ as I hear
it in listening prayer, then live out that lordship in serving the Kingdom wherever he brings it to
me, I am a man.
Listening prayer will show a man that he is never an orphan in the world.
I have now and again felt frighteningly alone in my half-century plus three. Periods in
my growing up found me sloughed in loneliness crushing enough to feel as if I was walking
adrift in a borderless, monochromatic desert vacant to kingdom come. Penetrating loneliness
fogged me in most often when I faced turns in the road needing prudent, manly decisiveness and
I was already lost when I got to the turn. Inaction would often be my failsafe. Every other man
knew what to do. I could see them all around me: chins out, striding resolutely down the road
with purposeful vigor, not a care in the world. Not like me at all. My ineptitude, confusion and
terror sealed me in as an orphan. I would never get untracked by myself, and I was too bull
elephant proud to ask for help.
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I actually spent years, for the most part, in this sorry, emasculated state -- up to my
mid-30s. My amazing wife, Tricia, tried repeatedly to encourage and affirm me every way she
could, but usually, I would have none of it. I knew the way, thank you very much, and it was
called lost. Only when God began mercifully to move on me for healing did I actually begin to
leave the emotional orphanage that had been my home for decades. Around 35, as I mentioned
earlier, he lead me away from internal strongholds under which the boy in me held the man at
bay. About that same time, I began to listen to God as a spiritual discipline (although I didnt call
it that way back then). There would exasperating trials and kairos seasons of training in
masculinity when I would frantically summon the boy to hide me for a while hoping that the
Lord would lay off. But listening prayer steadily took Gods healing deeper into my heart.
What I found in the first year of listening and subsequently, was that even the simple
act of going alone to sit with God and listen to him neutralized the power the orphan tried to
exert over me again and again. Hearing Jesus speak, and being in his presence where there was
living peace, stillness, rest and safety made a huge difference in whether I would choose to be a
man from one day to the next. I maintain that a man cannot be alone with God for very long if he
is seeking him earnestly, and not begin to feel in his bones the tremendous quiet that comes from
being in the shadow of benevolent might. This Friend has made his mensons, and his favor rests
with them as they carve out time and turn their hearts to listen for his life-soaked words. The
renewing quiet of God penetrates the thieving restlessness of men. When it does, they come
home to a Father and find healing for their orphaned hearts.
I noticed too as I learned the nature of his kind voice in the persistent swirl of my
merry-go-round mind, that he was vigilant and near. When I felt orphaned and solitary in the
enterprises of men it was a malevolent illusion. I had to believe that I was alone to give the
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feeling of aloneness an opportunity to establish a beachhead in my heart. If it could do that, I
would actually live for a time as ifI was an orphan even though I was not. I would filter all my
experience and relationships from the view of the impotent orphan. It would be real to me. I
would believe what wasnt, as though it were and be snared in a lie.
Sitting with the Lord and listening to him flushed the orphan in me out of hiding and
dragged it to the cross to die. It was a phantom, an imposter, and a parasite lusting for a host
available to suck its spiritual lifeblood. When I succumbed and passively let the parasite feed on
my soul, God in his robust mercy and trustworthy tenderness went after the soul sucker with the
ruthless truth that I belonged to him as his treasured possession. I was neverorphaned because I
was on his mind and in his gaze continually. He spoke into my passivity saying I merely needed
to embrace my blood ties to him and then live each day as if it was really so.
An aphorism worth memorizing is that: faith gives sight to the orphaned blind. It took
me a while to get it, and I, more often than I would like to admit, can listen to the pathetic lies
of the orphan when I am beleaguered and I dont know the way forward. As often as that has
happened, and if I have still managed to look for Him in the fog, he never seems to tire of
reminding me (sometimes with a sigh, Ill bet OK, one more time), I am his -- case closed.
When I hear him to that effect and say yes, the orphan recoils back into his empty room and I
walk with God for another day, a son and man in progress, and deeply loved.
When God teaches a son the discipline of listening prayer, he will also teach him about
the places and relationships in his life where he, too, feels an orphan. God might not use the term
orphan directly, but he will shine the light of maturing truth on areas where his son of clay
routinely abdicates responsibility or opts for a safer path because he feels alone, exposed and
incompetent. Most, if not all, men have those places and relationships, but they are well hidden
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from view to save face or try to keep in self-protective control. If a man internalizes the persona
and attitude of the orphan he will remain a boy (radically dependent on others to do for him what
he and God can do together). He may get by or perhaps even succeed smashingly in areas of
proven strength, but his masculinity will remain stunted in the very areas where it could be of
most use to God in advancing the kingdom such as ministering through what he has learned from
his brokenness.
In the friendship of listening God reminds a man that he is committed to his purposes in
and through him and will not forsake him even if his servant fails miserably. Deeply rooted
masculinity involves taking initiative when the way is not obvious and God must light the path
even if just beyond your toes, inch by inch for many miles. God works to not only sow seeds of
masculinity in a listening son, but to set deep roots that will anchor him through the fierce gales
waiting for him as they walk together. As a man listens to God in the quiet, he begins to believe
that God really is near him through thick and thin even if he doesnt feel his presence at a
particular moment. God has said through his written word that he will not leave or abandon him
and he has whispered in his quiet voice the same commitment. The orphan in him has less of a
case to make in moments of fear or trial than he did before because a listening, praying man has
learned to recognize Gods presence in the stillness, feel his reassuring peace, and sit at rest in
His favor. Listening prayer backs the orphan away so that holy masculinity can grow under the
wise and loving care of a Shepherd who knows his sheep and calls them by name. (Jn.10:2-16).
* * * *
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My life as a Christian man was altered that November morning when I climbed out of
bed, and went downstairs in search of the God who would speak to me in the solitude and quiet. I
didnt know what I would find, but I knew I needed to find out. 15 years later, God has found me
again and again. He has called me to walk uprightly with him as a man. He has taught me,
reminded me, corrected me, invited me and persistently called me into masculinity through this
dialogue of prayer. He has shown me that Christian males willing to become men, inherit the call
to wage battle for the Kingdom of God in a world rebelling in mad blindness and agony. Holy
masculinity (courageous, resolute, joyful abandonment to God), creates shoulders fitted well for
a cross each man can carry, and through his own death to self, push back the darkness in his life
and the lives of everyone he will be asked to care for in one way or another.
Listening prayer took me far into my true heart with its struggles and phantoms. It still
does. As I listened to God, I have had the courage to face down the boy, silence the orphan, and
challenge the imposter in the healing fellowship of One who called me to follow him to become
a man in his sight. He will continue to show me the way. I have no doubt that is has been him
who has gotten me this far and I am, at least, more than half way to trails end. On that day my
listening to him will no longer be from whispers in the stillness.