When I was in Africa, flocks of kids would follow my male teammates and me and stare at us.
Some cried: “Mzungu!” (“white person”) or “Givememoney!” (“Give me money!”).
But most the kids would just stand there, wearing dirty clothes and booger riddled faces, and stare. After speaking the six words of Swahili that I knew, many of the kids would walk over, grab my hand, and walk wherever I was going.
They didn’t know where I was headed.
And I don’t really think they cared.
Many of their mothers told me that most of them grew up without fathers and that they “just wanted to walk next to a man”.
This still blows my mind.
At the risk of making myself “too vulnerable for husband material”, I am exasperated at the way people react when I tell them that I did/do mission work. Many get wide eyed and ask if I am gay, Mormon, or a priest. (Sometimes all three.)
I then realized I spend too much time focusing on being “that guy”.
You know “that guy”:
“That guy” who tells way too many dirty jokes at a party to make people like him.
“That guy” who revs his truck engine in front of pretty girls to get noticed.
“That guy” makes fun of the most awkward guy in the room to hide his own awkwardness.
“That guy” has issues.
I’ve found being “that guy” has jaded both men and women into wondering if good men even exist.
Because I’ve faked being “that guy”, it still shocks me at the number of women that call me a “good man”.
I’m a nobody from nowhere, Texas.
I have no money, a bachelor’s degree that doesn’t help me a get job, and worth issues that I struggle with all the time. (They are becoming less, thank God).
I struggle with sinful thoughts daily.
And yet, somehow, I’m a “good man”?
When did it become the exception (rather than the rule) for men care enough to do something?
Speaking from experience, men have influence over hearts.
Women have just as an important influence, but with guys, there is a different kind of authority that can’t be found anywhere else.
We bear the masculine image of God.
Don’t think the image of God needs to be hypersensitive so that kids relate to you.
Don’t think being “too sensitive” makes you less of a man.
Rather, the real question lays in what makes you mad enough to want to rise up to the calling of being in His image.
For me, it was mistreated kids and women.
When I saw the magnitude of their hurt, it sent me screaming for help in the arms of my Lord.
It’s too big for me. The hurt out there is too big for us.
But, as we do our best to walk next to God, He gives us something that attracts people to walk next to us:
His healing Spirit made flesh.
