In case you hadn’t already made this assumption, man month
has been an absolute blast so far.
I really do love all the women on our squad but it has been really
refreshing for us to have some time to “bro out” and just have some man time.
Our living situation kind of caught me by surprise a little
bit. When we got off the plane in
Bangkok and walked out of the airport, I just about melted. It was about the same temperature that
it had been in Africa but the humidity was INTENSE. Walking through the sliding doors of the airport felt like
walking into a wall.
I typically use long distance travel days as days to remind
myself that I do have at least a little bit of stylishness left in me. In general, you kind of just have to
wear clothes that make sense on the race.
However, travel days sometimes include long amounts of time in airplanes
and airports (e.g. air conditioning); thus, I generally dress up a bit.
Let’s just say that within two seconds of walking out of the
airport in Bangkok, I 103% regretted rocking my denim and plaid look. Within a matter of minutes, I was
wearing more sweat than I was wearing clothes.
Suffice it to say, it is very very hot in Thailand this time
of year. This is actually the
hottest month of the year for Thailand.
So surely we would have A/C of some sort right? We would have a way to escape the heat
right? We would at least have fans
right?
Imagine my surprise when our living situation turned out to
be more along these lines:
My neighborhood.
My crib.
The neighbors.
It has definitely been hot here (right around 100 degrees
Fahrenheit each day) with high humidity; but it actually gets cool enough at
night that it’s ok for sleeping.
We are living a decent way outside of the city as well on a big piece of
land recently purchased by the ministry we are working with. We actually have set up our tents in
the middle of a mango and tamarind orchard. I had never heard of a tamarind either…they look like this:
There is a small house here on the property that houses a
married couple who actually went on the race a couple years ago! It is really fun having American’s for
contacts and Brian and Beth are super legit people with huge hearts to see God
work here in SE Asia.
God’s been pulling a “God” and teaching me a lot of things
that I thought I already knew.
Even in just this first week, He has been teaching me a lot about being
a man. He and I have been talking
about what it looks like to be a man who deals with the sin in his life like a
man and not a boy.
The 8 of us men here are doing a Bible study together over 1
John this month. I don’t know how
familiar you are with 1 John but, in case you’re at the “not at all familiar”
level, the book talks a lot about the love and grace of God right after it
talks VERY strongly about the gravity of sin. In talking through some of the stuff in this book, Jesus has
just really been reminding me how completely unacceptable any little ounce of
sin should be to me. 1 John says
things like “No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or
knows Him” or “No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides
in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.”
We haven’t gotten a chance yet to look in depth into these
verses. At this point we have just
looked at the book as a whole and the first chapter. However, even just looking at this book from a broad
perspective, I have been super challenged. John gives no room for grey areas. We are either living in the light or we are living in the
dark. We are either living in sin
or we are living in righteousness.
1 John seems to really communicate the gravity of sin. The writer doesn’t give any room for
sin to just be a part of our lives.
That’s what I get from reading it overall. We will see what God starts saying as we dig into the meat
of it.
Coming into this month with the men, I knew that God wanted
to do something awesome with this group of guys. Some of what God had been speaking to me about was BEING MEN
instead of BOYS. He was talking to
me about what the difference is.
One of the things He showed me was that MEN do not live consciously in
sin. So many men go through life
being VERY aware of the things that they struggle with whether that means the
typical guy struggles of lust and other sexual sin or whether that is a
struggle with lying or pride or WHATEVER.
Most of us men are well aware of the sins that have a hold on us.
However, MEN do not live consciously in sin. Ideally, we would be able to be men who
just share everything that is going on inside of us; everything that we are struggling
with. Most men aren’t good at that
though. Most of us are
significantly better at hiding behind expertly-crafted masks, counting on the
fact that we know how to make it uncomfortable for other people when they try
to get past that mask.
Men are good at passively communicating to people that we
have no interest in anyone trying to remove our masks. Just leave the mask where it is and
tell me how good I look in it.
Something that God showed me a while ago though is that this
fear of getting real and letting the REAL person of Christian Roderick be seen
is an issue that is pervasive amongst the men of my generation and maybe the
couple generations ahead of us.
It’s turned a bunch of would-be MEN into BOYS wearing man-masks.
The thing that sucks so much about these masks is that most
of us men have no idea how to drop the mask. We have no idea how to drop our guard and just SHARE what is
going on inside of us. Thus, part
of being a MAN is being in a community of MEN who will help you chip away at
your mask. Part of being a MAN is
surrounding yourself with other MEN who won’t let you pretend like you’re not
fighting a battle against sin.
That was my heart for this month with these 7 other
men. I wanted us to be able to
grow together as men who will not be happy looking around the room and seeing 7
other masks. We hate masks. We all know though that the easiest way
to get rid of the stupid thing is to have 7 other men take their sledgehammers
to it with me.
Part of being a real MAN instead of a real BOY is
surrounding yourself with other MEN who are just as malcontent with the sin in
your life as you either are or wish you were. And in that, part of being a MAN is fighting for your
brothers to be free from the masks that they hide behind. It is the oldest battle in the
book. What did Adam do the moment
that he sinned? He got his hide
on. We are fighting against that
same natural tendency.
All that said, I am really excited that we are studying
through 1 John as a group of men.
This book has, right off the bat, begun to challenge me in the way that
I view sin. It has reminded me of
the gravity of every little bit of sin that allow to have a hold on my
life. I don’t want it. I don’t any of it because the way that
I get to “ABIDE” in Jesus (whatever that means…hah I’ll get back to you after
we talk all about it), I need to be free of sin! That sounds insane but it is what I want to be striving for
and it is what I want to be fighting for in the men that the Lord places around
me.
So yeah, that’s kind of the tone that Jesus has been setting
for me the past week or so. This
month seems like it is actually going by fairly quickly but we still have a
couple of weeks together as men and I know that the Lord has so much more for
us.
I guess that if I was going to give any men out there any
advice from the advice that Jesus has been giving me, it would be this: do NOT be ok with even a tiny bit of
sin in your life. As men, we know
when we have sin in our lives that we have decided not to deal with. Don’t be that BOY who lets sin just sit
there with a hold on you.
That said, the easiest way by FAR to get out of sin is to go
to some men around you that you trust and ask them to HELP you obliterate the
mask-crap that you hide behind.
Surrounding yourself with men who WILL dig into you and who WILL make
you tell them what is really going on is just part of what it means to be a
MAN.
Ok, well now that I am finished with this blog post, I’m
going to get to work on making a video from the last couple days that we have
had here in Thailand. WATER
FESTIVAL. Get ready, it was
awesome. Should be here in a few
days if I can get the internet to post it. Love you all. Miss this girl more than I’ve ever missed anything ever:
