S
I'm also a man. I do many of the things mentioned above. I generally have not had any issues losing my gender until a few minutes ago. Ladies? If one of y'all don't snag Mr Seatbelt, then I will.
~swoons~
You had me at "I smoke meats".
~swoons~
You had me at "I smoke meats".
more seriously:
the more I reflect on Seoul's thread prompt, the more refined my answer is/would be. my struggles with this topic are primarily rooted in 3 things, 2 of which I am willing to discuss here. The first, though not chronologically is of course my new role as sole parent. I do not resent this role in any way, but see that it can open doors for the enemy to fire arrows of doubt at me. The other which I will put name to is the absence of my father in my own rearing. His job required extensive and exhaustive travel and I lacked much male influence in my life, until i was older and simply lacked Positive male influence in my life, for I had sought out that influence on my own and found it, and it was a poor one to find indeed. I was never handed over the secret handshake to being a man as I came of age. Luckily I realize now that there is not a secret clubhouse that I lack the password to. I can Create this for my own son, so that he can not be lacking in this way. I already am more involved in his life than my father ever was in mine, so I feel that I can extinguish the flames of fear that the devil tries to trap me in over whether or not my son will have the same experience as I did. I realize, too, that my daughter will not have an analogous experience, as I have already taken steps to ensure that she is ushered into womanhood with loving womanly hands.
This all brings me back to, well, me. What do I do when I feel Unmanly? I remember that I am wearing many hats, that my life has uniquely shaped me into who I am, that no matter how much I choose to mess myself up previously, that God Has Remade Me - and is CONTINUING ( Philippians 1:6 NIV "6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus."), and I Know that Surely God has made me into the MAN i am because it is the MAN he wants me to be. I have in the past handful of years suffered some blows, but Jehovah God made me Man enough to rise to the occasion - and made me Man enough to know never to rise with out first kneeling to pray. So if I feel un-manly I remember that I am what God has made of me, and that He is not done with me yet, know that Lord God has placed me where I need to be in the moment, and that while it is not all the stuff of rugged blue jeans & pickup-truck ad's, in the things that I do, right down to sweetly singing my daughter to sleep, I am more of a man than a great sea of so called manly men.
I'd rather take my daughter to a tea party and delicately stitch the arm back on my son's stuffed hedgehog than go to a gun show held on the grounds of a monster truck rally, and I am thankful God made me manly enough to make that choice, hypothetical though it may be.