Five Life Gear Checks for Every Man
Diaper Genie? Check. Wool socks? Check. Wife, baby, food, water? Check, check, check, check.
What could go wrong?
Shortly after moving to Colorado in 1995, Nicole and I packed one-year-old Madison and our gear in the car for a weekend of hard-core camping high in the mountains of Western Colorado. After our four-hour drive, we unpacked the car only to find…I forgot the sleeping bags.
Decades later, I’ve regularly mined that story for a variety of life lessons like make sure you’ve got your gear, and you understand what it is for. So, why have I succumbed so many times to forgetting my purpose and forgetting my gear? I see so many other men doing the same. We’ve got the education, the girl, the career, maybe some kids, the hobby, the money, the reputation, and other “gear.”
Here are five pieces of “gear” that I’ve learned are critically important for success.
Surrender. I get it – this word is unpopular. But I’m convinced that Surrender is the most important gear piece on my belt – where I am with God in my spiritual life and, specifically, my relationship with Jesus Christ. Don’t think you Surrender to something? Think again. We all have something we Surrender to. Failing to remember my Surrender “gear” has a cascading danger for everything else.
Purpose. Like the movie The Matrix, men today are trapped in a false world of purpose options. Many men don’t know how to discern enjoying the “gear” (the education, the girl, the career, the kids, the hobby, the money, the reputation) from idolizing the gear. Put another way, the apostle Paul critiques men as inclined to worship the creation rather than the Creator of the creation. We marvel at the painting, and yawn at the Creator. That’s a bad understanding of my Purpose gear.
Career. 90,000 hours is a long time to bow before a false god, but that’s what many American men do Monday through Friday during business hours. 90,000 hours – or one-third of a man’s life – is spent on career and rightly so. Did I contradict myself there? Not at all; God made and ordained work as a good thing, even before Adam and Eve messed it all up. Spending 90,000 hours enjoying one’s work is a good and even holy endeavor, but adoring those hours, or investing them misaligned from your clear Purpose, only toxifies the rest of a man’s life. Your Career gear serves you; you don’t serve your Career gear.
Relationship. While I’m a man of the 80s when relational rules were curated by hombres like Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and Willis, Hollywood’s formula for a man’s Relational gear remains pretty intact: rappel from the helicopter, kill the bad guys, get the babe, toast the sunset.
Hollywood is not completely wrong. Imaginative, and sometimes absurd? Yes. Groundless? No. Hollywood’s relational formula is a caricature of a man’s healthy relationships. We laugh at a political cartoon because the subject is recognizable, even though his features are exaggerated.
Movie hero caricatures reveal – wittingly or not – that a man’s Relationship gear is, at its core, sacrificial. We are wired, in a very tangible sense, to be “dead men walking.” By that I mean that we are men who live sacrificial lives. It’s the “dead man walking” who defends against threats, protects the vulnerable, and buys the ring. The successful man understands his Relational gear.
Sexuality. Yes, let’s talk about a man’s sexual gear and let’s talk about women’s gear, too. The modern American man has found hook-up culture to be a caricature of freedom, only to discover himself addicted to dopamine and enslaved to depths of depravity he once thought for only “really weird people.” Meanwhile, hook-up culture’s women boast of their body-count while hoping to find faithful men. Both sexes horribly misunderstand their Sexuality gear.
A man who misunderstands his sexual gear is like a camper who uses his cans of beans to hammer in tent stakes, chop wood, and feed bears. Nobody is arguing with this fool’s constitutional right to be an idiot. On the other hand, if nobody is forcing you to be an idiot…why insist? The fool will not only go hungry, wet, and cold, but he’ll have to look that grizzly in the eye and mansplain, “all gone means all gone!”
Men, don’t get cocky or foolish with your sexual gear. It’s good gear, and it was meant for good things. Freedom is found in one, not many.
And that’s the big idea behind all our gear. Hammers are for tent stakes and axes are for wood chopping. A right understanding of your Surrender, Purpose, Career, Relationships, and Sexuality gear is critically important for a man’s journey.
