欢迎大家 I wanna welcome you.
我希望这会是你的一次伟大探险 To what, I hope，will be, for your, a great great Adventure.
因为我们会去调查，探索，发现 For we are going to be probing and exploring and uncovering…
对有些人甚至是揭示 and for some of you guys, we are going to be unraveling…
男人是什么 what a man is,
男人能什么样 what a man can be,
男人应该什么样 what a man should be,
在一些情况下，男人必须做什么 what a man must be on certain occasions
如果他真的想从心里觉得自己是个男子汉的话 if he is going to feel a sense of real masculinity within himself.
You know, there are a lot of guys that don’t feel that way.
There are a lot of guys that just feel inside
like they are drifting.
One of the things that has been so exciting about this particular opportunity that I have had to be with men over the last ten years is to see guys find a center, not out here, but inside themselves, begin to find a place that they can stand a lot firmer, a lot clearer and surer about who they are as men. You know, something wonderful happens when a guy finds that. He becomes a force to be reckoned with when he is clear about who he is and clear about where he is going.
We are going to be talking this year about where we are going as men. We are calling it The Great Adventure. Now are you ready for the Great Adventure? I hope you are. You know, Bill was asking for a show of hands from some of you who have been in Men’s Fraternity I and Men’s Fraternity II and so on and so forth. Just for a moment, I would like to see a show of hands. How many of you guys have never been through Men’s Fraternity? I just want to see if this is your first time. No, is this your first time to go through Men’s Fraternity? Alright, just keep your hands up. That is incredible that you are starting out with us. I think for the rest of us…I think we ought to give you a round of applause for joining with us.
A number of years ago I stumbled into this because some men came to me and said, “You know, we just feel like we need to get together. We feel disconnected.” So I asked them why they felt that way, and there were a lot of different comments but nothing really clear. One of the guys in the group said, “You know, I would just like to get with some other guys to be real. You know, kind of like we did when we were back in the fraternity.”
Well, I was in a fraternity in college and I am not sure I want to go back there! But I think what he was trying to tell me was that…You know, you finish college, you get out into the work world, and there are all these forces that work there. And slowly, though you have a lot of superficial relationships, somehow you find yourself in a place one day where you are alone with your feelings, your thoughts, your dreams, your ambitions and your fears. Somehow the world has caused you to put this mask on where you can talk about golf, about the Razorbacks and about business deals; but you can’t talk about you. So where can you go to do that? And I think that is really what started the success of this particular ministry opportunity that we have had in the community. We started with, you know, about fifty guys over on Markham at the Razorback Gym years ago just talking about different subjects. Then we eventually got to this issue of what it means to be a man, and all of a sudden more and more men started coming every year. First, there were a couple of hundred, then three hundred and then four hundred…and a couple of years ago, seven hundred. Is that not amazing?
But let me tell you, as amazing as it is, it says something. It makes a statement about the state of masculinity in our country. It says that men are hungry to get together and talk about what it means to be a man. It means that men need some sense of direction. They need to explore their masculinity and who they are, what they are, and where they are going. And that is what we are going to do this year.
In fact, I want to tell you that Men’s Fraternity will basically do three things for you. Here is the first one. It is going to be a place where you can talk openly…and I want to say openly and safely…about what it means to be a man. It is really important that we have a place where we can talk openly and safely.
You know, every year when we finish Men’s Fraternity, we kind of take a survey of what the guys experienced when they went through this year together. One of the things that comes out of every year that I think is so important is men will tell me, “I discovered I am not alone. I am not alone in my feelings, in my fears, in my sense of what I am dealing with. You know, I thought I was all alone. Everybody else looked like they were doing great. I asked Joe how he is doing and he said, ‘Fine.’ Everybody says, ‘Fine.’ But there are things in me that are not so necessarily fine and things I don’t really even understand. So Men’s Fraternity…as I listen to other guys talk in my small group, they help me understand that I am not alone. They were all dealing with the same things.” I want you to know we all are. We are all dealing with the same issues in life. We all need encouragement. We all need guys to cheer for us. We all need a sense of companionship where we can talk openly with one another. Guys desperately need that. I need that.
Secondly, it is a place where I think over the course of the year…if you will hang with us through the course of the year, if you will be a finisher, then it is going to allow you to personally process your own masculinity. Now I think every guy needs that. A lot of us grew up with distant dads, disconnected dads, so we lost something in that. So maybe we are still in the process of recovering that, maybe you are. But even if you had a dad who was a strong nurturer and leader, guys still come to a place where they get cast out in the world on their own, and they have to process their masculinity now alone; so they need a place where they can go and connect with other guys to begin that process. I want you to know that is here. That is here in a small group. That is here in lectures. That is here just in the friendships that will be formed over the course of this year.
If you have been through Men’s Fraternity, you guys know it is also a place where we can come and laugh at ourselves a little bit. It is good to laugh. It is good for the soul. And probably nobody does that better for me (and if you have been in Men’s Fraternity I and II…) than Dave Barry. I thought I would start off Men’s Fraternity III by just reading you a little selection so we could laugh a little bit at ourselves before we go on into the rest of the session here today.
In this particular thing that I found, he is just talking about the differences in men and women in regards to their values around the home in cleanliness. Here is what he says: “Women and guys have profoundly different concepts of clean. When a woman cleans the bathroom, she will go in there with numerous specialized products and implements for cleansing, scouring, shining and deodorizing the glass, the porcelain, the tile. She will spend even hours on the grout. She will eradicate dirt on a molecular level. She will track down and destroy each individual mildew spore. She can actually hear the germs and she can make them scream. Whereas, the guy, if instructed to clean the bathroom, will go in there with a single paper towel and the first spray bottle he finds. It might be Windex or it could even be Raid. He will pay no attention to whether or not he is actually getting the bathroom cleaner, because he really believes that when fungal growth reaches a certain size and aggressiveness-level, it is time to find a new place to live. And then there is laundry. Let’s consider this excerpt from the following letter:
Dear Dave,
My husband announced one morning that he had discovered the previous night on the eve of a two day business trip, that he was ought of underwear. Why he told me, I don’t know. I never tell him when I am out of underwear. (It’s true, isn’t it guys?) Anyway, he decided to remedy the situation in true guy fashion by washing exactly three sets of underwear, thus disregarding the bulging hamper full of the rest of his underwear which presumably he thought would wash itself.
Signed,
Allison Schuller from Albuquerque.
This is a perfect example of the kind of hurtful, stereotypical, blanket statement about guys that women as a group are always making. Just because Mrs. Schuller’s husband doesn’t do the laundry doesn’t mean that there aren’t millions upon millions of males who do their laundry and then hang it out to dry under the three suns of the planet Zomar, where they obviously live. I will admit, however, that most guys here on earth do not do more laundry than they absolutely have to. Why is this? Are guys simply worthless, irresponsible scum? Yes! But a woman wouldn’t let a guy do her laundry anyway unless he underwent years of training because she assumes he would screw it up and cause her garments to shrink down to cute little Tinkerbell clothes or transmaterialize in the dryer similar to what happened to that unfortunate man in the movie The Fly. So she would wind up, for example, with a brassiere that had pant legs. I am not defending guys here. I am just saying that a lot of us have developed a powerful laundry phobia and will continue to suffer from it as long as women roll their eyes and shove us away from the washing machine when we are about to, for example, wash our delicate silks in the same load as our boat cover. Yes, we guys have a problem in these areas, but it is not our fault. We are talking about nature here. It is a lot like tapeworms. Tapeworms tend to have a negative public image because they are repulsive organisms that get inside people’s intestines and eat people’s food and grow to lengths of sixty feet. But is it their fault? No! It is their nature! And we guys are no different. In fact, guys are exactly like tapeworms except in one area: Tapeworms are more likely to help with the dishes.”
II. A Brief Men’s Fraternity? Orientation
Well, we want to laugh over the course of the year as well and we want to talk about things that make us guys, but most importantly we want to talk about what makes us men. And I thought maybe just to start us out we would do a big picture overview of Men’s Fraternity by giving you just a diagram of orientation. It is there on your outline and we will put it up here on the screen.
MF1 MF2 MF3
Name: The Quest for Authentic Manhood A Man at Work
and at Home A Man and His World: The Great Adventure?
Focus: A Man’s Core Identity A Man’s Chief Responsibility A Man’s Chosen Destiny
Chief Elements:
A Man’s Wounds; Definition of Manhood; Overview of Manhood Issues How a Man Enjoys His Work; How a Man Relates Successfully to a Woman Rediscovering the Adventure of Life; Understanding His Design; Developing a Satisfying Life Focus
Major Challenge:
The Boy in You Must Die The Man in You Must Step Forward The Adventurer in You Must Live
Passion:
Seizing Your Manhood Establishing Your Manhood Maximizing Your Manhood
Direction:
Go
Fight Win
I want to give you a sense of what Men’s Fraternity is because it is really a three year curriculum, and over that course of three years we are building in a direction. Now, for those of you who are here for the very first time, I want you to know you are in the third year. This is a whole new Men’s Fraternity this year. Next year, we will start Men’s Fraternity I again and go
I, II, and III. But to give you an overview, to give everybody an overview to kind of bring us up to speed, let’s just kind of walk through what the names of Men’s Fraternity I, II and III are. The name of Men’s Fraternity I was called “The Quest for Authentic Manhood.” It is kind of a foundational level concerning manhood. Men’s Fraternity II was “A Man at Work and At Home,” focused on kind of two specific areas that predominantly are central to a man’s life, his career and his family. Then now here in Men’s Fraternity III we are talking about a man and his world. It is what is out beyond that and it is what is in his future. It is called “A Man and His World: The Great Adventure.” The first one was kind of a ground floor, Men’s Fraternity II was the walls, and now we are putting the roof on the house of masculinity.
The focus of Men’s Fraternity I was a man’s core identity. It deals with identity issues, kind of basic concepts. But then Men’s Fraternity II dealt with a man’s responsibilities, his chief responsibilities. Then Men’s Fraternity III (what you are in here) is a man’s destiny.
The chief elements in Men’s Fraternity I was a man’s wounds. It is looking back into his past and looking at the things that maybe misshaped part of his masculinity. So we do a lot of probing into a man’s past in Men’s Fraternity I. We give a definition of manhood, a place where guys can finally stand. What I think most men in America still can’t do is…if they were asked the question, “What is a man?” If you were asked the question, you guys who are here for the very first time, “What is a man?” could you give us a succinct passionate definition of it and say, “That is what I am living to be”? You see, most guys can’t. Most guys just draw a blank at that point. So in Men’s Fraternity I we give this definition of manhood and we overview some basic manhood issues.
Then in Men’s Fraternity II, the chief elements are how a man enjoys and engages his work in a whole new way; then, secondly, how he successfully relates to a woman, which is a big part of a man’s life.
Finally, in this one, Men’s Fraternity III, what we are going to be doing is rediscovering some of the adventure of life. We will talk about why we need to do that here in a moment. But it is understanding who I am. What are the uniquenesses that I have as a man? So we are going to be talking about design issues, how men are designed, how you are uniquely designed, and then discovering what I call “a satisfying life focus.”
The major challenge if you were with us in Men’s Fraternity I was this call that we made, “The boy must die.” Now if you were in Men’s Fraternity I, you know what that means. But there comes a place where a man has to put away childish things and he has to move on in his life to what I call “real manhood issues.” So “the boy in you must die” in Men’s Fraternity I.
In Men’s Fraternity II, it is more of “the man in you must step forward.” Step forward into those areas that are most central to your life. Step forward in the work place with conviction, a whole different conviction that goes beyond just making a paycheck. It is being a force in the work place. Then also stepping forward in your home as the leader of your home, and how you relate to your wife and your children, the responsibilities you have there.
Then in this particular Men’s Fraternity, what we are doing is the Adventure. We are talking about the Adventure you must live because somewhere along life’s path, a lot of guys lose the adventure of life; it just becomes hard.
The passion of Men’s Fraternity I was seizing your manhood. The passion of Men’s Fraternity II was establishing your manhood. And the passion of this Men’s Fraternity III is maximizing your manhood.
In fact, if you look in those, that last one on passion...For those of you guys who know the definition of manhood, I see the really central part of Men’s Fraternity I is rejecting passivity. Do you remember that? That is really what Men’s Fraternity I is all about. It is finally stepping up and saying, “I am going to be a man.” Men’s Fraternity II is accepting responsibility, those chief responsibilities. Men’s Fraternity III is now leading courageously…not your family and not in the work place…leading you courageously in this Great Adventure so that you might receive all that God has for you in this life. That is why I would put the directives of the three simply this way: Men’s Fraternity I is “Go!” Men’s Fraternity II is “Fight!” and Men’s Fraternity III is “Win!” Go, fight and win in life as a man.
Now, let’s just go back, as you see this diagram where it says under the chief elements, “Rediscovering the Adventure of Life” and “Understanding My Design” and “Establishing a Satisfying Life Focus”—while that diagram stays up there just for a moment, I just want to stop there and ask, why did we focus there? Why is the chief element Rediscovering the Adventure of Life? What does that mean? Well, I want to do a little inventory and see if you have some of the need that Men’s Fraternity III seeks to address. I want to do that just by taking a personal inventory with you for a moment by asking you some questions. Just sit there and reflect on this.
Do you like where you are? As a man, do you like where you are right now? When you think of yourself as the man, is the future exciting to you? I mean, we are talking about going on and doing more of the same. Is that exciting to you? Or is that something you are saying, “No, I kind of want to escape”? For some of you guys who started out so strong in your twenties and maybe even into your thirties…and as you went on and even as you succeeded, life just kept saying, “Okay, you are doing good.” And what it kept loading on your pack is just more responsibility. Have you gotten to a place kind of in your mid-years where doing more of what you are doing feels burdensome rather than exciting?
You know, there are a lot of guys that get there. That has been the constant refrain, as we will see in a moment, in human history. Guys get tired midway through life. I like what Ed Siseman says in this statement. He said, “Men past forty get up at night, look out at city lights and wonder where they made the wrong turn and why life is so long.” Does that strike a cord in you? For some of you guys in mid-life? Do you know why you are here? That is a metaphysical question. Do you know why you are here in life? Do you know what you are here for? Is there a sense of calling on your life? Is there a sense of destiny to your life about where you are going? Is there a cause in your life that you are excited about that is bigger than you? Do you have a growing sense that something is dying in you but you don’t know what it is? You can feel it, but you can’t express it. But there is this growing sense that maybe something is missing. Do you know what makes you come alive as a man? Do you know the places where if you swim into those streams, it is like life becomes exciting again as opposed to deadening? Do you know what those areas are? And, finally, are you having fun in life? You know, it seems that guys…after awhile they don’t have any fun anymore. They are still doing some of the same recreations, but it just doesn’t have the thrill. The thrill is gone. We want to explore what makes a man come alive. What brings adventure to his life? What gives him a sense of destiny and calling? That is what Men’s Fraternity III is all about.
You know, I love the verse in Psalm 90. It says this, “Teach us to number our days.” It is kind of big picture verse. It is one of those flybys where all of a sudden you can see all of life just for a moment in a verse. “Teach us to number our days that we…” and I am going to put we as men…“might present to you, God, a heart of wisdom,” that when we look over our life, whether we are in our twenties or thirties or forties, there is kind of a heart of wisdom there. We are glad. We get past our twenties and look back and go, “I am glad I did that.” We get past our thirties and look back on our thirties and go, “I am glad I did that.” And all the way until you finally get to the end of your life and you go, “I am glad I lived that way.” “Teach us to number our days,” all of them, to live with the big picture in mind “that we may present to Thee a heart of wisdom.” Then he says, “O satisfy us that we may sing for joy.” And I love the last line because it is so important, “And that we…” We are men in this case… “that we might be glad all our days.”
III. The Goal of This Year’s Men’s Fraternity?: To help you finish this life with satisfaction and enter the next life with confidence.
Now I tell you, when I read a verse like that, I go, “That is what I want for my life!” So let me tell you, out of that, here is the goal that we have in mind for this year. The goal of this year’s Men’s Fraternity is just simply this: to help you finish this life with satisfaction and enter the next life with confidence. For you younger guys, it is to help stretch you to think long term in your life. For those of us who are little bit older, it is to help us rethink where we are and maybe reinvent ourselves a little bit. It is to help each of us finish this life with personal satisfaction and enter, as we will talk about later, the next life with confidence. Maybe you haven’t thought about the next life, but we are going to think about it. We are headed for somewhere and we are going to finish it sometime. If your philosophy is that when you are finished, you are done; that is one thing. I am going to encourage you to think even beyond that, to enter the next life with confidence.
IV. Assumptions I Will Be Making
A. Our Creator desires for us to live a meaningful adventure.
Let me give you some assumptions that I am going to be making. I will give you four assumptions that I will be making as we go through this time together. Here is the first one.
I believe our Creator desires for us to live a meaningful adventure. Our Creator desires for us to live a meaningful adventure. Now how do I get to that? Well, you know, I open the pages of Scripture. If you open up a Bible and read in Genesis, one of the first things you read is what God said to Adam, the first man. He said, “Adam, I want you to be fruitful and multiply and I want you to subdue the earth.” Now just think about that for a moment. Here is the first man and how did he start? He didn’t start by God saying, “Now, you know, I have got this little plot of ground and I want you to till it, this little garden.” He said to the first man, “I want you to subdue the earth”! Now let me tell you, that is quite a pill to swallow there. Now that is an adventure. That is global. When Jesus was with His disciples right before He left, He turned to His disciples and said, “Go into all the world.” Now for some guys who had never been much further than the Sea of Galilee, going into all the world was an incredible adventure.
Then you have Jesus Himself saying to us as men, “I have come that you might have life and have it more abundantly.” Now in all of those little snapshots, at least from a spiritual perspective, the word I would like to extract from that is the word “adventure.” It was an adventure for Adam. It was an adventure for those fishermen. It was an adventure for that tax gatherer who first followed around the Son of God. It is an adventure that Jesus is inviting people into. I believe that comes from heaven to any man. The shout down to us is, “I want you to have an adventure in your life”!
B. Many men often miss the spirit of adventure in their lives; others lose it somewhere along life’s journey.
Secondly, many men, I think, often miss this spirit of adventure (and they miss it sometimes totally in their lives), but I think more often others lose it somewhere along life’s journey. Life doesn’t become an adventure anymore.
My father-in-law gave me his library several years ago. He was a history professor and one of the things he gave me were The Harvard Classics, fifty volumes of the great works of Western Civilization. I just began to thumb through some of those books and read some of the English poets, and one of the things that kept standing out in the English poets was that the guys always seemed blue to me. They always were talking about the glories of youth, but there was never any sense of glory in midlife or old age. It is kind of like we are pining away for Friday night football, or the baseball diamond, or what it was like in the fraternity, or when we were kids running around with our friends and stuff like that…making, you know, forts and things like that. But now at 25, 35, life just feels like responsibility. So we always look back. That is what they were doing.
Do you know what I found? I found as I read a lot of philosophers, they say the same thing. They continually give this warning to men like, Manhood is a half-life…and then you just brood the second half away. For instance, here are some quotes. Here is Thoreau. You have heard this a million times, haven’t you? “The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” That is so discouraging. How about this quote from Albert Switzer, “The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man even as he lives.” Our how about this quote from Dante, “In the middle of the road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood…” In the middle of my life, I kind of woke up and I was in a dark wood…“and I was wholly lost.” Evidently that is an experience that men have as they navigate through their lives, that somehow when they get to the mid-portion of their life, they begin to...it is like, “I have kind of made a living, but I haven’t made a life.”
You know, I was a big Beatles fan when I grew up in the 60’s, and my daughter gave me for Christmas The Beatles 1 album, the remake of all their #1 hits. And I thought, you know, even those guys kind of sound the alarm a little bit. As you follow their little journey along, as you listen to their records, you hear then start out with the “I want to hold your hand” kind of experience, kind of the vitality of virulent, young masculinity; but then as they go on, they get depressed. And then you have this song (I was driving along the other day and I was listening to this song.), “Nowhere Man.” Remember “Nowhere Man”? “He is a real nowhere man, living in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody. Doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he is going to, isn’t he a bit like you and me? He is as blind as he can be, knows not what he wants to be. Nowhere man, can you still see at all?”
A lot of men live just that way. And if you are a young man, sometimes if you are not clear about where you are going, where you are going to find yourself is at the end of an alley with a big, giant brick wall. Men lose their spirit of adventure somewhere along the line.
C. Men need an on-going adventure “to stay alive!”
Thirdly, here is my assumption. Men need on-going adventure. They need on-going adventure. Just ask Michael Jordan. I mean, look at what has happened to Michael. You know he finished in such a grand style. Would you not have wanted to finish your basketball career with that last shot? But you know what? Sitting around a desk in a corporate office with no vision for your life is not a place for a guy like Michael Jordan. It is not a place for you either, if you don’t know where you are going with it. And so what are we going to do? What do men do when they don’t know where they are going? They do exactly what Michael Jordan is doing. You want to go where? Back. Back! That is where the adventure was. It is not going to be there, but he is going to try to squeeze one more drop of a little adventure out of it because men were built for adventure. Some of us make the opposite mistake. We go out into life and it is an adventure at the beginning and we try to control it. And after awhile when we tame life, when we get it all tamed…we have got the mortgage under control and the kids under control, the wife under control…all of a sudden we look up and we go, “This is no fun! I played it safe so long that life is no fun anymore.” Men need ongoing adventure.
D. An adventuresome man lives differently than others who blindly plod onward.
Finally, I believe an adventuresome man often lives differently than others who will blindly plod onward. But for him to do that he will have to make some courageous choices, and he will have to take some courageous chances, and at times he is going to have to break with conformity.
Do you know what I would love to do in the course of this year with the guys who are in this room? There are going to be different ones of you who will have this experience. But it would be great to give some of you men permission to take a chance, to recapture the dream or a desire that is within you and go for it!...rather than just keeping pressing it down thinking, “Someday I will get there.” The more you press on that, the deader it feels inside the interior of your soul. Some of you need permission to change your job because you were never meant for that job. Some of you need permission to jump out and try something brand new, to take on a new adventure for yourself, whether it is a hobby or an adventure of some kind. You need to be able to do that. Or you need to come up with a cause that you can live for that is bigger than you. You have this world mastered, but that is not why you are in this world, just to master this. You were called into a world to contribute. What is it that would excite you so that when you think about it you get tingles? You see, I hope we can give you permission to go for it, try it, risk it, step out there. That is what masculinity was made for.
So those are the assumptions. Our Creator desires us to live this meaningful adventure. Men oftentimes miss it. Men desperately need it. But to get there, you are going to have to take some chances, some courageous chances. You are going to have to lead courageously as we talked about back in Men’s Fraternity I—not others, but yourself, yourself.
V. Promises for Any Man Who Completes All 20 Sessions
Now some promises and we will be finished and you can get in your groups. Let me just give you seven promises I think I can make and deliver on.
A. You will have opportunities to think deeply about who you are and where you are going while making some significant personal discoveries in the process.
First, I think you are going to have some great opportunities to do something men oftentimes don’t do, and that is think deeply about who you are and where you are going while making some significant personal discoveries in the process. To think deeply about who you are and where you are going, and in that process make some personal discoveries. Now I want to give you a warning: it is hard to do that. We are going to be really simple here because I am simple, but it is hard to think deeply about who you are. Most of us would rather do what young men do, and here is the way young men go into life. You know, after they finish college or finish high school, here is the mode that we go into (Robert walks around stage with his head down), and we keep going just like that until we hit a wall. And all I am saying is that what we want to do for you guys who are young starting out and you guys who are old trying to rethink is…we want to get you to go and look up, look around and ask some deep philosophical questions about who you are, what you are, where you really should be going in life and then to do it! So we are going to give you that opportunity.
Ephesians 5 puts it this way, “Therefore, be careful how you walk (or how you live your life), not as unwise men but as wise, making…” and this is the key phrase…“making the most of your time,” because you have only got a short period of time. It will be over before you know it. “Because,” it says, “the days are evil.” And what does it mean by “the days are evil”? It is evil because it will steal away that abundant life that we just mentioned a minute ago. These days are meant to take life from you. It is to bring you to those dead ends. They are evil in that sense. Manhood is more than a half-life; manhood is a full life. But where is it? That is what we want to probe.
B. You will have the opportunity to interact with other men who can help you think more clearly and objectively about your life.
Secondly, you will have opportunities to interact with other men who can help you think more clearly and objectively about your life. The Proverbs say that is a good thing. Proverbs 27:17 just says, “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” And that is what we need. We need to rub up with other guys who are going through the same experience we are and learn from them, listen to them, let them hear us, reflect back to us what they are hearing from us to help us begin to bring that dream back out, that adventure back out and learn how we can recapture it for our life…or embellish it in some cases. Some of you guys feel like you are on an adventure; you just need to embellish it a little more, polish it.
That is why we have small groups. Now when Bill comes up here in just a moment and breaks us up, some of you guys aren’t going to be in a small group. You are going to need to come down and talk to him about how to get into a small group. The rest of us will break into small groups and answer the questions that are there at the very bottom of your outline. But I want to tell you this (and we have heard it every year): I will try to do a good job every week, but the small group experience will be the most valuable moment of the whole morning, and you don’t want to miss that.
C. You will learn how to focus your life using a Life Focus Chart.
Thirdly, you will learn how to focus your life using a Life Focus Chart. It is a little tool that I am going to give you later on in the year that will help you. It is something you can keep in your wallet that will help you rethink your life all the time. It is the simplest thing I can give you. It is the only thing, by the way, I am going to ask you to do all year. But I am going to tell you, it is going to be a real challenge for you to do it. And if you have that, if you can begin to craft that, you can begin to put real flesh on your adventure and you can review it any time. It is just a very simple, little tool. But I am going to give you that and have you work on it and work with the group on it. Then you will have something that when you get up in the morning, you can look at that and go, “Man! That is what I am going to do. That is where I am going, and I am excited about it.”
C. You will develop a personal mission statement.
Fourthly, you will develop a personal mission statement that I think helps you define the purpose of your life. That is quite a challenge in and of itself. You know, (there have been times where you may have heard this but…) you will walk through a graveyard and you will look at these gravestones, and you will see people’s names there on those little grave heads. It will say “such and such” and it will give his birth and his death, and then his whole life is what? Just a dash! …and there is nothing there. And you are going, “Well, what was there?” And I have been thinking about my life, even preparing this and I thought, “You know, when somebody walks by my grave plot and they look down, what do I want them to see? “
So I wrote it out. Here is what I want them to look at. Robert Lewis, 1949-20?? ...whatever it is going to be. But then over that dash, “Mission accomplished!” I want them to say, “What is that?” “Mission accomplished!” I want them to know that as a man before God, I believed that I could figure out my life, where I am going, and I could live it in such a way that it would be an adventure; and I would do what I believe my Creator called me to do as well as how He designed me to be, and it was exciting from start to finish. And let me tell you, it has been. I can offer that with passion. But at the end, I want to be able to look back and say, “I have accomplished what I was here for.” It is not just a negative sign; it is mission accomplished. And I am leaving this life with satisfaction and I am moving on to the next life with confidence.
E. You will gain a better understanding of your unique design and what makes you come alive.
Next, you will gain a better understanding of your unique design and what makes you come alive. In January, Bill Wellons is going to help walk through a little tool on discovering your design. We are going to help you go through a process where you discover, through what he is going to offer you, what excites you about life. You will be able to finally bring it out and objectify it. You will go, “When I am in these places doing these kinds of things, this is me.” We are going to help you get to that and use that to help you more effectively formulate how to find places in this world where you can go invest…whatever that means. Let me tell you, that would be exciting, wouldn’t it? To know what really excites you? To have that objectified and to use that in those places?
F. You will have the opportunity to choose your future!
Then, finally, you will have the opportunity, in many ways, to choose your future. Life is a choice, guys. Did you know that? Tom Patterson writes, “The greatest tragedy of all is for a man to be managed by circumstances and live a half-dead life.” I don’t want to be managed by circumstances; I want to be managed by my choices. You know, even the Scriptures appeal to us that life is a choice.
When God spoke to the nation Israel, He said, “You see, I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse,” and then He says, “so choose life that you may live.” Life is a choice. You can choose your future to some degree. You can’t do it fully, but to some degree. And in many large degrees, you can choose the type of life you are going to have and the adventure you are going to have and the excitement that is going to be there. But there is a process that you have to go through to discover that. I want you men to be able to choose life and know that you are choosing life and be excited about that.
1. Young men can get a jump start on an exciting first half adventure in life.
For some of you young men, for instance, I want you to have a jump start on an exciting first half of life. If you are between the ages of 20 and 40, I am going to call you a young man, alright? And give you that jump start. Yeah, there you go. You can clap for yourselves, you sorry group! Young guys are warriors and they are busy. A lot of times they have blind ambition, and if they are not careful, over time they become the dark warrior who does a lot of hurt to themselves and to others. So it is really good to figure out, “What do I need to do, not only to bring my life into orbit with these responsibilities that I have been given, but also to do more than just make a living?” That is what I really want to call you young guys to—more than just making a living, making a life. And don’t do what so many other men do, which is make a living and try to figure out life in their mid-forties and fifties. You can start doing that now, and we want to help you do that.
2. Older men can retool for an exciting second half adventure in life.
Then for us older men, forty and up, I want to help you retool for an exciting second half adventure, because you guys are established and you have at least mastered or survived the first half of life. I mean, you have got the car, the house, the dog, the kids, the responsibilities and debt and a lot of other things. And what I don’t want you to do is be crushed under that. I want you to retool so you can have an exciting life because out there is an adventure that can thrill you, can encourage you, can motivate you. I want you to be like Abraham.
Do you know what it says of Abraham in Genesis 25? Here is this old man. It makes this one line at the end of his life and it says, “Abraham died,” and then it adds this statement, “satisfied with life.” Wouldn’t you like to be Abraham at that moment? What an adventure he had. As a young guy in Ur, big businessman, successful—and then God calls him to His design. He says, “Abraham, leave all this and go to a land that I will tell you about later when you are on the journey.” Man, that took courage. But it started Abraham on an adventure that was more than just making a living; it started him on an adventure that made a life. It was rugged and it was challenging. There were times he failed, but at the end of his life he could look back over it and say, “I am satisfied.” I covet that for every guy here, that you would be thrilled with your life. Choosing your future is what we want to explore and probe and grapple with in the year that is ahead of us. We want you to have an adventure.
Let me close with a statement from John Eldredge in the book Wild at Heart that we gave away. He says this: “Adventure with all its requisite danger and wildness is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man. The masculine heart needs a place where nothing is prefabricated, modular, non-fat, zip-locked, franchised, on-line or microwaveable; where there are no deadlines, cell phones or committee meetings, just simply where there is room for the soul; where finally the geography around us corresponds to the geography of our heart. Deep in a man’s heart are some fundamental questions that simply cannot be answered at the kitchen table. Who am I? What am I made of? What am I destined for? It is fear that keeps a man at home where things are neat and orderly and under his control. But the answers to his deepest questions are not to be found on television or at a ballgame or in the refrigerator. These answers require a courageous Adventurer whose quest is nothing less than the best of life.” This is what Men’s Fraternity III is going to be all about.