12 Reasons Why We Need Godly Men More Than Ever
by on Oct 15th, 2009 at 2:51 am
#8 - Adulthood Keeps Creeping to a Later Period in Life
When William McCune was 15 years old, his father died. Though he had several older siblings, William’s father, John, left him most of the animals on his estate and some land to sustain them. Today, he can’t even be trusted to drive at age 15, but in 1766, he was running his own estate. By his mid-twenties, his management of the family’s estate was so good that he was able to offer, as a gift, 300 acres to a Presbyterian missionary in order to persuade him to stay and start a church in their region. Oh, did I forget to mention that he did all of this on the far edge of the American wilderness, which is now known as Pennsylvania?
Besides farming hundreds of acres alone, caring for dozens of animals, protecting the villages against attacks by Native Americans, starting churches, and raising a family, he spent the rest of his twenties traveling with his half-brother, John Hinkston, and associate, Daniel Boone, throughout wild Kentucky, and participating in the founding of Louisville. At 30, he left his young family to defend Kentucky from the British during the Revolutionary War, where he was captured by the Shawnee Indians and force marched 400 miles to Detroit as a prisoner of war.
William is my direct ancestor, and at 29 years old, I feel like our generation just isn’t made of the same stock as men of his day. Teenagers, a twentieth-century concept by the way, and “tweenagers” are expected to enjoy life, play all the games they can, and never exceed 40 hours of school work a week. With the exception of the military, which puts a tremendous load of trust upon young men, our culture expects little from young men. Young men expect even less of themselves.
Take, for instance, the description offered by sociologist and professor, Michael Kimmel of the typical state of manhood in its teens and twenties:
Guyland is the world in which young men live. It is both a stage of life, a liminal underlined time span between adolescence and adulthood that can stretch for a decade or more, and a place, or, rather, a bunch of places where guys gather to be guys with each other, unhassled by the demands of parents, girlfriends, jobs, kids, and the other nuisances of adult life. In this topsy-turvy, Peter-Pan mindset, young men shirk the responsibilities of adulthood and remain fixated on the trappings of boyhood, while the boys they still are struggle heroically to prove that they are real men despite all evidence to the contrary.1
What professor Kimmel has observed is the similar to what Alex and Brett Harris have found in their interactions with teenagers across the country. Adulthood is creeping ever further back in life, and the world cannot afford to have such ill-prepared people leading the world in the years to come.
With every crisis there is an opportunity, and the opportunity for Christian young men is that there is plenty of space in our society for those will be intentional about growing into mature adulthood. We could use young men who view their teenage and tweenage years as opportunities to train and gain experience in the “real world.” These will be men who will understand how the world works, both intellectually, doctrinally, and practically, and they will have a ten year advantage on the rest of the men who think that partying is the meaning of life until the thirties arrive.
Men are not made in a day, and God does not owe you maturity. He will work through those whose hearts are His, and what an advantage you have if you would do like Daniel, Joseph, Timothy, and David: set your heart on faithfulness to Him regardless of your young age. What us men should be telling you is that the rewards and privileges that accompany God-honoring manhood far outweigh the trophies and fleeting pleasures that come from the games of youth. My hope and prayer is that this site can be yet another source of encouragement to you from men who are tired of waiting for the rest of the generation to grow up.
1 Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 4.