12 Reasons Why We Need Godly Men More Than Ever
by on Oct 19th, 2009 at 12:05 am
#9 - Our Sunday Evenings are Composed of Cartoons
Every Sunday evening, a major television network produces almost three hours of cartoon programs. Apparently, the demand for cartoons among the 18-25 male demographic is so strong that they keep adding new irreverent show after irreverent show. “Men” like Homer, Cleveland, Peter, and Stan line up to demonstrate masculinity at its cultural finest. Now, Christian males can start their day in the Word and end it with the absurd.
Maybe complaining about cartoons during prime time television makes me sound like I’m becoming an old cuss. After all, we really can’t expect to learn much about manhood from television programs in the first place. Most of television is designed to keep us simultaneously glued to the couch and inattentive to the real world, with all of its needs, around us.
What bothers me is not the fact that a network has decided to run cartoons. I am more bothered by the fact that the males in our generation are clamoring for more. Television companies obey the consumer, and we, as the consumers, seem to want greater and stronger doses of programs that waste our time and serve as little more than a spiritual anesthetic. Seriously, do we really have no better way to invest our talents for the Kingdom?
The soul of a man was not designed to rot in such hedonistic or diversionary comas. In fact, much of our wasting of time is due to having a passion for life, but not knowing the right ways in which to funnel our energy. In the absence of purpose, we spend our passion on less meaningful, yet more measurable activities, like watching cartoons, obsessing about sports, or taking over some other world with our MMORPG clan.
All of this diverted energy comes at the cost of the building of discipline, development of character, and reaching for meaningful goals that God has designed to perfectly match our abilities and passions. We develop weakness of heart, not strength, and every day that we waste makes us less prepared to impact our culture for Christ by proclaiming Him and leading people to the cross. We become, as poet Rupert Brooke once penned, “half men.”
Gentlemen, you are being treated like little children in the free market by culture at-large because that is what they think of you. To be honest, we have earned the distinction of being worth little more to the world than as consumers of fantasy programs. We need to recognize that the lack of expectations is conditioning us in a direction that does not lead to holy living and humble leading.
The men who are fit for service in God’s kingdom in our generation will not necessarily ban their exposure to or enjoyment of all forms of sport, entertainment, recreation, or even escapist art. There are men of God who have been able to utilize all of above for the proclamation of Jesus. Immediately, two fiction writers, J. R. R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis come to mind as examples. However, the men who made such impact did so only after focusing their own lives, calendars, and efforts upon their work. They were not mindless consumers like us.
What we must learn to do is control our consumption of these activities. We need to seriously inspect the amount of time we devote to meaningless pleasures, “lesser dreams,” as Pastor Bill Hybels would say, and earn reputations for being worth more, as a young man, than that.