Our Father is working to take the death out of us, out of men, out of our sons and daughters, out of our wives, out of His children. He does it with kindness, He does it with fire and He does it as a loving Father. While God is doing this life-giving work, our enemy is doing all he can to betray us, to have us betray ourselves and those we love, and to make us think and believe we love death rather than life.

While we do them, we love our sins more than we love God; we prefer them at that moment more than we desire to be with Jesus. We might as well say to him, “Father, I know Jesus suffered and died to deliver me from this fatal attraction, but for the moment, right now, I want what I want and I care more about what I want than what you did on the cross to deliver me from my darkness.” Try saying that to God about the mess you’re in. He might appreciate that more than an apology when your guilt is driving you insane.

I was in my middle 20s, caught in loneliness and self-gratification, developing unhealthy habits and patterns of sin that easily could have destroyed my life. I knew it, hated it, but the lonely call of the wild on Friday nights was too much. Too much, that is, until I sat in my apartment one Friday night and looked straight at the cross and told Jesus I preferred my sin over what He had done to deliver me from my sin and the kingdom of darkness. I wept that night; I think Jesus smiled. And it was the turning point for me. God was taking the death out of me.

Men live in the shade because they do not like the full light of day. Inside our secrets and shame, we prefer the half-light of truth to the bright light of life Jesus has promised. In these shadows of half-light, we can control our image, live in two separate realities, have a visible and vocal self-righteousness, enjoy “emotional affairs” which are nothing but adultery, cut business deals that are not fair for all parties, hide from who we really are, and project the life we want others to see. Unlike Moses, we have chosen “the pleasures of sin for a season.” This is the death and darkness our good Father will incinerate to take it and the last ashes of our death out of us until the Light of Life shines in us like the morning sun.

These “preferences”, dark comforts, self-gratifying pleasures are the predictable traps and ambushes that we knowingly walk into, even though we realize the danger. Those waking moments inside the snares we helped the enemy set for ourselves are the loneliest moments a man will ever know on earth. We can be among family and friends, and in our churches, but still be men of the walking dead.

There’s not much hope for a guy who persists in isolation without honest friends. Not much help or friendship for a man whose matrix of life and fulfillment is performance. I see it all the time. A man’s life disappears before his very eyes and suddenly, he does not know who he can trust and no longer trusts himself. In fact, he trusts no one unless he is lucky enough to have one last friend who knows how to help a brother find his life again. What he resisted before because it was light and life he now runs to in desperation. When we do go to Him, our good Father continues his work to take away our death so we can be made alive by his son, our Lord Jesus, and find comfort and help, direction and joy, peace and forgiveness, friendship and hope because the Holy Spirit generates rich life and love within us. Home never looked so good and all our good Father requires is our honest cooperation!

I got another fresh start in my early 40s when my father, then in his 70s, told his children and their spouses about some sin in his middle years that had deeply hurt others. He did this by way of confession and telling us his story. His honesty, despite the temporary loss of trust among his children, was the key to finally getting honest about my own secrets before they got a choke-hold on my life. My father’s desire to live in truth despite the anguish of telling his story was what God used to set me free. Dad went home to Jesus last summer, the last bit of death sent out of him by Our Father.

What is the first memory you have of being utterly and profoundly alone?

Mine was in second or third grade. I had an embarrassing mishap made worse by a teacher who would not let go of it, called me out in front of the class, detained me after school, and drove me home to my mother to make me confess. Whatever she thought I had done I did not, but for an eight year old boy, it was the worst pickle I had ever been in.  At home with Mom and the teacher, I refused to say a word. There are some things boys can’t put into words. I might have told my Dad, but not Ms. Elsie. Mom coaxed it out of me privately, but then told the teacher whom I had to face the next day. She meant well, but I felt betrayed.

Not one word was ever spoken about the incident again, but, as you know, the searing of a young boy’s heart starts early. The incident is almost funny, well, is funny, but what the Creepy One did with it in my life was not. The devil loses no opportunity to begin the process of mistrust in the life of a lad so he can continue his gnarly business in the life of the man.

What I learned that day was SHAME. Every shame after the first feels like Original Shame, and shame became a battle to win for many years of my life. The feeling I had that day is the same one I have had hundreds of times I’ve messed up, or when I was accused of messing up. I’m in the mess alone, again and again, barely comprehending the reinforcement of the pattern of guilt, shame, isolation, confession and wondering whether God actually loves a guy like me. The voices of this deception are always the same, and they conspire to remove from a man his sense of worth, a conspiracy begun in a boy the day the world became unsafe.

In the Garden of our Eternal Birth, there is another Voice…the “voice that breathed o’er Eden.” This voice gives us our identity, our hope, our comfort and our instruction for life. It is the voice of our Father telling us it is not good for man to be alone. It is also the lonely voice of the Man of Sorrows in Gethsemane where we, his betrayers, deniers, and runaways, are invited into his presence to find healing, forgiveness, friendship, and life.

What I did not know that bizarre afternoon in second grade was that I was not alone. Nor did I know how innocence could be used against a child to make him feel like an orphan. Or that someone even then hated me enough to set a trap with feelings he could evoke years later to keep me from the joy of life and the dynamic spark that marks a man living in freedom and grace.

What about you? What early scars do you bear that may be connected to the troubles and sorrows of your life today? Jesus wants to restore the heart of a child in the chest of a full-grown man. He says so himself – “Unless you become like a child you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” He stands by to make this possible for me. This means forgiving the teacher who embarrassed me, the friends who betrayed me, the disappointing business relationships that ended along the way, and connecting some dots to my past where innocence and child-like joy first met the debilitating undertow and dark waters of evil.

Healing is the restoration of what you lost before you even knew there was a war. It is the journey in grace and truth Jesus gives to us in the company of our brothers after our innocence was lost.

Are we men through whom light shines freely, alive in the joy designed for us by our Creator, or are we still insane and drunk on self-gratification, busy accumulating the empty praises of men, unable to perceive how far we have drifted from home?

This is for each man to answer for himself and perhaps the way to begin your own appraisal is to measure the sense of emptiness you feel within, the strength of fear in your life, and whether anyone but you knows your interior world.

It’s plain to see. The majority of men struggle with a deep sense of inadequacy and fear of failure. Add to these fears the sorrows they have already encountered and the unexpected degree of difficulty presented by unrelenting life challenges and it becomes a no-brainer why so many guys check out, why they look for the easy road, and why the dark side fascinates them until they become prisoners in it.

A guy in deep trouble tends to think he’s the only one with his problems. The reason we think this way is because we live in isolation, friends few, if any at all. The truth is, almost every man out there is in a mess of identical proportion, and for the same reason. All the devil has to do is keep us isolated and afraid, our voices pathetic echoes of ourselves, and he wins the war to destroy us.

There is healing among honest brothers. While there is a cost to friendship, it’s a price worth paying. There is safety in the presence of friends. Many of us who were silent and alone the first time the sorrows of life overwhelmed us will not be alone in round two.

What about you? You can’t be a healthy man in isolation, and I think it is impossible to live to your full potential as a good father to your children, a good husband to your wife, or to be the kind of man a woman would actually want for a husband five or ten years into marriage if you are a man without true friends. True friends know how to be present with you in times of trouble, and they know how to talk about the things men care about beyond the game and whatever happened at work last Thursday.

The Prophet Malachi wrote these words almost 2,500 years ago: “Then those who feared the Lord spoke with one another. The Lord paid attention and heard them….”

I’d bet my life they were talking about a thing or two that mattered to them and to God.

Think about this: Can a man have a healthy marriage or be the father he is meant to be without close and deep friendships with other men?