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Men are typically trained to be always battling one foe or another. The most common one being poverty. Whether born into a family of wealth or one struggling to get by, men typically are given the message that they need to be the means of their economic survival and possibly the survival of others as well.
Women, even in these more enlightened times, still get strong messages about attracting a mate to assure material sustenance and to support baby making.
Men are taught that to have economic means one needs to out-do others in the completion for scarce resources.
Beyond economic survival, there is fighting to assure the welfare of humanity through the sharing of resources. This includes fighting for social justice. This includes fighting to support the sustainability of the Planet’s ecology.
In more every day terminology a guy has got to know how to make money to pay the bills, to afford to go on vacation and eventually retire in a way that he doesn’t shit too much on the well being of others. You can throw in leaving something behind for loved ones beyond debt when you die too.
Or maybe I have had it all wrong, I think, as I reconsider things from the vantage point of being sixty five years old and having an ever shrinking retirement fund. Perhaps I need to focus on fighting for my everlasting life, first and foremost. Maybe I should have been doing this all along.
I have so far won the fight to avoid starvation. I have been successful in procreating. I have the best granddaughter ever, with the best sonogram predicted grandson ever, who is presently involved with being a fantastic fetus.
I haven’t depleted the Earth of stuff as much as some people I know. I haven’t made too much of a mess. Okay, I have bought stuff made by others who work at slave wages, but to my knowledge I have not engaged in any behavior that could obviously be considered a felony. What I have profited from the military industrial complex of the United States of America, Inc. has been inadvertent.
I have been a coward in looking the other way to hints of activity by secretive elites and in not thinking much about the evil of the World, but I have thought about it, I believe, more than most people.
What I am fighting now, is the sense that all human efforts at assuring social justice and persevering the livability of the home of my species, be that here or some other place, is not obtainable through my efforts in concert with other human beings.
I have come to believe in one fight only, the fight to glorify God through the belief in his Son, Jesus Christ.
I may have lost you with that last line. That is okay. I hope that if you are a man who has considered himself to be too preoccupied with the day to day chores of making a living and recreating, to make an everlasting life, that I haven’t lost you.
As an atheist from the age of eighteen to the age of sixty five, I certainly had other priorities on my mind other than my eternity. I figured if death was like the plug being pulled on an electronic appliance, I wouldn’t be around to experience it, so no big deal. I kept an open mind to there being something next after death, but not to my ability to do anything about that.
I did not return to my boyhood belief in Jesus, due to any intense life changing epiphany. Being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease put greater limits on my enjoy life while you can agenda, but it was contemplating the state of the World that rekindled a live long dormant fire in my soul.
From every reasonable perspective, it looked like the bad guys were going to eventually ruin everything. I just decided that I was not okay with this.
It seems to me that the cause for my disease was evil itself, in the form of an entity, with this foe knowing no other match than Jesus Christ. By accepting His offer of everlasting life I could have it, and trusting that He knows what to do about evil, is part of the deal.
My new convictions leave me with a great fear of my Lord, Jesus Christ, as well as boundless gratitude for the life he has given me. These feelings often do not make sense to me, but they feel very real.
Humanity has done so much to harm the home it was provided and I have been such a part in that, that of course there is great fear that I will not be able to repent enough in the time I have left to live to obtain a positive approval rating come Judgement Day. There is great fear and great faith that that fear can be overcome.
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