It’s a strange thing to feel as if you’re currently living out a climactic page of your next book. As someone who now writes books, I cannot help but forever think of my life this way. As a story. As one story in a saga connected with stories.
In many ways this current page feels like the part of the story that feels worst and must get worse before it gets better. The “all is lost?” moment before the hero rises again. Or at least that’s how heroic stories go.
Am I living a heroic story?
With life feeling maybe hazier than it ever has, I actually feel as though I’m in a good place with God. The best place I’ve been with him in years, actually. Learning to lean on him beyond relationships, beyond addictions, beyond a career, beyond a calling, beyond a steady paycheck, beyond a community, beyond a home.
Beyond everything.
If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.
With life leaving me where it is, I’m left throwing gunk at a wall and seeing what sticks.
Daily Scripture-time and prayer? Sure, even though I don’t feel like it.
Counseling? Sure, let’s bare my soul in that setting for the first time.
Hard conversations? Sure, keep the coffee coming.
A men’s retreat several states away? Sure, let me pack my bags and drive for days to there.
And so I did. A couple weeks ago I showed up to this thing where I knew nobody and couldn’t bring my cell phone inside; truthfully, I was all too happy to leave it in my car. Staff members led me to a table with a piece of paper that said I couldn’t share with others the specifics of what I’d soon experience there.
Sure, let me sign my name to it. I’ll use my blood if it’s required. Do with me what you will for the next 72 hours.
A few friends had recommend this organization to me over the years, and I finally took the plunge because, hey, it’s gunk, and there’s a wall over there. If nothing else, it could make for a great story one day, right?
While I can’t share my specific experiences from the weekend, I can say that I cried a lot. Cried in the presence of total strangers, young and old, single and married, men also attracted to men and mostly men not attracted to men. Men of all stripes and sexualities who rallied around me in my weakness.
The weekend came and went with a blur of awkward and empowering encounters alike, and I turned on my cold phone after three days wishing I could just leave it off forever. Wishing I could continue living presently that weekend without phone or timepiece in the ongoing presence of men, godly men, men who will pray over me and worship alongside me and speak vulnerably about their hurts and hangups as they hear me express my own.
Existing among the manliest men with whom I’ve ever coexisted in 31 years.
Instead, I packed up my car and returned home a few days later.
I earned a new name at this retreat. I’ve been a Traveling Golden Trout since the days of Camp Ridgecrest, and I’ve grown quite fond of the moniker. Fond enough to make it my website’s logo. Fond enough that it’s the only tattoo I’ve ever considered getting: a trout bearing a wanderer’s staff, swimming upstream.
Upstream, of course. Always upstream. Against the current. The current of sexuality. The current of introversion. The current of inferiority. The current of separation. The current of brokenness and deficiency.
The current of not being quite enough of a man, if even at all. Let alone a man of God.
Also, I do adore traveling — so, like, the name and logo do have some whimsical connotations too.
Nonetheless, this notion of swimming upstream, over and over and over with the same baggage —
It gets exhausting. Or rather, it gets exhausting swimming while also attempting to plant my wanderer’s staff into some soil somewhere, learning to walk on land. Fixed. Rooted. Resolute.
And so I walked away from the weekend with a new name, a new logo. A new mantra.
A bold buffalo. A man of God who finds strength in solitude as well as strength with his herd.
A man of God who is loved and also lovely. A man worth dying for and also one worth getting to know. Even liked.
I’m a trout and a buffalo, someone who wanders and someone who’s rooted. And maybe now someone with two tattoo ideas.
But before I ever sport one of those, I’ve become a necklace-person. Someone who tells his story with removable ornaments rather than immovable ones.
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As I adorn this stone in the sling and this dangling key, day in, day out, I remind myself of this man I am. This man I’ve always been. This man I’m maybe only just now seeing 31 and 1/2 years into this story.
A man who is capable of slaying giants.
And a man who is lovely — even glorious.
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