Thread by @themanslife

“My hunt actually has little to do with elk. There is something else I’m after out here in the wild. I am searching for an even more elusive prey . . . something that can only be found through the help of wilderness. I am looking for my heart.” - John Eldredge - Wild at Heart

“It is fear that keeps a man at home where things are neat and orderly and under his control.”

“Can a man live all his days to keep his fingernails clean and trim? Is that what a boy dreams of?”

“So many men make the mistake of thinking that the woman is the adventure. But that is where the relationship immediately goes downhill. A woman doesn’t want to be the adventure; she wants to be caught up into something greater than herself.”

“Every boy has a question that needs an answer, and he cannot get that answer from his mother. Femininity can never bestow masculinity.”

“My son asked about his strength, his dangerous capacity to come through. A boy’s passage into manhood involves many such moments. The father’s role is to arrange for them, invite his boy into them, keep his eye out for the question, then speak into his son’s heart ‘Yes you are.”

“You cannot teach a boy to use his strength by stripping him of it. You will emasculate him for life. From that point on all will be passive and fearful. He will be courteous, deferential, minding all his manners. It may look moral, like turning the other cheek. It is weakness.”

“We must not strip a man of strength and call it sanctification. Yet for many men, their souls still hang in the balance because no one has ever invited them to be dangerous, to know their own strength, to discover that they have what it takes.”

“Women are attracted to the wilder side of a man, but once having caught him they settle down to the task of domesticating him. Ironically, if he gives in he’ll resent her for it, and she in turn will wonder where the passion has gone.”

“A man is a dangerous thing. Women don’t start wars or commit violent crimes. Columbine wasn’t the work of two young girls. Obviously, something has gone wrong in the masculine soul, and we’ve decided the way to handle it is to take that dangerous nature away . . . entirely.”

“Yes, a man is a dangerous thing. So is a scalpel. It can wound or save your life. You don’t make it safe by making it dull; you put it in the hands of someone who knows what he’s doing.”

“A wound that is denied is a wound that cannot heal. A wound you’ve embraced is a wound that cannot heal. A wound you think you deserved is a wound that cannot heal.”

“A man needs a much bigger orbit than a woman. He needs a mission, a life purpose, and he needs to know who he is. Only then is he fit for a woman, for only then does he have something to invite her into.”

“The masculine journey always takes a man away from the woman in order that he may come back to her with his question answered. A man does not go to a woman to get his strength, he goes to her to offer it.”

“What a milestone day it was when I simply allowed myself to say that the loss of my father mattered. The tears that flowed were the first I’d ever granted my wound and they were deeply healing.”

“For in grieving we admit the truth - that we were hurt by someone we loved, that we lost something very dear, and it hurt us very much.”

“A man needs a battle to fight, a place for the warrior in him to come alive and be honed, trained, seasoned. If we can reawaken that fierce quality in a man, hook it up to a higher purpose, release the warrior within, then the boy can grow up and become truly masculine.”

“A man must have a great mission to his life that involves yet transcends even home and family. He must have a cause to which he is devoted even unto death, for this is written into the fabric of his being.”

“Let people feel the weight of who you are and let them deal with it.”

“The most dangerous man on earth is the man who has reckoned with his own death.”

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. A man must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water, yet drink death like wine.” - quoting Chesterton.

“The deep cry of every little girl’s heart is ‘am I lovely’? Every woman needs to know she is exquisite and exotic and chosen. ‘Will you pursue me? Do you delight in me? Will you fight for me?’” A little girl looks to her father for the answers to these questions.

“If her father is violent, he answers these questions with abuse and she puts up a wall around her heart. If her father is passive, he answers these questions with abandonment, and she turns to boys to hear what she never heard from her father.”

“I realized that I had - like so many men - married for safety. I married a woman I thought would never challenge me as a man. I wanted to look like the knight, but not bleed like one. I didn’t know about the tower, the dragon, or what my strength was for.”

“The number one problem between men and their women is that we men, when truly ask to fight for her . . . hesitate. We are still seeking to save ourselves, we have forgotten the deep pleasure of spilling our life for another.”

“The beauty of a woman arouses a man to play the man; the strength of a man offered tenderly to his woman, allows her to be beautiful; it brings life to her and to many. This is far, far more than sex and orgasm. It is a reality that extends to every aspect of our lives.

“A violent man destroys his wife with his words; a silent or passive man starves her.”

“Most men spend the energy of their lives trying to eliminate risk, or squeezing it down to a more manageable size. If it works, if he succeeds in securing his life against all risk, he’ll wind up in a cocoon of self-protection and wonder all the while why he’s suffocating.”

“Mystery is essential to adventure.”

“A man is never more a man than when he embraces an adventure beyond his control, or when he walks into a battle he isn’t sure of winning.”

“To become a man - and to know that he has become a man - a boy must have a guide, a father who will show him how to fix a bike, cast a fishing rod, call a girl, land a job, and all the other things a boy will encounter on his journey to become a man.”

“This we must understand: masculinity is bestowed. A boy learns who he is and what he’s made of from a man (or a company of men). This can’t be learned in any other place. It can’t be learned from other boys and it can’t be learned from the world of women.”

The stages of the masculine journey:

Boyhood
Cowboy
Warrior
Lover
King
Sage

Boyhood - a time of wonder and exploration, of affirmation, of being the beloved son.

Cowboy - a time of learning the lessons of the field, of great adventures, of hard work, of danger and daring, and of learning that he is what it takes.

Warrior - a time when the young man gets a mission, learns the rigors of discipline, encounters evil face-to-face, and does battle to advance a cause.

Lover - a time when the young man awakens to beauty, learning that poetry and passion often lead him to truth better than reason; he develops an appreciation for music and literature and offers his strength to a woman.

King - the man comes into a place of authority, a place where his role is to use his power and lead young warriors in a way that benefits the kingdom.

Sage - when the gray-haired King uses his knowledge and experience to counsel others. His kingdom is smaller, but his influence increases, making this the period of his greatest contribution through mentoring other leaders.