Sword & Spade

By: Thomas Connelly

Do you have what it takes? This is one of the central questions of manhood. Perhaps your personal version of it is a bit more nuanced, “do I have what it takes to do my job/school, ask this girl out or eventually to marry me, to be a father?” But we all ask ourselves that question in some way, and often multiple times.

One of the biggest dangers is in trying to answer that question by comparing yourself to those around you. Of course we only have others that are like us to compare to, and there’s a certain need for that in a natural sense.  A runner can only break a record against another runner.  And, of course, when it comes to “being a man,” is there any other way to consider our identity as men than by comparison?  Manliness is not something that just comes from within by force of will, but is received from a culture.  “That is,” says anthropologist David Gilmore, “it is not simply a reflection of individual psychology but a part of a public culture, a collective representation.”

As Christians, this takes on a new meaning in Christ.  We are humans, so we have – more or less – some sort of cultural surrounding.  But the “collective representation” is now measured by the singular representation of Christ Himself, true God and true Man.  He is now our measure, and we are seen by the Father in Him, and all measures now fall away to this one – the viewpoint and vision of the Father as He looks upon us as sons in the Son.

Therefore, we can’t merely pull our full identity, our understanding of worth and meaning, from comparisons.  If you find your value in sports, there will be someone faster, stronger, and more talented. If you place your worth in your intellect there will be someone smarter than you. If you place your value on holiness that seems like a good thing but, guess what, there are lots of people holier than you.  

So where do we look? How do we find our worth and how do we know if we have what it takes?  The answer is to stop looking at yourself, and others, and to look to God alone. God didn’t just create you and set you out on your own, like a wind up toy that he left to fend for itself. He sustains you, your being, in every moment. We have often heard that we can’t take a breath without God giving it to us.  But, more than that, everything we see, or think, or do is made possible because God sustains us. We are like sailboats that only move because God blows and fills our sails with wind. Without him it is not that we can’t do anything, it’s that we wouldn’t even exist. If he were to stop sustaining us we wouldn’t just vaporize, but our very being would be no longer an intelligible reality – nothing.

God knows us inside and out, all our joys and triumphs and all our sorrows and sins, and he loves us anyway.  It’s true that others love us – like a spouse or friend – and they know our sins too, from experiencing them close-up.  But God’s knowledge is so much greater, and his revulsion to sin is total, unlike other people that are sinners like us and see our sins on human spectrums like patience or empathy or disgust.  We gloss over too easily the scripture passage from St. Paul, that while we were sinners Jesus died for the love of us. 

In God we are totally known – and worth dying for. In comparison to everyone else we are more or less sinners with some strengths here and there, but God sees and knows us as we are and as what we can be in his grace.  He knows what we are without grace too. 

His vision for each of us is the standard to which we need to hold ourselves. He loves us and wants the best for us. He also gives us a model to follow in Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect man. The funny thing is, God loves us so much that he doesn’t let us plateau. Imagine you have a coach who challenges you to run a mile in 7 minutes and then just stops pushing you when you achieve it. Bad coach. As soon as we reach the milestone God has for us he smiles and points to another one a bit higher. 

If we measure worth by comparison, presumably we could “stop” when we reach the top.  But in God we keep climbing, because instead of looking down at everyone we’re superior to, we look up to Him.  In that sense, our goal is not a “better version of ourselves,” nor is it “better than the rest.”  The Goal is God Himself.  There’s no comparison to that.