Wednesday, August 3, 2005
Dan Edelen has done it again. Run, don't walk, over to Cerulean Sanctum to read his latest post: The Humble Warrior.
Here is an excerpt (the whole thing's good). I have nothing else to add, other than that I want to be like the humble man he describes.
Less often than that do we have examples of men who never picked up a sword or gun, who never spilled blood, but spent most of their time on their knees. George M?ller was such a man. A lot of the testosterone-laden out there wouldn't think much of M?ller; he was concerned for orphans. Sounds kind of womanly compared with the examples we see held up in bestselling men's books. But M?ller prayed. That man sweated out big prayers that met big needs and overcame ferocious principalities and powers that sought to destroy little boys and girls, demonic forces that wanted nothing more than to grind up children in the hardscrabble streets of England. And the one thing that people said about M?ller besides the fact that he was a praying man? That he was humble.
As much as the bestseller shelves are loaded with books jam-packed with bone-chewing examples of manliness, the dearth of books featuring meek and humble men speaks volumes. Simply possessing a penis and knowing every great line from Spartacus, The Green Berets and the king of all warrior movies, Braveheart, doesn't qualify you for warriorhood. Making prideful, snarky assertions about someone's eternal security on the God-blog flavor of the week doesn't make you God's man, either. It takes a humble man to walk into his prayer closet (where, it should be noted, there are no ticker-tape parades), kneel in humility before the Lord, and start assaulting the powers of darkness through prayer. Your average street dog can easily sink his teeth into a flesh and blood foe, but only a meek man devoted to prayer can tear down demonic strongholds in spiritual places!
The problem with Christian manhood today is not that there aren't enough villages to plunder, it's that humble, stooped grandmothers are out there on their knees fighting the battles that "real" men are too proud (or lazy or weak) to fight. Too many men in our churches moan that someone stole their warrior badge. Meanwhile, Satan is plundering OUR village. And he's doing it not in the obvious places, but in the spiritual realms, the very place that prayer alone works.
Fwiw, Bill, you are the humblest man I've ever met.
So you've got that going for you.
;-)