The Lion Of Judah??
“A man is fierce… passionate… wild at heart? You wouldn’t know it from what normally walks around in a pair of trousers. If a man is the image of the Lion of Judah, how come there are so many lonely women, so many fatherless children, so few men around? Why is it that the world seems filled with “caricatures” of masculinity? There’s the guy who lives behind us. He spends his entire weekend in front of the tube watching sports while his sons play outside - without him. We’ve lived here nine years and I think I’ve seen him play with his boys maybe twice. What’s with that? Why won’t he engage? And the guy the next street over, who races motorcycles and drives a huge truck and wears a leather jacket and sort of swaggers when he walks. I thought James Dean died years ago. What’s with him? It looks manly, but it seems cartoonish, overdone.
How come when men look in their heart they don’t discover something valiant and dangerous, but instead find anger, lust, and fear? Most of the time, I feel more fearful than I do fierce. Why is that? It was one hundred and fifty years ago that Thoreau wrote, “The mass of men lead lives quiet of desperation,” and it seems nothing has changed. As the line from Braveheart has it, “All men die; few men ever really live.” And so most women lead lives of quiet resignation, having given up on their hope for a true man.
The real life of the average man seems a universe away from the desires of his heart. There is no battle to fight, unless it’s traffic and meetings and hassles and bills.”
- WILD AT HEART John Eldredge