is it time for you to man up?

I don't know about you but I love lists, top ten lists in particular. It may stem from a grand desire to be David Letterman. Seriously, he may have the best job. Stay up late, talk to interesting people, tell stupid jokes that the bald guy is paid to laugh at, and occasionally throw something off a tall building, this sounds like a job description I can get behind.

Many of the lists used to be funny, political, satirical or at least silly. But I have noticed in many different places that the lists are getting serious. And the serious lists appear to be designed to make us feel bad. One list I have seen in a couple of different forms is "skills every man should know."  The list has grown from 10 to 100 and this version includes telling pictures and videos.  Now I should tell you that I can/have done most of the things on this list.  I can even do some of them really well, or at least well enough to not embarass myself.  But is my manhood really determined by my ability to "make a bed drum tight."

Some of these skills I can even do well enough to teach someone else, but as important as conquering an off-road obstacle seems, it appears to me they have left of a couple of really critical skills.  Skills like loving your wife and kids (everyday even when they crawled into your bed in the middle of the night and then proceeded to pee through their pullup), determining which "broken" legs/arms actually require medical attention and which simply need a homemade sling, potty training a squirrel (not a literal one mind you, though that would be an amazing skill, but one of the squirrels encoded with your DNA), putting a sleeping baby to bed without his waking up, not laughing in your kids face when he announces that he married some girl at preschool and plans to be a stay at home dad so he can be rich, learning to enjoy watching Hannah Montana (I hate to admit it publicly but that Jackson makes me laugh everytime), finding time to read a book that doesn't have anything to do with your job, or even the ability to write your blog while eating breakfast, settling a dispute over who pushed who into a wall, and de-virusing your other computer because your wife accidentally clicked "that" link in facebook.

The real problem with these lists is that we use them as some sort of measuring system.  I can actually do 83 of the things on the list of 100 and even as I'm counting I am noting which one of the things the other "men" I know can or cannot, and justifying why the things I can't do don't belong on the list.  Unfortunately we are using a bad standard, if you use me or whatever other "manly" man fits your picture, we are all going to come up short.  I'm not sure that Jesus could "tackle steep drops on a mountain bike" but He did manage to traverse this earth perfectly.  And so I hope that you and I will remember this week that Jesus knew how far we were all going to fall short.  He knew that we would love imperfectly, judge harshly, fail miserably, and even "fly a stunt kite" into the ground.  

If you are looking for a man to be your standard let's use Jesus Himself.