Why Guys Need Guys

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by Carlan Wendler

Have you ever stayed up late and gotten up early? Like, later than you wanted and earlier than you thought healthy? Maybe you were going on a big journey and didn't get the same head-start on packing that you scheduled for departing. Maybe your kids were too tired to go to sleep and too excited to stay asleep. Or maybe you were up until the wee hours of the morning on a Skype date with a special someone in Kenya the night before the inaugural McCropder Men's Morning Meeting at 7:30 AM at your apartment. In any case, God saves some special lessons for people who are tired and He never wastes anything.

We're kind of a motley crew, scruffy, unshorn, bleary-eyed and some a little sick. We're all tired/exhausted/frustrated/defeated/broken in different ways, but when we start to share, something changes. Maybe it's the coffee, maybe it's the tea, but it smells like the Holy Spirit stirring us up to encourage and edify each other. Some of what we share is sacred, some is silly, but it is all good. And I find, in living and learning in this community again, that I needed it again, more than I remembered.

I've got blind-spots (thank God for John), I've got unseen stress (praise Him for Eric), I've got stuff growing inside me that doesn't belong (bless Him for Jason). I can go a long ways down a trail of thinking, acting, or being before something one of these guys says will awaken me with a start. Today that came in the form of a quote from Thornton Wilder (from the play, The Angel That Troubled The Waters): "In love's service, only wounded soldiers can serve."

It strikes me again what Christ did for us - suffering 33 years on what had to seem a horrifically scarred planet capped off by an excruciation, meted out by those He came to save. And while His work required that He suffer alone, He has placed us in His Body and given us His Spirit so that we should never walk alone. When He changed our name He also touched our hip. The limp reminds us of our weakness, the cane of our need. I'm grateful to need, and sometimes be, the support of these guys.

And as I'm neither as clever or as cute as some of the other posters, maybe I can be the challenging one. So, especially to the gentlemen readers, I encourage you to write that note or make that call to a guy who has supported you in the past. It might just be the support he needed today.