CHAPTER ONE: My Story

Kit McDermott

I have always been someone willing to poke around in stuff offering the promise of fresh

air. The unusual or atypical or even the avant-garde never failed to appeal to me. What would I

find or experience? Exploring in areas that just drew me seemed in my bones. Not that I would

try anything, mind you, because I wouldn’t, even before I became a Christian. Hurtling down the

Interstate at 125mph on a cycle without a helmet didn’t appeal to me then, and it doesn’t now.

What did appeal was that much of life’s zing for me promised to be discovered on the less trod

paths.

When I surrendered to Christ in 1973 by myself in a friend’s VW Beetle hurtling up

Interstate 84 back to Boston, the draw to discover lost little potency. I came into the faith a

zealous jazz musician and stayed that same course for the next 7 years. During those early years

in Christ, I also got involved with Christian music and influenced the band I was playing with to

explore modes of musical expression Christians had not associated with music ministry. We

pushed the envelope. People did not know where to fit us. I loved the discovery and rigor and

wildness of pushing into new territory even when it proved a struggle.

In my 30’s, God apparently decided it was time for me to make a new discovery I would

have never made on my own. I was blind-sided by the One who cannot be planned for. He pulled

the ground out from underneath and yanked me toward the unfamiliar. I have felt lost many

times in my life, but never this lost. I was enrolled in the school of his sovereign re-tooling and I

wasn’t auditing the course, thank you very kindly.

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 As it turns out, the years of my third decade were to be a time of personal, spiritual

upheaval: sometimes bewildering, often excruciating, occasionally overwhelming. I would

abandon the creative life of the jazz musician I was nuts about, begin a family, receive the gift of

tongues and other spiritual gifts, pray with 4-5 brothers in the wee hours of the morning 3 days a

week for 2 years, hear a call to ministry, find and leave another career (equipped with tools for

the ministry ahead), go back to college, wrestle through deep healing to my masculine soul for a

year, begin Klesis Ministries, assume the leadership of the Center For Renewal retreat ministry

and move with my wife and family to the retreat center, and go back to college to study religion.

All the while God was tearing up the hard ground of my soul, breaking clods into a growing

medium that could receive the seeds of genuine godly masculinity. To tell you the truth, I would

have been happy to stay in boyhood, if left to my own.

Somewhere near the age of 37, I also learned to listen to God. My brother-in-law, Steve,

a painter, told me about a book (Mark Virkler’s Dialoguing With God), he was reading that

revolutionized the way he had been praying. Steve had been a man of prayer for many years. He

had credibility with me. He told me that through listening prayer he had been able to “dialogue

with God” about, among other things, the frustrating problems he would encounter in his artwork

and God would help him, sometimes in ways that were breath-takingly new and creative. He got

my attention because my prayer life was wilting in the noonday heat of sameness. I knew

praying was essential to a relationship of any substance with God, but hadn’t gotten there with

any real depth.

There were times when I yearned to know Jesus in a way that drew Him far into my life

where I really lived and made him a partner in how I sorted out each day. I was eager to test

whether listening prayer would be a way to find that. So I read the book, got myself a light blue

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spiral notebook, and began listening on November 19, 1986 in my pre-dawn living room on Pratt

Street. I was not sure what I was looking for as I sat in the silence on the couch, but I began to

get the intriguing sense that I was being invited into something fresh and alive. It felt as if I was

coming to God in trust like a young boy with his papa, not afraid, but believing he had good

things waiting to tell me. I was eager to know him better. At the same time, I also came to him as

a young man seeking to set my life squarely in his will with no looking back. The trail was

cleared and I was on my way.

Virkler’s book described a process whereby a person could sit in God’s presence and

converse with him as with a friend. He helped me see that God spoke quietly through my

spontaneous thoughts in response to questions I had or concerns I brought to him, and that it was

possible for me to discern him in those thoughts. Virkler showed me how to write out my

“dialogue” with God and his responses to me in a journal. He gave me a simple tool for learning

how to take time with God in the quiet and actually commune with him in way that felt

authentic. Although simple, it was not easy or simplistic. I would still have to battle with

laziness, a mind filled with noise, occasional doubt, and the need to develop discipline with

prayer. But I had something tangible to grab onto.

The first entry in my journal, solemnly named Communion and Dialogue, Volume One, is

dated November 19, 1986. It begins with my prayer to the Father avowing my love for him

because of his character and ways. I move to thank him for the life and family he had graciously

given me. I end by affirming that because he has given me a hope and a vision in Jesus, I could

move out from “the sorrow of a world in dread of its death.” I am not sure why I said that, but

over the years I would revisit the themes of life and death in its varied forms. Becoming a man as

God ordained from the beginning a man should be, would be a formidable struggle for me, and

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listening prayer would be the vehicle through which I would wrestle with God as he called me to

leave emotional, spiritual, and relational boyhood behind.

What God said to me that day in response to my prayer, put in place life themes that I

have run headlong into countless times over the years in my battle to yield and accept the

daunting responsibility of godly manhood. His response in the quiet that morning was:

“My son, my love is boundless. My liberty is vast as the space of the deep. Surely, your

place is secured in me. Your music is from my heart and it is a song waiting singing.

Your days will be filled with my music, your thoughts with my words, your dreams with

my countenance. I will yoke you to my burden and you will soar. Don’t leave my side for

it is there that your days will find rest. My words will spring from my covering. Stand.

Abide. Be firm in me.”

I wasn’t sure if I was to take all the references to music literally or that God was saying

something about the essence of my being through the metaphor of music. But in those gentle,

fatherly words, God pulled me to himself, and told me to go forth into the world as he had

uniquely made me needing no one’s permission. He had already given it. He called me to

resound his life through mine; that I am his and he knows me in way no one does, including my

wonderful wife. I am his idea, and his life saturates mine, making mine full and real. I was

stunned by his metaphorical use of music to talk of our relationship. One of the ways I began to

uncover and test the call to masculinity was through music. It was a language I adopted

vigorously and relished. God, in effect, was saying “I know how much this means to you, and I

care about that because you are Mine.” I had left music because he required it of me, yet here he

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was saying that I had not lost it after all; I had just needed to walk with the Composer and be an

instrument for his music as he chose to express it through me.

For me that first day of listening was a monumental start. I had connected intimately with

the Living God. He chose to speak words to me that were intensely personal and important. He

demonstrated that he cared to know through what lens I saw life and it mattered. Through the

next days and months, he would keep speaking with me about how he wanted me to walk with

him as a son, as a man who was a husband, father, leader and friend. Sometimes he would be

tender and compassionate, other times he would reveal sin and correct bad attitudes or

cowardice. There were occasions when he would instruct me in how I was to do my work for

him in leading retreats, teaching a class, preaching or working with a person in counseling. There

were times when he would not respond to a question I asked. There would be silence, or he

would move the dialogue toward something I needed to hear. God was not the Great Answer

Man in the sky, there to do my bidding. He was the LORD, but I was one of his sons and he

wanted to show me many things on the way to walking as a man.

In short order, Jesus’ answer in the wilderness to the Tempter that “Man does not live on

bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Mt. 4:4), made personal

sense in a new way. It framed my life in the context of a God who has spoken and still speaks in

a way I can hear. Christ’s declarations in the Gospel of John that the “sheep follow him (the

shepherd) because they know his voice,” (Jn. 10:4), and as the “good shepherd,” The fact that he

knows his sheep and they him because they recognize his voice (Jn.10:5, 11) opened for me the

possibility that it was normal to hear his voice from a quiet heart turned to listen because by

being born into a filial relationship with him, I was given the ability to recognize his voice. I just

needed to pay attention with diligence.

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 If you were to look at my prayer journals since that November morning you would see

days, even weeks separating periods when I would be listening regularly. I found that as I

pressed on through the days he gave me, I would not be faithful to sit down with him day after

day. I noticed that when I would be overtaken by a cold or flu or some other physical affliction,

for instance, it would be hard to get back to the discipline (odd that the opportunity to be with my

gentle Savior, majestic Lord and good-beyond-hoping King who seemed to delight in my

friendship required discipline on my part, but it did). Another problem I had to face was that

occasionally I would mis-hear him or he seemed to say that something would come to pass and it

didn’t when I thought it should. If I was not careful I could slip into doubt and pull away. More

common to my learning process were distractions of all sorts that would cause me to postpone

being alone with him: “I can’t seem to find the time these days.” You know the drill about

finding time to pray or study God’s Word. Listening to God turned out to not be a surefire

technique for me as a man, and I had to come to terms again and again with my sinful

weaknesses and love of putting me-myself-and-I at the top of my favored guest list.

****

One of the gifts on board when I came into the world was the analytical ability to discern

patterns of all sorts. They could be rhythmic patterns of drumming. They could be habits of

behavior that I saw in myself or in others. They could be patterns of words, visual design or ways

of accomplishing tasks. I just seemed to notice how things were woven together and collected in

discernible shapes.

Similarly, I had also become aware of a pattern in the unfolding of my life: transitional

change arrives about every 10 years in my training under my Lord. The decade of my 40’s

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confronted me with whether I would embrace fully his challenge to godly manhood and spiritual

maturity, or throw off my responsibility and retreat to the comforts of hiddenness and

dependence on others in areas that intimidated or threatened me. Emasculating safety poked at

my heart more than once. To read my journal entries during many of those years is to often

witness a struggle between God who would not relent in calling me forward, and me seemingly

bewildered by it all, ready to bolt at the least opportunity because I was confused, hurt, worn out,

fed up or just plain scared. My words are still painful for me to read today in that they reveal

how thoroughly flawed and unmanly I was (there is still miles to go, make no mistake, but God

has built momentum in the right direction). I gave the Father an earful and he let me in on the

truth, trying to cut me free and make me fit for something more than a pleasant ride to the end of

the line with me planted firmly in the driver’s seat.

In the middle of my 40’s I ran aground and was washed overboard by a deep, crippling

depression. Emotionally I felt like I was being buried in sediment at the bottom of a murky sea.

My arms were pinned and I wasn’t going anywhere to get away from it. I was a middle-aged guy

whose manhood became entombed in a rapacious darkness like a moth encased by a hungry

spider ready to suck its life juices away. If God was speaking to me regularly, the lines were

often down on my end. I felt so emptied out inside that had God given me some of his words to

keep, they would have fallen right through me. Or so I thought. I did use my journal to cry out to

God all the pain that filled my thoughts. And because I had to, most of my listening times were

focused on what Jesus wanted me say to lead a retreat, give a teaching, preach a sermon or attend

to the work of Klesis and the Center For Renewal. I knew I could not do any of that stuff just by

gifts or experience. I couldn’t rely on me because I was fading out of view. There were many

gaps of time during those years because I was walking empty of heart. The barren, numbing

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stillness in my soul was eerie and exhausting. God faithfully held onto me (I asked him not to let

me slide into oblivion), and spoke, as I needed to hear Him to fulfill my responsibilities. He was

truly a Paraclete to me.

What surfaced over time in my understanding was that clinical depression spiritually

eviscerates a man. It takes his masculine initiative and anesthetizes it. Slowly, his strength to do,

to make a way, drains out of him as if spilled blood oozing unstaunched from a mortal wound.

He doesn’t return to boyhood, he just becomes a shell man, a walking carcass seemingly out of

fuel before his time. His fire cools to embers. If you look closely, you will notice the vacant

hollowness in his eyes. He sits alone in a tomb and words of life or hope fail to penetrate. All

men need to hear words of hope from God. Such words give them vision and courage to face the

battles and allurements waiting on the path marked for them. Depression waylays those words

before they ever find their mark like the seeds sown on stony ground.

I lost real time to the depression, a number of months were gouged out. But by God’s

stubborn, healing grace I gradually found my way up from the slime and headed back toward the

foothills of living. I was able to hear God again in ways other than what he wanted to do in my

next task for him. Faith and hope took their seats again in my heart.

The latter half of my 40’s and first few years of my 50’s have given me plenty of

opportunity to be alone with God to listen to him. I have not always taken advantage of the time

(and I live and work at a retreat center!), Jesus has made available for us to talk with one another.

The battles I have faced all along in becoming and staying a praying man have never

disappeared. The world, the flesh, and the devil are formidable foes requiring every gram of

masculinity I can pull up. Nevertheless, over the last almost 30 years I have never seen the desire

to pray be silenced entirely. There is always the tug in my soul, however slight at times, to lift

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my concerns to God and receive his touch in some way. I know I do not walk as an orphan even

in the most desolate of seasons. I am convinced that I walk before the face of God.

****

Listening prayer has shown itself to be a spiritual anchor for my masculine soul. Along

with reading and studying the Scripture, it has beckoned me far into Mystery, the mystery of

living with the wildly transcendent, yet surprisingly immanent Triune God from one day to the

next. I am not the same Christian, nor the same man because of what God, through listening

prayer, has openhandedly given me. I could not be truthfully called an expert in this type of

prayer even though I have been muddling along with it for 16+ years. I am not convinced

expertise in such things can exist. But neither am I a fresh-out-of-the-box beginner. I imagine

that I am somewhere on my own Emmaus Road -- he speaks to me and I don’t always recognize

it, but my heart burns within me when he breaks through and reveals himself, penetrating my

distractions and defenses. I know when I hear him. I recognize him more now than I did at the

first. As he did on that day with the two disciples in the village, he seems to disappear from time

to time as I try to listen. No matter. I have learned to listen after him and know that he will return

as he sees fit.

I am a disciple in the root sense that I am continually learning how to fill the big loafers

of manhood in light of what God reveals to me through his Spirit in the Scriptures, in the rigors

and responsibilities of life, and through other men as I observe them and they teach me. I have

grown to see that there are no formulas to master in communing with God such that once you

discover and practice the right hermetic formula God becomes more manageable and less

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dangerous. He is no genie in a bottle responding to my three rubs. While I have learned a process

that helps me sit with my Lord and seek to hear him, it ensures nothing other than I am in his

presence, available to him as he pleases. His terms of engagement rule the day here as with the

rest of the universe.

In the sixteen years I have been working at this, God has undeservedly let me in on how

listening prayer blesses men. Being a man who has learned to listen myself and having the

benefit of teaching other men over the years how to listen to God, then seeing them wrestle with

it, has taught me how to tackle the call to mature masculinity, and what that looks like from

God’s heart. There are four truths that I want to look at more closely because they will

demonstrate how I have been changed, and how important it is for men to learn this foundational

part of praying:

• Listening prayer will open a man to God’s invitation to intimacy with him, flowing

from his passionate love for him as a son.

• Listening prayer will open a man to how God wants him to single-heartedly embrace

masculinity in all the roles he will play.

• Listening prayer will teach him to see God as the sovereign Senior Partner and Lord in

the enterprise of living and serving His Kingdom.

• Listening prayer will show a man that he is not an orphan in the world; his life is not

solely up to him.

Listening prayer will open a man to God’s invitation to intimacy with him

Beginning with the very first words he gave to me in 1986 and up to today, God has

convinced me that he wanted me to come near enough to know him well (as much as he chose to

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reveal). None of this “walking at a safe distance” was going to do in the relationship if it was to

be a relationship of any substance with him. Over the years, God has revealed a passion for me

as actually one of his sons, a part of the family, so to speak, a bona fide saved-by-the blood

relative. He is not cool and distant toward me. He wants intimacy, meaning he wants me in close,

deliberately trusting him, unabashedly hungry to seek and know his nature, being

uncompromisingly willing to go because he sends me when I haven’t the foggiest how to get

there, or when I want to avoid like the plague what I know he wants.

Jesus showed me again and again that in his mysterious compassion and friendly grace

he is tenderhearted toward the likes of me. As a man I have had to come to grips with the fecund

passion of God. Men get nervous around passion directed at them unless it’s their own, they

solicit it, or they can be in control of it. To tell you the truth I was, at first, unsure of what to

make of how intimately and freely God revealed he saw me. He seemed to make himself

vulnerable in relationship to erratic me, and yet, I could sense behind it an unshakable strength

and authoritative integrity. The One who spoke to me was no needy Jesus; this was the LORD of

all, the Most High God telling me I had found favor with him and he delighted in me.

I was listening to a God who loved me beyond what I could hold, but also to the depth

that he would not spare me from healing and convicting truth. He addressed me as a man, not a

boy even when I acted the latter. Many times he commanded me to face down my fears, quit

hiding or throwing off the mantle of responsibility and leadership he had given. He corrected me

with the rebuke of One who knew me thoroughly, was merciful, but also challenged that I walk

in the light without compromise. He showed me through his words that a man is to learn

intimacy with his Lord and King so that his life can be sacrificially authentic: he can live from a

heart broken by the cross and healed by the shed blood of the Lamb. He can let Christ live

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through his life for others because he knows his Master’s fondness for him, and is thus set free to

be an instrument of his love other broken and hidden ones. Intimacy with God heals masculine

wounds and creates the courage to go forth in his Name, to make a way for God through a life

lived well under his guiding, one rich in grace and fruit.

I have recognized that intimacy with God learned through listening to him also enables

a man to embrace his essential mandate to generate and protect what is right and true and good in

every sphere of his life regardless of personal cost. To do so is the most noble and fitting thing a

man can do with his life. He called to holiness (radical separation unto God), and that means

knowing the truth, then battling any falsehood that sets itself up against God’s truth. More than

likely, this battle will rage first with his own sinful flesh: his selfishness, cowardice, lusts, greed,

fear, shame, laziness, arrogance and pride. But as he learns to move in the grace God supplies to

battle well, the struggle will inevitably break out into all of life’s enterprises and relationships

because sin threatens to corrupt everything he touches if left unchallenged by him.

Listening prayer is a key way that a man can seek his Lord for counsel and truth-telling.

God will remind any man who seeks him this way where he actually lives from one day to the

next and where he needs to be. Such reminders are treasures beyond measure. Listening prayer

fosters intimacy with Jesus that shapes a man through love that heals him and truth that

strengthens him. He learns to know his Master’s voice, to trust it and to follow it. As he learns

this way of praying, he will come to realize that the same God who has revealed himself in the

Scriptures also reveals himself in the quietness of the heart to those eager to walk in his ways and

do right as a man.

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Listening prayer will open a man to how God wants him to single-heartedly embrace

masculinity.

When I was learning to read the Bible, beyond those early months of just trying to

figure out who was who and what was what, I would experiment with different ways of

approaching the text, everything from reading about a certain theme such as faith or covenant

wherever it showed up in the testaments, to studying a particular book for many weeks to glean

everything I could from it. I wanted to go deep, one way or the other. I wanted to understand

(read “stand under the truth of”) the text and be changed by it. What I discovered over the years

was that it was important for my way of grabbing hold of the world to get a grand scale overview

of God’s revealed story in order to make any sense of the ways the story was expressed in the

different chapters he chose to write.

The same principle of seeing from the “top down” has held true as I have listened to

God about this masculinity business. He has repeatedly beckoned me to assent to his call to be a

man in attitude, character, and action. Many of my dialogues with him have been opportunities

for him to teach me, from the experiences of my own story, what essential and redeemed

masculinity is. He has shown me many times over that I must choose to be masculine in response

to life’s struggles and obstacles. Often he has called me to virtues such as courage in the face of

fear or uncertainty, trust when I want to control people and escape situations, decisive action

when I will to procrastinate, Christ-like sacrifice when I choose self-enhancement, perseverance

when I want to quit and do something else, love in the face of hurt, and pressing forward when

the way seems hopelessly blocked, or I find myself so utterly lost I couldn’t find my way back to

where I am!

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 In listening prayer, God has confronted everything about me that remained

destructively immature and boyish and continues to reveal areas I was not aware. His call to

manhood has been relentless. Many times, his responses came to my anguished cries of

frustration or despair over life throwing me a set of pitches I couldn’t hit. I didn’t want to be at

bat any more. He would resolutely point me to how I was supposed to respond as a man,

reminding me what he had already told me in the Scripture, or bringing to my attention that I had

failed to hold up my end of the bargain in some way and nothing would change until I did. His

charge remained for me to be single-hearted in this task of learning to be masculine as one of his

disciples. He has been patient, forbearing, kind and firm.

God knows beyond a shadow, every man he has ever made. He knows what makes him

tick and what makes him tock. He knows thoroughly the masculine path he has set for each and

how to lead him to, and down that path over the years he will give him. He is ready to help at the

least hint that we are ready to go. But men respond to his call to masculinity in different ways

depending on a complex set of forces and circumstances. Some of us just seem to get in the

masculine groove fairly quickly; others of us take their sweet time sauntering through safe

emotional boyhood before we put a shoulder to the task of becoming a man as God has deemed

it. A deeply damaged few of us will never really leave the emotional fortresses we have created

to ward off the monsters in our worlds that would make us men if we would confront them on

God’s terms and with his help.

Through listening prayer God speaks to his sons about what it means to adopt single-

hearted masculinity as he moves through life. He will counsel a man when he faces crushing

defeats, devastating losses, perplexing trials, overpowering sin, and afflictions of every stinging

stripe that threaten to destroy him and those he loves. He will invite a man deep into masculine

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initiative and courage when fear blocks the road like a behemoth with no seeming way around.

God will remind a man to take the high path of masculine integrity and perseverance as he walks

through bone-dry deserts of mind-numbing drudgery, excruciating disappointment, and dreary

discipline evidencing little fruit. When covenant relationships eviscerate, bore, or dishearten him

through the years, the Father will break in quietly with truth and summon him to masculine

faithfulness, sacrificial love and resolute patience every time. Even when his own successes and

the copious yields of his intellectual, physical or professional prowess threaten to lure him into

falling in love with himself and the world he has created, God will whisper in listening prayer

that authentic Christian masculinity stays put, humble before a majestic and resplendent

Sovereign who has given him every jot and tittle he has been blessed to produce or achieve.

The Father leads sons to mature manhood if the sons will listen and obey. Listening

prayer opens the door to the heart of the Father for his sons, and invites them learn the glory of

their inheritance discovered only by being godly men. Single-hearted Christian masculinity is

holy by its nature. It desires only to walk in God’s ways as he has ordained it uniquely for those

who bear his image as men. Listening prayer deepens the transformation of turning a man’s heart

to the heart of the Father and the Son because he hears them challenge him into masculinity

while he wrestles with real life through the days, months and years. Listening prayer is not the

sole means of grace God has given to accomplish this transformation, but it is one of the most

intimate and compelling.

Listening prayer will teach a man to see God as the sovereign Senior Partner and Lord in

the enterprise of living and serving his Kingdom.

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 As I grew in listening to God, gradually accumulating the many words of our

“conversations,” I noticed his consistent desire to walk with me through my days. The

relationship that he was unfolding in the quiet had the friendly feel of a partnership, not of equals

by any stretch, but of Friend to friend engaged jointly in an unfolding enterprise vitally important

to both. It dawned early on that I was ushered into a partnership where my gross limits and

besetting sins were exposed often, but in the respect that they impeded the work we were doing

in his Name. Clearly, he was the Senior Partner in the work of living the Kingdom life, so senior

as to be Lord, one to be listened to and obeyed. His hand was never heavy with me nor his tone

sharp. He was firm and authoritative. He meant business, but he was fond of me as a partner, and

was patient with my false starts, rabbit trails, rebellions and carryings on. I was to be about his

business, to walk in his way, but as one accepted and loved.

In the context of my questions about what to do in a particular retreat or teaching, or

when I had a problem that knocked me off the path, he would point me toward building the

Kingdom as I lived it and helped others do the same. His wisdom and knowledge are without

equal in the universe. He is never wrong or confused or worried about what to do. He was to be

listened to and followed in each instance. At the same time, he was not there at my pleasure

when I needed an answer. There was still plenty of mystery and paradox that I had to traverse

without a divine road map or OnStar system for every turn in the road. His sovereignty was

demonstrated by his silence at times, or by changing the subject when I wanted him to respond to

me about what I thought I needed to know. As the Lord and Senior Partner, his silence forced me

to press ahead into the unknown armed with faith and trust and hope (ample provisions!). His

changing the subject turned me toward more important concerns, usually about me and sin and

the pressing need to dump my attitude.

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 Through the years my journals affirmed that we were busy jointly working his

Kingdom. His voluntary partnership with me has called forth the man in me more than once. As I

led retreats, taught, preached and shaped how I thought Klesis should press ahead, he would

respond to my questions about the way he wanted it done. Clearly, he was in charge, and I saw

that was so by what he led me to do in all sorts of ministry activities. I wanted to hear from the

Lord of life, and not my big ideas because he took me to places I would never find on my own

and made me able to get there. His way of doing what he asked me to do has always been so

miles-high superior to my ways that I have learned to trust what he directs with deep confidence

even when he takes me way into the woods where I can’t see out. I have learned that masculinity

is authenticated in the deep woods of life.

In the work of listening and following, I see I am little by little being made fit for the

task of living the Kingdom more freely and resolutely. The Lord Christ is always talking to me

about how he wants me to change to be more fit. Many times I cannot grasp his will in this

retooling. I don’t respond, chicken out or forget to persevere. He keeps after me anyway. I have

sinful attitudes and habits that hide behind virtues and well-practiced sleights of hand designed to

fool any observer, including me. They have to be exposed and cast off. Otherwise, I am

neutralized for the work of really living the Kingdom, useful for beans in partnership with Jesus.

While he graciously turns my helpless brokenness into bread he breaks to nourish and serve

others in ways unexpected by me, I continually need to be made fitter for the light yoke of

shining his light more brilliantly into the stubborn darkness of the world I face from one day to

the next.

Any man who presses forward in listening to God will run smack dab into Christ the

Lord, but he will also find himself called into a partnership with One whose demonstration of

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lordship includes allying himself with remarkably broken vessels. Jesus will never shy away

from being the Lord when he speaks intimately to one of his own, but his words never diminish,

deride or mock a man who trustingly comes in close. Jesus tells us the truth because he is the

truth, but even if the telling stings or spreads the ribs and exposes heart like a surgeon, He goes

after authentic freedom in us. As Jesus teaches a man the dazzling magnificence of his lordship

in the quiet place of listening prayer, he treats him as a brother of promise. He always invites him

to be truly masculine by yielding (with courageous abandon), obeying (without hanging back

safely), serving (without a stutter-step), and glorifying (with abiding happiness), him as we live

our but-a-breath lives on earth. When I learn to trust and assent to the lordship of Christ as I hear

it in listening prayer, then live out that lordship in serving the Kingdom wherever he brings it to

me, I am a man.

Listening prayer will show a man that he is never an orphan in the world.

I have now and again felt frighteningly alone in my half-century plus three. Periods in

my growing up found me sloughed in loneliness crushing enough to feel as if I was walking

adrift in a borderless, monochromatic desert vacant to kingdom come. Penetrating loneliness

fogged me in most often when I faced turns in the road needing prudent, manly decisiveness and

I was already lost when I got to the turn. Inaction would often be my failsafe. Every other man

knew what to do. I could see them all around me: chins out, striding resolutely down the road

with purposeful vigor, not a care in the world. Not like me at all. My ineptitude, confusion and

terror sealed me in as an orphan. I would never get untracked by myself, and I was too bull

elephant proud to ask for help.

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 I actually spent years, for the most part, in this sorry, emasculated state -- up to my

mid-30’s. My amazing wife, Tricia, tried repeatedly to encourage and affirm me every way she

could, but usually, I would have none of it. I knew the way, thank you very much, and it was

called lost. Only when God began mercifully to move on me for healing did I actually begin to

leave the emotional orphanage that had been my home for decades. Around 35, as I mentioned

earlier, he lead me away from internal strongholds under which the boy in me held the man at

bay. About that same time, I began to listen to God as a spiritual discipline (although I didn’t call

it that way back then). There would exasperating trials and kairos seasons of training in

masculinity when I would frantically summon the “boy” to hide me for a while hoping that the

Lord would lay off. But listening prayer steadily took God’s healing deeper into my heart.

What I found in the first year of listening and subsequently, was that even the simple

act of going alone to sit with God and listen to him neutralized the power the orphan tried to

exert over me again and again. Hearing Jesus speak, and being in his presence where there was

living peace, stillness, rest and safety made a huge difference in whether I would choose to be a

man from one day to the next. I maintain that a man cannot be alone with God for very long if he

is seeking him earnestly, and not begin to feel in his bones the tremendous quiet that comes from

being in the shadow of benevolent might. This Friend has made his men sons, and his favor rests

with them as they carve out time and turn their hearts to listen for his life-soaked words. The

renewing quiet of God penetrates the thieving restlessness of men. When it does, they come

home to a Father and find healing for their orphaned hearts.

I noticed too as I learned the nature of his kind voice in the persistent swirl of my

merry-go-round mind, that he was vigilant and near. When I felt orphaned and solitary in the

enterprises of men it was a malevolent illusion. I had to believe that I was alone to give the

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feeling of aloneness an opportunity to establish a beachhead in my heart. If it could do that, I

would actually live for a time as if I was an orphan even though I was not. I would filter all my

experience and relationships from the view of the impotent orphan. It would be real to me. I

would believe what wasn’t, as though it were and be snared in a lie.

Sitting with the Lord and listening to him flushed the orphan in me out of hiding and

dragged it to the cross to die. It was a phantom, an imposter, and a parasite lusting for a host

available to suck its spiritual lifeblood. When I succumbed and passively let the parasite feed on

my soul, God in his robust mercy and trustworthy tenderness went after the soul sucker with the

ruthless truth that I belonged to him as his treasured possession. I was never orphaned because I

was on his mind and in his gaze continually. He spoke into my passivity saying I merely needed

to embrace my blood ties to him and then live each day as if it was really so.

An aphorism worth memorizing is that: faith gives sight to the orphaned blind. It took

me a while to “get it,” and I, more often than I would like to admit, can listen to the pathetic lies

of the orphan when I am beleaguered and I don’t know the way forward. As often as that has

happened, and if I have still managed to look for Him in the fog, he never seems to tire of

reminding me (sometimes with a sigh, I’ll bet – OK, one more time), I am his -- case closed.

When I hear him to that effect and say “yes,” the orphan recoils back into his empty room and I

walk with God for another day, a son and man in progress, and deeply loved.

When God teaches a son the discipline of listening prayer, he will also teach him about

the places and relationships in his life where he, too, feels an orphan. God might not use the term

orphan directly, but he will shine the light of maturing truth on areas where his son of clay

routinely abdicates responsibility or opts for a safer path because he feels alone, exposed and

incompetent. Most, if not all, men have those places and relationships, but they are well hidden

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from view to save face or try to keep in self-protective control. If a man internalizes the persona

and attitude of the orphan he will remain a boy (radically dependent on others to do for him what

he and God can do together). He may get by or perhaps even succeed smashingly in areas of

proven strength, but his masculinity will remain stunted in the very areas where it could be of

most use to God in advancing the kingdom such as ministering through what he has learned from

his brokenness.

In the friendship of listening God reminds a man that he is committed to his purposes in

and through him and will not forsake him even if his servant fails miserably. Deeply rooted

masculinity involves taking initiative when the way is not obvious and God must light the path

even if just beyond your toes, inch by inch for many miles. God works to not only sow seeds of

masculinity in a listening son, but to set deep roots that will anchor him through the fierce gales

waiting for him as they walk together. As a man listens to God in the quiet, he begins to believe

that God really is near him through thick and thin even if he doesn’t “feel” his presence at a

particular moment. God has said through his written word that he will not leave or abandon him

and he has whispered in his quiet voice the same commitment. The orphan in him has less of a

case to make in moments of fear or trial than he did before because a listening, praying man has

learned to recognize God’s presence in the stillness, feel his reassuring peace, and sit at rest in

His favor. Listening prayer backs the orphan away so that holy masculinity can grow under the

wise and loving care of a Shepherd who knows his sheep and calls them by name.” (Jn.10:2-16).

****

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 My life as a Christian man was altered that November morning when I climbed out of

bed, and went downstairs in search of the God who would speak to me in the solitude and quiet. I

didn’t know what I would find, but I knew I needed to find out. 15 years later, God has found me

again and again. He has called me to walk uprightly with him as a man. He has taught me,

reminded me, corrected me, invited me and persistently called me into masculinity through this

dialogue of prayer. He has shown me that Christian males willing to become men, inherit the call

to wage battle for the Kingdom of God in a world rebelling in mad blindness and agony. Holy

masculinity (courageous, resolute, joyful abandonment to God), creates shoulders fitted well for

a cross each man can carry, and through his own death to self, push back the darkness in his life

and the lives of everyone he will be asked to care for in one way or another.

Listening prayer took me far into my true heart with its struggles and phantoms. It still

does. As I listened to God, I have had the courage to face down the boy, silence the orphan, and

challenge the imposter in the healing fellowship of One who called me to follow him to become

a man in his sight. He will continue to show me the way. I have no doubt that is has been him

who has gotten me this far and I am, at least, more than half way to trail’s end. On that day my

listening to him will no longer be from whispers in the stillness.

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