day no. 15,398: five o'clock shadows

1 Corinthians 13:11
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.

It is easier to grow a beard than it is to be a man. It is easier to do things you've seen men do than it is to actually be a man doing his own thing. It is quicker to parrot things men should say and become a parody of a Y chromosome than it is to acquire the substantive character of man by embodying the very essence of what it means to live as though it were a mission assigned to you by God when He gave you a Y chromosome.

Many have succumb to the temptation to aim at the shadow. They prefer the echo to the impetus. They chase the stubble instead of the stature. They opt out of gravitas and fall for anything. They no longer even want the substance. If you tried to pull their man card, claiming they were not a one-woman man (i.e. flirting with the girls at the gym and snap-chatting old female college friends) or claiming that they were not a committed father (i.e. spending all their free time on their hobbies in the garage or on their gaming console in their man caves), they would simply assert that they weren't aiming at anything more in the first place and reject your definition of masculinity and your accusation along with it.

In their mind, they are manly because they know more than one woman who would be willing to sleep with them or because they are a fifth level wizard warrior king in some simulated universe or because they own a gun that looks like the one their childhood G.I. Joe figurine came with. But these things do not a real man maketh. The disagreement is always in the form of the target. You can always ask, "By what standard?" They may be a man by their own definition, but by God's standards, their definition of manhood is merely childish boyishness. They raise their beard-clad brows up to Heaven and shake their tattoo'd fists while holding their assault rifles and God looks down and laughs like He's watching a congregation of babies attempting to cross the Atlantic on a worn out dish towel. 

Psalm 2:1-4
Why do the nations rage

and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,

and the rulers take counsel together,

against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart

and cast away their cords from us.”
He who sits in the heavens laughs;

the Lord holds them in derision.