And yet, and yet…

Whenever I have the task of entertaining a group of young guys, one thing that I’ll normally do is pull up some trick videos on YouTube. No group does this better than DudePerfect. They have somehow created a cottage industry of trick shots, pranks, and challenges that all function in a space that is clean for kids. They took Bottle-flipping and made it a career.

It got me to thinking about the why of DudePerfect. And beyond that, what about the other things that seem to characterize young manhood now? Why is it that young guys are so drawn to games like Fortnite and Call of Duty? Is there something deeper than just violence?

I believe there’s something intrinsic to masculinity that is designed to impact and to change things around the self. Think about Adam in the Garden of Eden. His job was to give name and identity to all the of animals the Lord had created, to tend and cultivate the ground to make things grow. From our oldest ancestors, men were designed to take the created world and build it, change it, grow it.

Flash forward many more years, and consider the passage that talks about King David and his affair with Bathsheba. The Bible notes that the whole episode happened in the season “when kings went to war.” There was a regular rhythm, expectation of war in society. Men were tuned and sharpened to engage others in battle, to protect and to conquer.

Keep moving forward and in the days of World War II, you had young men lying about their age so that they could join the war effort. There is a press to attack.

Then we enter our era, an era in which men are shamed into thinking that these internal drives of aggressiveness and change are wrong. They’re taught to be nice, inoffensive, and calm. The need for adventure, to scrape knees, climb trees, and dig holes are changed into playing Minecraft or Call of Duty, cyberbullying others, engaging in a whole slanted world of technomasculinity. It’s now much less likely that a young man would work on his own car or get a summer job. The profile has changed.

There is plenty of content out there talking about how culture got to this point, but what I want to point out is the resiliency of the masculine spirit. I’m currently writing a book called Blurry that talks about our Metamodern moment and how it applies for Christians, and this retuning of truth for men applies in that topic. The need for men to build, to attack, to grow, to change the world, to speak truth into the world is still intrinsic in the male spirit. Even though we now have dulled the edge of risk in our world, the desire of men remains the same.

So how do we respond in this? How do we guide a blurry generation of men to rightly express their intrinsic need to impact the world? I think it boils down to one word: risk. Let young men take risks in the world. Challenge them to do hard things, let them experience failure, let them learn and grow through it. As they dream about what they can do to impact the world, open the door for them, but do not clear the way. Give the young man a sword and show him to the battlelines.

The Lord created men to take His creation and build with it. This is part of being created in God’s Image. Let’s not be content with an inoffensive, safe manhood in our era. But let’s recapture the spirit of adventure, of expedition, of changing things. As we bleed, may we heal stronger than before. I believe that as men take their real Call of Duty, they’ll be the poet-warriors of days past, men of integrity, the fathers of generations to come.

And young men, get beyond just being entertained. Do hard things. Do good work. Change the world.