Man vs. Mild

Feb, 22, 2012

Well, Valentine’s Day has come and gone and I’m left with just one question. Seriously, not one of you could have emailed me and given me a warning? A heads up, something? I’m kidding of course. I love my wife with all my wallet and therefore go all out on V-day. I bought her Netflix. Oh yea, I’m a romantic like that.
Netflix has everything! In fact, my wife and I are watching Man VS. Wild right now. Actually, she’s watching the show…I’m looking for the remote because I’m realizing that the star of this show is making me look like a wimp. If you haven’t seen Man Vs Wild, its a show of survival and by that I mean a man watches the show with his wife and if she still thinks he’s somewhat of a man afterwards then he has survived!
Bear Grylls (the star of the show) is the toughest man in the world. You could duct tape an anchor to Bear’s face, kick him out of a moving airplane into the middle of the ocean and, on the way down, Bear would smelt the anchor into a harpoon, somehow land on an unsuspecting whale…which he would probably dine on as he made the whale swim him safely to shore. Meanwhile, I get winded just typing long sentences like the one before this. In fact, I’m embarrassed to say that I had to pause halfway through this article and drink some gatorade. So, in short, Bear is a stud. And its just not a good contrast for my wife to observe Bear on TV while I’m sitting next to her breathing heavy as I type this.
Bear never complains and never gets discouraged. He just mans up. The first episode we watched involved Bear trekking through 4 foot snow drifts. He survived by eating Reindeer droppings that I’m pretty sure he heated up in his armpit. Meanwhile, I’m sitting on the couch next to my wife depressed and cranky because I remembered the bag of chips but left the bean dip on the counter in the kitchen. I quickly fast forwarded to an episode where Bear made a lasso to snare a wild pig. I tried to mimic his actions using my shoe laces in hopes I could snag the bean dip so I wouldn’t have to walk the 20 feet around the couch and into the kitchen.
Well, it dawned on me while thinking about all this that the best way to man up is to make sure God is the main focus of your life (something that Bear himself has said many times). To truly be a man we have to totally rely on God. We have to make sure that God is the head of all our relationships, our decisions and most importantly our actions. If we do that, we’ll always be able to face the wild. So my challenge this month is to man up by making God a bigger part of your life. Now if you will excuse me, I have to go clean bean dip up off my kitchen floor and see if I can get this knot out of my shoe lace.