After the fun I had writing ‘How to be a Rubbish Christian’ it was only a matter of time before I put on my satire hat, wound up my irony generator and exercised my sarcasm muscle again. So I present to you: How to be a Rubbish Man (or If I were a Boy)
Course, I should probably explain why you’d want to read this guide in the first place. Being a man is hard work. It’s connected with things like responsibility, integrity, duty, discipline, courage, steadfastness, maturity and the ilk. These things are boring! It requires so much effort to display these in your character that you may as well give up before you even start. Being a man is too hard. Being a Rubbish Man is easy. Being a Rubbish Man involves being a boy and that requires so much less effort. As Paul writes: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” 1 Corinthians 13 v 11 The task of a Rubbish Man is to never put childish things behind him. The perfect Rubbish Man finds that sweet spot known as Kidult or adultlescence. The Rubbish Man is a child in an adult’s body and with an adult’s passions. This is probably sounding pretty negative but that’s only because as a would be Rubbish Man your intelligence probably isn’t up to noticing the beauty of being a boy not a man so I’ll spell it out for you: NO RESPONSIBILITY! No stress, no hassle, no worries, no need to step up to the mark and be tested just a life of idleness, pleasure and ease. Sound good? You betcha, so let’s get right on in and learn how to be the perfect Rubbish Man, in other words, how to be a boy:
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To put this in context as my twentieth birthday approaches I am becoming increasingly obsessed with what it means to be a man. And by that I mean what it means to be a man in the biblical sense, a man as God created me to be.
I’m beginning to form a picture of what it looks like. But as a side train of thought I remembered a scene from Lord of the Rings (see video at end of post) and thought I’d share it with you… Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam. Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something. Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam? Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for. Over the last three months I’ve had a growing realization that so many of my problems in life can be solved by telling myself to man up. And as my twentieth birthday approaches I find myself more and more thinking about what that means. What does it mean to be a man? What should ‘manning up’ look like? So I created a new field of study: Manology. That is, the study of being a man. What follows is my first venture into the field as I explore the singular importance of the very biblical command to man up.
Of course, the actual phrase ‘man up’ doesn’t appear in the Bible. But we do Joshua 1 where God gives the new leader Joshua what can only be described as a pep talk. “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1 v 9 The phrase ‘be strong and courageous’ is repeated four times in the passage. I read this chapter on the 27th November last year and the phrase has been stuck in my head ever since. It’s basically God telling Joshua to man up! I know, it’s pathetic isn’t it? Now, before you think otherwise I didn’t have an actual shrine to video games, I didn’t literally bow down to them, I didn’t make sacrificial burnt offerings to them and expect them to save me from my sins…
Except, in a way, I kind of did. There’s no easy, non-embarrassing, non cringe worthy way of putting this so here goes: |
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