The fear of raising up fearless children

The following is taken from a Facebook post written by my friend, Andrew Kern: 

 "Up jumped Bilbo, and putting on his dressing-gown went into the dining room. There he saw nobody, but all the signs of a late and hurried breakfast. There was a fearful mess in the room, and piles of unwashed crocks in the kitchen. Nearly every pot and pan he possessed to be have been used. The washing-up was so dismally real that Bilbo was forced to believe the party of the night before had not been part of his bad dreams, as he had rather hoped. Indeed he was really relieved after all to think that they had all gone without him, and without bothering to wake him up ("but with never a thank-you" he thought); and yet in a way he could not help feeling just a trifle disappointed. The feeling surprised him." - The Hobbit, Page 40. 

-- 

I don't know what it is like to be a girl, and even if I could take advantage of the insecurities raised by the combination of media madness and technologies unimaginable about two weeks ago and pretend to become one, I still wouldn't really know what it was like. So I can't comment on this from a female perspective and I hope you can all forgive me either for acknowledging that women have a glory different from that of men or for refusing to admit that men and women are identical. 

But I love that paragraph. I love it so much I read it in Latin. 

The last sentence and the previous clause go like this for those of you who care:

nihilominus mirum in modum non potuit sentire quin spes sua paululum falsa sit. de quo sensu admiratus est. 

Okay, now that I have distracted you and got most of you to stop reading, I'll get to my point. 

I mentioned a week or so ago that I was thinking about getting a motorcycle. When I did, I asked for advice but specifically said I didn't want it from paranoid people. Since I exaggerated the way I put it, I undercut my own point. The result was that I got lots of advice about how dangerous motorcycles were. 

Here's an interesting observation:

Every. 

Single. 

One. 

Of. 

The people who wrote warning about how dangerous it was

without a context of value

was. 

a. 

_________ 

Go ahead. Fill in the blank. 

What does that signify?

I don't know. Honestly. I don't. But I have a further statement to make that I think mothers of boys, if not women generally, need to hear:

I know that if I got a motorcycle and drove it recklessly or even carefully, I could get killed or seriously injured. 

I also know that if I went camping in the mountains of Idaho, I could get killed by a grizzly bear.

And I know that if I ride a boda in Uganda I could find myself in the boda wing of the hospital. 

And when I was a kid I knew that if I climbed too high, I could fall to my death and if I did any number of the things that I should not have done, I might have died. 

In fact, I nearly did die more than once. On one occasion I spent three days unconscious with a brain injury (that is my excuse for all those concerns you have about me). 

On another occasion, I came within inches of being run over by a car after my bike tire caught the groove of a train track and Tom Anthony, whom I was racing on a country highway, flipped over me and the car swerved at the last second. 

I lost the tip of a finger when I was three because I was testing limits and the limits won, I have scars on my back and arms from taking risks and losing, I got bit by a dog (delivering newspapers, if you must know - and the poor children had to have their dog put down because of it), I flipped over my bike handles in the middle of traffic - I did all those things you worry yourself sick over for your boys. 

And the fact is, I could have died any number of times and I could have been injured much worse than I was on some occasions. 

But this is what you have to understand:

Every time I haven't done something because I was afraid, there was no risk of me dying physically, but every single time, something died inside me. 

If I live to be 80 without courage, I would rather have died at 5. 

If your reaction is to feel uncomfortable, I get it. If your reaction is to close yourself to the thought, I hope you will ask people to pray for your sons, because you are going to hurt their souls. Forgive me. 

I do not know if I will get a motorcycle. But if I don't, it will not be because they are more dangerous than cars. 

To draw a parallel: in business there is a myth that successful entrepreneurs are the great risk takers. This is not so. The successful ones are the great risk managers. They think constantly about what could go wrong, but they don't let that make them worry. They use the information to inform their decisions. 

Even so, courageous people are not reckless. That is not courage but compensation. Much of my childhood was spent on that sort of overcompensation out of a need to prove myself, which sometimes I did, but more often I didn't. 

Now I just want to be courageous, whether I appear to be or not. I do not want to be without reck, because if I am without reck, I will get in a wreck. And I reckon I don't want that. 

I am grateful for all the information about the dangers of motorcycles. I will take them into consideration and do something about them. 

Same with camping, and riding bodas, and swimming with sharks. 

One final word: some of you are now inclined to take this post as being about me getting a motorcycle. That is only to illustrate. This post is about raising boys to be men. It's up to you how you apply it in your circumstances and it's up to me how I apply it in mine.  

But the world can't afford Christian cowardice - or compensation for that matter.