A young man once lamented to me, “I’ve been a Christian since I was five — no one ever showed me what it means to really be a man.” He’s lost now. He moved across the country to be with his girlfriend, but she’s dumped him because he doesn’t know who he is and what he’s here for. There are countless others like him, a world of such men — a world of uninitiated men.
A number of years ago, at a point in my own journey when I felt more lost than ever, I heard a talk given by Gordon Dalbey, who had just written Healing the Masculine Soul. He raised the idea that despite a man’s past and the failures of his own father to initiate him, God could take him on that journey, provide what was missing. A hope rose within me, but I dismissed it with the cynicism I’d learned to use to keep down most things in my soul.
Several weeks, perhaps months later, I was downstairs in the early morning to read and pray. As with so many of my “quiet times,” I ended up looking out the window toward the east to watch the sun rise.
I heard Jesus whisper a question to me: “Will you let Me initiate you?” Before my mind ever had a chance to process, dissect, and doubt the whole exchange, my heart leaped up and said yes.
Not mentioning the numerous challenges that paved it’s way in, some circumstantial, some but major blunders. Allowing God to initiate me wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I rebelled. My mentor would testify the best. Ha!
“Who can give a man this, his own name?” George MacDonald asks. “God alone. For no one but God sees what the man is.” He reflects upon the white stone that Revelation includes among the rewards God will give to those who “overcome.” On that white stone there is a new name. It is “new” only in the sense that it is not the name the world gave to us, certainly not the one delivered with the wound. No man will find on that stone “mama’s boy” or “fatty” or “seagull.” But the new name is really not new at all when you understand that it is your true name, the one that belongs to you, “that being whom He had in His thought when He began to make the child, and whom He kept in His thought throughout the long process of creation” and redemption. Psalm 139 makes it clear that we were personally, uniquely planned and created, knit together in our mother’s womb by God Himself. He had someone in mind and that someone has a name.
That someone has also undergone a terrible assault. Yet God remains committed to the realization of that same someone. The giving of the white stone makes it clear — that is what He is up to.
The history of a man’s relationship with God is the story of how God calls him out, takes him on a journey and gives him his true name. Most of us have thought it was the story of how God sits on His throne waiting to whack a man broadside when he steps out of line. Not so. He created Adam for adventure, battle, and beauty; He created us for a unique place in His story and He is committed to bringing us back to the original design.
So God calls Abram out from Ur of the Chaldees to a land he has never seen, to the frontier, and along the way Abram gets a new name. He becomes Abraham. God takes Jacob off into Mesopotamia somewhere, to learn things he has to learn and cannot learn at his mother’s side. When he rides back into town, he has a limp and a new name as well.
Even if your father did his job, he can only take you partway.
There comes a time when you have to leave all that is familiar, and go on into the unknown with God.
Saul was a guy who really thought he understood the story and very much liked the part he had written for himself. He was the hero of his own little miniseries, “Saul the Avenger.” After that little matter on the Damascus road he becomes Paul; and rather than heading back into all of the old and familiar ways he is led out into Arabia for three years to learn directly from God.
Jesus shows us that initiation can happen even when we’ve lost our father or grandfather.
He’s the carpenter’s son, which means Joseph was able to help him in the early days of his journey. But when we meet the young man Jesus, Joseph is out of the picture. Jesus has a new teacher — his true Father — and it is from Him He must learn who he really is and what he’s really made of.
Initiation involves a journey and a series of tests, through which we discover our real name and our true place in the story.
Most of us have been misinterpreting life and what God is doing for a long time.
“I think I’m just trying to get God to make my life work easier,” a young client of mine at BreadButterJam confessed, but he could have been speaking for most of us. We’re asking the wrong questions. Most of us are asking, “God, why did you let this happen to me?” Or, “God, why won’t you just…” (fill in the blank — help me succeed, get my kids to straighten out, fix my marriage — you know what you’ve been whining about). But to enter into a journey of initiation with God requires a new set of questions:
What are You trying to teach me here? What issues in my heart are You trying to raise through this? What is it You want me to see? What are You asking me to let go of?
In truth, God has been trying to initiate you for a long time. What is in the way is how you’ve mishandled your wound and the life you’ve constructed as a result.
Krishik nair 