Nature of wounds cont.

Walk into a room of men, be it a locker room or otherwise, and ask them to show you their physical scars. Inevitably shirts come off, pants come down, and hands start pointing. Most men are proud to show other men their scars they received from old sport injuries, heroic acts, and even from ridiculous behavior. Yet, ask those same men to talk about their emotional scars from childhood traumas or relationship failures and the room grows awkwardly silent. Ask them to show you where they hurt after a best friend betrayed them, a failed marriage, or the death of a father or son. Ask another man where he feels fear or rejection and you will almost always be met with a blank stare. What man wants to talk about the pain of feeling isolated, betrayed, abandoned, or rejected in the company of other men? So we remain silent, in our own cavernous isolation of Hell. Sure we can go to work and talk with our co-workers or hangout with the guys to watch a game or two on tv. But do we ever really know the man who is sittin across from us at the card table or the more importantly the man staring back at us in the mirror. For all of us our silence compounds our pain. We don't realize that our experience is a shared human experienced. That all men long for the same things, struggle with the same fears, and even succomb to the same emotions. Dr. Larry Crabb in his book, the Silence of Adam, proposes that it was not Eve’s forbidden fruit consumption as the first sin, that it was in fact Adam’s silence in preventing Eve by warning her. In Genesis, Adam in instructed not to partake of the Tree of Knowledge but Eve is not mentioned. Dr. Crabb expounds that the male sex is the silent sex. We live most of our life in emotional and relational silence.

We will become the stories we tell ourselves. In our culture we honor comic book heros such as spiderman, batman, and superman. These are the men that we silently hold ourselves up to. We want the can do attitude of Spiderman, the mysterious life of Batman, and the power of Superman. But think for a moment, If even superman had kryptonite, are we no less expected to have our own? If Batman had a sidekick, then who is ours? If even spiderman had a superpower, than what is our own?
The truth is wounds never absolve on their own. Men who have wounds that have never healed will inevitably hurt other people. Our need for healing will continue to grow with time, not diminish away. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. There are things that even time can’t put a distance between. Some of us choose to medicate our pain with narcotics, alcohol, or sex. But the relief is fleeting. The emptiness remains and the light of hope fades faster each time. We get caught in addictions not because we are whole, but because we are broken. We are caught in vicious cycles of lust, rage, and depression as a result of the wounds we received growing up. Why do so many of our brothers end up cheating on their partners, rape, murder, steal, or commit other crimes in order to be incarcerated? Could it be that perhaps the way we were raised by our parents and our culture is somehow misguided?