Thai Food and Piper on the issue of MEN

Thai Food, and Piper on Men

a)

There was one brother that I got to spend a lot of time with during my travelling, God bless him, who had a big problem with eating. While we were in Thailand, he refused to eat western food, cause he thinks “I’m in Thailand, so I should devote my time here to getting to know Thai food”.

Although that seems like a good principle, as you examine the situation further, you encounter some problems:

I) Thailand has more western food than my current location, so I should have tried to take advantage of that.

II) In the area we were in, variety in Thai food was limited

III) Thai food is not that great

Although I have yet to experience all the cultures of the world, I think I can say with some certainty that Chinese food is the best Asian food. Often, other Asian foods just taste like someone tried to make Chinese food, but screwed up. There are good other Asian foods (Korean BBQ, Sushi), but Chinese food still rules.

b)

Sometimes, I’ll see stuff or read something and make a note to blog about it. Then months go by, and I have yet to blog about it. Here is an example:

A few months ago, I (as I usually do) went onto Piper’s website and saw a new audio resource:

Men!

Piper!!

Free!!!

You could imagine that I almost cried with excitement. With great delight, I downloaded this gem and with further delight, discovered that it was actually pretty good. Here’s an excerpt:

(speaking of a Church with a Biblical understanding of gender) The theology and the church and the mission are marked by over-arching male leadership and an ethos of tender-hearted strength and contrite courage and risk-taking decisiveness and readiness to sacrifice to protect and provide for the community—the feel of a great, majestic God making the men lovingly strong and the women intelligently secure.

In this ethos…

1. Men are freed to have feminine traits without being effeminate and women are freed to have masculine traits without being tomboys. (The most admirable women have masculine traits and the most admirable men have feminine traits: Lopsided masculinity and femininity are not as admirable.)

Back when I was at school, I remember talking to a good friend of mine and he was saying that someone in his small group got pretty discouraged reading these Christian man books (since a bunch of them came out recently) like Wild at Heart because he felt like his masculinity was threatened. He felt like the books made it seem like if you’re a real, Biblical man, you should be some kind of Rambo/Braveheart/Danny Sh*****-type guy, enjoying NFL, mountain-climbing, pick-up trucks, and beer. Our friend didn’t think he fit that kinda mold, and wondered if that meant he wasn’t a “man”.

Well, what if you’re not that kinda guy? I know it might surprise you, but I’m not that kinda guy either, despite what you may have guessed based on my physique (refer to profile pic). What determines if I’m a man or… less than a man?

I thought what Piper wrote was pretty Biblical and insightful. The Bible doesn’t list have a list that says “Things that you gotta do if you’re a man and you don’t wanna look gay”. It instead says “stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong” (1 Cor. 16:13). Being a man is about strength in the faith and in the home. It’s about moral and Spiritual courage and conviction that translates into Spiritual and household leadership. But what that looks like is gonna be different depending on personality and culture.

There are some character traits that are more masculine and some that are more feminine, but to be a man does not mean having all of A and lacking all of B. That is not what a man should worry about.

It is not spending a lot of time on your hair, or enjoying figure skating, or listening to Coldplay that makes a man effeminate (though I still strongly suggest you avoid the latter). It is the cowardly abdication of responsibility in the home and in the Church that marks him who fails to undertake the Biblical role of manhood. That is what a man should worry about.

If this is true, guys have a lot of freedom in this area. Mark Driscoll says (paraphrasing) “most guys in our culture end up being gay or end up being bullies, cause they don’t wanna be gay”. We can be free from both, because we know manhood is different than womanhood, and we know that it’s about strong, loving, leadership in the family and in the Church, not about conforming to a list of character traits.