Why Men Don't Think

If their Bible study is simply hyper-spiritual TPS reports, they'll check out before they even show up.

There’s no dark like the dark of winter. Where the sun seems to go down so fast it just feels like the whole planet is off kilter. It churns something in your gut.

If the climate was a vinyl record, the needle has most definitely slipped off of the wax.

There’s no reason it should be this dark this early.

I used to have a job where my shifts started at 5 pm. I’d show up a little early and take care of all my equipment and change into my uniform. We’d been fed some nonsense about achievement and getting ahead, and I’d taken it to heart as a kid (a bit too much, I might add).

The sun was still up when I pulled into the parking lot. But by the time roll call ended, the sky had gone darker than a Friday evening pulpit. A winter sky has a film under it; some kind of stubborn buffer that makes God seem further away. One of your prayers might rise up to this buffer, strike it, and then fall back down at your feet like a popped balloon.

That’s the kind of winter sky we had when our men’s Bible study began. It had a special kind of silence that’s at once isolating and inviting. Somehow though, that silence had found its way inside the church building and crept into our Fellowship Hall.

We’d been meeting in this space since the end of the summer. When we started, there were maybe six of us. As the weather turned cold, the study grew. Numbers aren’t everything, but they’re certainly something. By this time, we regularly had twelve to fifteen men showing up. And on a Monday night of all nights.

Considering we were competing against Monday Night Football (which some might describe as a religion), we weren’t doing too bad. We picked that day because Mondays are most peoples’ least favorite day of the week. They get a bad rap.

By this time, we were studying the epistle of Jude—yep, that short little book right before Revelation. It works like something of a preamble to John’s apocalyptic musings on plagues, seals, and multi-headed beasts. It’s not even thirty verses. But it's got oceans of meaning and historical depth to it.

During the discussion, someone asked Alex (not his real name) a question.

“Alex, what do you think about what Jude writes in this verse?”

Alex’s eyes fell hard on the table where he sat. He doodled infinity symbols on the blank page of his open notebook. Each new loop dug into the surface of the paper and pressed the shape into the page beneath it.

“How does it connect with the idea in the previous —”

Alex dropped his pen and folded his hands on his notebook. He looked at the questioner. With a desert-dry throat, he opened his mouth and cut the questioner off.

“I don’t know what I think,” said Alex.

The cold night air refused to be left outside. It wafted in, an unwelcome guest amid our discussion, and settled like a fog between us. No one spoke until Alex piped up to finish his thought.

“Not because I don’t have any thoughts or because I’m stupid,” Alex continued.

He picked his pen up and resumed tracing the loops of the infinity symbol. Alex took a sip of his coffee and added one more thing.

“I don’t know what I think because no one’s ever asked me.”

Photo by Matheus de Souza on Unsplash

Alex’s dilemma represents what many men across the pews in American churches experience. Every Sunday, they’re given a 3-point sermon with a moral at the end that’s supposed to help them get through the next week. The following Sunday, they get one more placebo from the Jesus Pez dispenser. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.

For many of us, this is where our transformation ends. We do what’s expected:

• We bring our families to church (preferably one with a kids’ program we like).

• We read books about improving our marriages and try to make sure our families are emotionally healthy.

• We quit smoking and drinking, read our Bibles daily, and vote how we’re supposed to.

And we’re left starving as a result. Our spirits cannot engage with the wisdom of Scripture on our own terms. We aren’t taught how to study it, or how to find the different schools of thought around a particular issue or doctrine. We know so little of church history, especially the history of believers outside our own nation.

We don’t know how to think because no one, at least in a spiritual sense, has ever demanded that we think. As a result, we learn to parrot trite affirmations or quippy one-liners that carry a veneer of wisdom and maturity. But these pithy pleasantries are matchstick houses that will ignite and blow away as soon as a real challenge comes.

Sound teaching—Biblical or otherwise—props a man up so that he might prop others up. It doesn’t just feed him, it teaches him how to prepare good food for his own soul, and then to serve it to others. So many of us spend countless hours debating the proper way to prepare and cook meat for our stomachs.

What could we be if we spent that time preparing meat for our souls?