THE STORY OF TAYLOR

Mansfield's Book of Manly Men (241-244)

GENTLEMEN, I WANT TO CLOSE THIS BOOK BY TELLING YOU one more story. I hope it will make you want to act, and act in very much the same way the men in this story did.
There is a church I know and love very much. Its members are nearly all African American, and what is most remarkable about this church is its amazing ministry to men. Frankly, it’s the best I’ve ever seen—bold, fiery, effective, and fun, measured by how men live loving and righteous lives in their homes and their communities. It is wonderful.

The main reason it’s wonderful is a man we’ll call Taylor. He had the ability to rally men to the example of Jesus and to fulfilling their destinies in this world. He also had an infectious laugh, gave a bone-crushing hug, and could out-eat anyone in the state.

Taylor’s ministry to men rocked on for years, changing lives and impacting the community. Well, the thing happened that often happens in churches. A new pastor. A shift in priorities. A new budget. By the time it had all settled, Taylor got hurt and left the church. And he really left the church. He wouldn’t talk to anybody. He completely cut himself off. Taylor’s wife told some of the men that he had locked himself in his house and wouldn’t come out.

This went on for a number of weeks, and no one did anything. Everyone seemed to think Taylor would eventually “get over his mad” and get back to his life. But he didn’t, and more weeks went by.

Finally, two of the men in the ministry were talking and one of them said, “You know, I don’t want to turn to you in five years and say, ‘I wonder what happened to old Taylor. He sure was a good guy. I wonder how he’s doing.’ We had some pretty special times together, and I’m just not going to sit by and let him drift away. I’m just not going to do it!

Both men agreed and decided to start talking to all the other men. Then together these men came up with the most astounding plan I’ve ever seen come out of a church men’s ministry.

Within forty-eight hours, these guys had set up camp in Taylor’s yard. About 150 of them. They had decided Taylor was going to come out if they had to stay there—on a rotating schedule so men could work their jobs—for the rest of the year if they had to, but they weren’t going to let Taylor go.

Picture it: more than 150 African American men camping in Taylor’s big old yard with electric lines running from neighboring houses to power the televisions and the refrigerators. About twenty grills and smokers are working up some of the best barbecue in the world. These are men, after all. They don’t plan to starve! And there are great big signs all over the place: “Taylor. Come Out. We Love you!” “Taylor, You’re an Idiot. Get Out Here!

One of the leaders told me later, “We had some fun, but don’t think this wasn’t a sacrifice. Black men don’t camp. But we decided we would do it for Taylor.

This went on for days. Taylor never came out. But our men had come to settle in for the long haul.

All of this must have ticked Taylor off, because on the third day the police came. Taylor had called them. When Taylor’s wife and some of the leaders explained what was going on, one of the policemen said, “I wish the guys in our church loved each other this way. Don’t worry. We’ve got this.” Then the two cops just drove off. No one knew what they meant by, “We’ve got this."

The next day, the police came back. They walked through the crowd of men without saying a word and rang the front doorbell. No one answered. One of the officers shouted, “Sir, are you in there? Sir, are you okay? We’ve had a call that you might not be safe. Sir, you’ll need to come to the door to let us know you’re okay. Sir, are there guns in there?

Of course, no one had called the police. These officers had decided to help.

Finally, Taylor came to the door, and the men camping in his yard exploded with cheers, which lasted until Taylor finished his chat with the officers and went back inside.

But the police came back. Twice a day. And not the same policemen, either. Different guys. Apparently the first two had let the entire police department in on what was happening, and they all agreed to help. So twice a day a patrol car pulled up to Taylor’s house. Twice a day policemen rang the doorbell. Twice a day one of them shouted that they had received a call and needed to make sure Taylor was all right. And twice a day, the men in that yard got to scream their love for Taylor.

On the sixth day, someone looked up on the porch and there was Taylor—crying his eyes out and sputtering how sorry he was.

And Taylor came out.

This is a true story. In fact, I’m not telling you where this happened because I’m not completely sure that what the policemen did wasn’t some violation of regulations.

I’ve told this story, though, because it is almost a picture of wounded manhood in our age. And what’s the answer? Men need to bring men in. Men need to stand for other men. Men need to rescue the men who are adrift. Men need the presence of other valiant men—both living and dead—to draw them out to what they are meant to be.

That’s it. That’s the story. And at the heart of it is the simple truth we started with. Don’t sit around talking so that years from now you’re wondering what happened to your life. Act. Act now. Act like a man. Do what men do. There’s time for change, and God is with you.

What then will you do? How will you show yourself a man?

SACRIFICE

Mansfield's Book of Manly Men (221-230)

• You are called to sacrifice. There just isn’t a way to say it any more clearly. Genuine manhood, manly manhood, true manhood—is sacrifice. To do manly things, tend your field, make manly men, and live to the glory of God—in other words, to fulfill all the Manly Maxims—you have to sacrifice.
• Sacrifice what? Everything. Anything. Not your integrity or morality or commitments to God, but certainly your comforts, your rights, your time, your money, your attention, and your energy. You have to sacrifice the priority of yourself.
• One thing is certain: we are to give ourselves up. Just as Jesus did for his church. Dying to save her. Dying to rescue her. Dying to present her pure to her God.
• Isn’t it interesting that the stereotype of a modern man is exactly opposite this? You’ve seen this stereotype played out on the screen. The man is all about himself. His food, his hobbies, his addictions, his deformities, and his vanities dominate his life and the lives in his family. He is one big black hole of self, a giant suck hole of self-interest.
• His name was Witold (Vee-told) Uilecki. 
• He was born on May 13, 1901, in Russia. These words would have made him wince. 
• His family had been forcibly removed to Russia from their beloved Poland as punishment for a Polish uprising in the 1860s.
• Witold exemplified the Polish soul. He played guitar, painted, wrote poetry, composed songs, gave himself fully to his Catholic faith, and dreamed of a free Polish homeland.
• He was also fiercely courageous.
• While still a teenager, he secretly joined a Polish equivalent of the Boy Scouts, though it had been outlawed by Soviet Russia. He fought in guerrilla units during the Soviet-Polish war that followed the First World War and took his examinations to graduate from high school only after that conflict ended. 
• He attended college and then officer training classes, which allowed him to be commissioned as a lieutenant in the Polish army in 1926.
• He married, had two children, inherited his family’s small estate in Belarus, and helped develop paramilitary units in his home region. He was so effective he was awarded the Silver Cross of Merit in 1938. World War II began the next year.
• The invading Germans defeated his 19th Infantry Division on the sixth of September.
• Witold stayed in his homeland and helped organize an underground resistance movement—the Tajna Armia Polska, or TAP—the Polish Secret Army. The TAP was built on Christian principles, had no political party affiliation, and grew to as many as twelve thousand men.
• Not long after, intelligence reached the TAP that people were being gassed at a prison camp in Auschwitz. 
• On September 19, 1940, Witold Pilecki tucked forged identity papers into his jacket, kissed his wife and two children good-bye, and intentionally walked into a Nazi roadblock. He was on a mission—a mission to get himself sent to Auschwitz.
• The sketchy journals he was able to smuggle out give some indication of the horrors he endured. They are filled with Nazi butchery, tales of crematoriums, pseudo-medical experiments, and the Nazi delight in killing Poles.
• Witold was imprisoned in Auschwitz for 947 days—more than two and a half years—days filled with starvation, beatings, and torture.
• Yet they were also days of success, for he fulfilled every assignment the Polish Underground gave him. Then he escaped.
• While much of the world celebrated the close of World War II, patriotic Poles quickly realized they had fought Nazi oppression only to end up under equally evil Soviet rule.
• Witold, ever the patriot, threw himself into this new fight. He again joined an underground movement, taking dangerous assignments to gather intelligence on Soviet operations. He was eventually captured by communist Poles who were in league with the Soviet Union. He was interrogated endlessly, tortured to the threshold of death, and finally found guilty in a farce of a trial in which he received three death sentences.
• Just before his execution, he wrote a poem that includes the line, “For though I should lose my life, I prefer it so, than to live, and bear a wound in my heart.” This “wound” was knowledge that anyone else should suffer for his spying. He was executed on May 25, 1948, at Warsaw’s Mokotow Prison.
• He had lived his life for his people and had given everything again and again. He is one of the greatest heroes of Poland, but he is also one of the greatest examples of self-sacrifice we can know.
• To choose Auschwitz with all its hellish tortures and death required an almost complete surrender of personal preference, inwardly cutting ties with everything dear in this life. This is the essence of being both a man and a patriot. 
• Simply through the mandate of being men, though, we are asked to surrender our rights and comforts for a higher cause—the responsibility for all we are given as men. Our rights come after the requirements of God, of course, but they also come after whatever is required to serve our wives, to invest in the lives of our children, to stand for righteousness in our communities, or to tend anything else that is within the field assigned to us.
• Being a man is a privilege, not an entitlement. It is a surrender of our priority. It is a laying down of our lives, not physically but inwardly—our preferences, our pleasures, sometimes even our dreams.
• “A RACE, LIKE AN INDIVIDUAL, LIFTS ITSELF UP BY LIFTING OTHERS UP.”—Booker T. Washington

PRESENCE

Mansfield's Book of Manly Men (231-240)

• I have learned that when a man is a genuine man and tends his field with devotion and to the glory of God, he receives both authority and grace for that field. He has weight in that field, occupies it for the good of others. He stands within it and somehow permeates it at the same time. He has rank. His spirit covers it.
• I think this is a feature of righteous manhood.
• The power of John Wooden’s presence. He was a man committed to God. He had worked hard to overcome his background and his failures, and in time he had led many fierce competitors in epic athletic contests. You felt it. All of it. It radiated from him. There was a steely authority wrapped in a grandfather’s tenderness, and you didn’t know whether to hug him or come to attention
• He had come into the world in the Indiana of 1910. 
• Among a people devoted to basketball, young Wooden led his high school team to the state championship finals three years in a row. 
• He attended Purdue University, where he was a star player, the first to be named a three-time consensus All-American. 
• He played professionally after college before the navy called and he spent three years as a young officer during World War II.
• When he returned to Indiana, he coached basketball at Indiana State, accumulating championships and crafting a philosophy of achievement that began to remake the lives of many of his players. 
• Finally, in 1948, he became the head coach at the University of California, Los Angeles. 
• From that year until his retirement in 1975—a twenty-seven-year career—John Wooden won ten national championships. 
• He was awarded every honor possible for a college basketball coach. There has been no one like him since. 
• In the nine years after John Wooden retired, four men tried to fill his shoes. All failed. 
• Many called him the greatest coach in history. He died on June 4, 2010, four months and ten days shy of his one-hundredth birthday. His was a life well lived.
• This famous pro returned to UCLA after some years and spent time with his old mentor. When the player arrived, he announced to Coach that he felt it was more appropriate for him to call Coach by his first name.
• But it all became too much for the visiting player. He finally broke down and blurted out, “I can’t do it. I just can’t!” Can’t do what?” Wooden asked. "I just can’t call you by your first name. It just isn’t right! You are Coach. You always will be. Trying to call you John is just pride. I’m sorry.”
• Later, this player said, “You just feel this force coming from the man and the last thing it makes you want to do is be all chummy with him. You want to do what he tells you to do. You want to please him. You might even want to fall down and worship. What you don’t want to do is call him John.”
• John Wooden radiated something powerful, something that arose from his life, something that surrounded you, something that drew you in and made you better.
• He was a great man, a great spirit, and you felt it every moment you were in his presence.
• And that’s how it works. In your home. In your marriage. In your parenting. In your church and your community. Men stand. Men radiate. Men carry something holy and strong for the good of all they’ve been assigned.

HUMILITY

Mansfield's Book of Manly Men (211-220)

• Few men have modeled the deeds of humility quite like the man...Booker T. Washington.
• "To a very extraordinary degree, he combined the humility and dignity; and I think that the explanation of his extraordinary degree of success in a very difficult combination was due to the fact that at the bottom of his humility was really the outward expression, not of a servile attitude toward any man, but of the spiritual fact that in very truth he walked humbly with his God." ~ Theodore Roosevelt on Booker T. Washington
• He was born to a slave woman on a Virginia farm in 1856. A census taken a few years later listed him as “1 Negro Boy (Booker)–$400.” 
• It was there he became an employee of Viola Ruffner, a demanding New England schoolteacher who gave him his first lessons in responsibility. In later years, he attributed much of what he became to her influence.
• after teaching there for a season, moved to Alabama to open a newly chartered school with the name Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute.
• He believed character, cleanliness, industriousness, skill, godliness, and patience would mean advancement for black America.
• He believed unearned wealth would harm his race and leave them forever an underclass. He was certain that “habits of thrift, a love of work, economy, ownership of property, bank accounts” would lead to his people’s ascent. It was the message he preached to the nation and the guiding principle of his work at Tuskegee.
• At the heart of Booker T. Washington’s vision for blacks was confidence in the power of humility”
• Yet Mr. Washington also taught that doing humility is the path to being humble. Do humble deeds, he taught, and a humble heart will follow.
• Character is not out of our reach. It is not a lifelong battle to organize our emotions. Instead, it is a decision to act and to act consistently, knowing that emotions are usually a result and not a cause.
• How liberating this is. A man can say to his son as men can say to each other, “Go be humble,” and the words require no need to manage feelings. Just do what is right; do what is humble. God will see and work in you to see his will complete.
• I FIND MORE AND MORE THAT TRUE HUMILITY CONSISTS IN BEING SUBMISSIVE TO THOSE WHO ARE A LITTLE ABOVE OR A LITTLE BELOW US. OH, WHEN SHALL I COME TO REJOICE IN OTHERS’ GIFTS AND GRACES AS MUCH AS IN MY OWN!”—George Whitefield

VISION

This was Rudyard Kipling, and, though study of his life and writings has fallen out of fashion today, he was a manly man who knew what genuine manhood was and used his skill with words to define it for his generation.

“Yet this brilliant articulation of vital manhood came from the pen of a small, unathletic, bespectacled, bookish, bullied, insecure man whom friends expected would become almost anything other than the prophet of manhood for his time. ”

"I have known a certain amount of bullying, but this was calculated torture—religious as well as scientific. Yet it made me give attention to the lies I soon found it necessary to tell: and this, I presume, is the foundation of literary effort.”

“Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established. Also, badly-treated children have a clear notion of what they are likely to get if they betray the secrets of a prison-house before they are clear of it.”

Typical of men who are destined for influence and power, his failures and setbacks served him well.

He acquired a ruggedness of soul that began to reveal itself in his writing.

He continued to write at an astonishing pace, but it became too much for him and he suffered a nervous breakdown.

Marriage settled him and made him a more deliberate, more thoughtful writer.

He wrote enduring classics like The Jungle Book, Captains Courageous, Just So Stories, The Light That Failed, and Kim. His poetry, which dealt with themes of empire, heroism, and the conflict of cultures, included “Gunga Din,” “Recessional,” “The White Man’s Burden,” and, of course, the magnificent “If—.”

What Rudyard Kipling teaches us, among so much else, is that rugged, courageous manhood is not exclusively a matter of strength and speed, of physical skill and athletic prowess. It is first a condition of soul: a vision of what masculinity is and can be.

Knowing this frees us from a trite brand of manhood that is only about the life of the body and the physical world. Instead, it teaches us that genuine manhood grows from a man’s inner life. It is born of a sense of responsibility and oriented to virtues that have the power to distinguish the life of a man from every other kind of life on earth.

He was a small, bookish, bespectacled man whom no one thought of as physically masculine. Yet he proved to be one of the most masculine of men in the only way that is ultimately important: in the manliness of the vision that guided his life and set his message aflame.

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

FORGIVENESS

Mansfield's Book of Manly Men (175-186)

• Each March 17, parades, Celtic music, the wearing of green, and oceans of beer commemorate the memory of St. Patrick, the legendary apostle to Ireland.
• Patrick courageously strolled into violent pagan villages, befriended the chieftain, won both the man and the tribe with hospitality, served the needy, and by the end of his life had drawn most of Ireland to the  gospel of Jesus Christ. What a life!
• Patrick had no faith of his own by the time he was sixteen.
• Pagan raiders kidnapped him and took him north to the Irish realms.
• He spent the next six years as a captive and was made to tend herds on frigid pasturelands, ill fed and ill treated. 
• It was a season of great suffering, but it served to return him to the Christianity of his fathers.
• Before long deliverance came, though the journey was arduous and it took several years for Patrick to make his way home.
• Sometime later, Patrick began experiencing visions that turned his attention to the land where he had been a captive. 
• "I saw a man whose name was Victorious coming as if from Ireland with innumerable letters...and they were crying as if with one voice: 'We beg you, holy youth, that you shall come and shall walk again among us.'"
• What kind of man endures six years of cruel captivity and yet emerges with a new and vital faith? What kind of man returns to the land of his former captivity because he is touched by the needs of the people there? What kind of man converts warring pagan tribes with kindness, miracles, and beer? The answer is a holy man, an anointed and, a man who is chosen by God. Indeed, a true man, in the highest and grandest sense.
• For a man to become a great man, he will have to defeat the force of bitterness in his life. No one escapes it. There is enough offense and hardship in the world to assure that all of us will be wounded and betrayed, all of us will have opportunity to drink the sweet-tasting poison of bitterness against those who have wronged us. The art of surviving untainted is to learn the art of forgiveness.
• Men hold on to the wrongs done them, rehearse those wrongs, make excuses for failure out of those wrongs, and frequently poison their lives with the bitterness they keep circulating through their hearts and minds. 
• It makes them small, blaming, angry souls rather than the large-hearted beings they are called to be.
• So we forgive. We send away the wrongs done to us. We let people out of the little cages we keep them in while we enjoy our feelings of moral superiority. We hand the feelings of wrong to God and refuse to ever take them back. Then we shut up and never mention the matter again. When the time comes, we put our arm around the offender and we ask him how he is. 
• "To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you." - Frederick Buechner

SUFFERING

Mansfield's Book of Manly Men (187-196)

• We have all been done a great disservice. We have been taught what I call the statue version of history. By this I mean that we have been taught a version of history that presents the heroes of the past as moral giants who fell flawless from the womb, who achieved fame almost effortlessly. It hasn't served us well.
• The great heroes of the past you've grown to admire were all pitiful human beings whom we remember only because they declared war on some part of their pitifulness.
• God sets destinies in heaven, but those destinies have to hammered out on earth one arduous minute at a time. We strain. We bleed. We grieve. We have to conquer each step. No one gets a pass. No one moves to the head of the line, even if he gets a statue. Everyone is flawed.
• John Wesley was a great man...Yet his marriage was so bad that when a friend went to pick him up for a meeting, the man found Wesley's wife dragging the great preacher around the house by the hair...the woman pretty much despised her husband.
• Winston Churchill: He was a great man. One of the greatest. 
• And yet, he was in debt every day of his adult life. 
• His marriage was often troubled. 
• One of his children committed suicide. 
• He once made a decision that threw his entire country into economic turmoil. 
• He was, for a long period, the most hated political figure in his nation. 
• Even when he was the leader of that nation, he refused to spend the night in a room with a balcony...he suffered from horrible bouts of depression...feared that one day the darkness would come for him and he would try to jump to his death...
• Abraham Lincoln: His best friend said he dripped melancholy as he walked. 
• Another said he had the saddest face he ever saw.
• He once wrote "I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall every be better I cannot tell; I awfully forbade I shall not."
• He was haunted all his life by the thought of rain falling on graves
• He was chronically, manically depressed.
• Friends once had to "remove razors from his room - take away all knives and other such dangerous things - it was terrible."
• He even wrote a poem about suicide
• This is one of the great truths of life. Great men suffer greatly in order to be great. Heroic men must first endure heroic struggles with themselves. I've never read about a great man or woman of whom this was not true.
• The question we all face is not whether or not we have defects. We do. Every one of us. The question is whether we are capable of envisioning a life defined by forces greater than the weight of our flaws.
• Manly men know themselves, work to understand their God-ordained uniqueness and their unique brand of damage, and accept they will always be a work in progress, always be a one-man construction project that is never quite finished in this life. They don't despair. They don't settle. They don't expect perfection of themselves. They understand that destiny is in the hand of God. They also understand that these destinies are fashioned in a man's struggle against the enemies of his soul.
• "I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot...and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that's precisely why I succeed." - Michael Jordan