I have always loved to read. In 6th grade there was a contest at school for reading and you got “book bucks” for every hundred pages you read. The bucks could then get traded in for prizes. I think I read something like 10,000 pages during the time of the contest. I can still vividly remember dropping all my book bucks on a new basketball in the cafeteria at Glenwood Elementary School in Enid, OK. I still love to read to this day and most mornings begin with reading both my Bible and, typically, a theology or church planting book.

I hope that Malachi and potentially PB and/or J also love to read and I’m excited to share with them some great books from my childhood. The sad truth of 2010, however, is that many boys don’t read and if they do it’s mostly “gross-out” books. Instead of reading, the Internet and video games consume their time. An opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today talks about this trend. There were some very interesting statements in the article, one of which I want to highlight. The author, Thomas Spence, writes

If you keep meeting a boy where he is, he doesn’t go very far.

At face value, it’s a very true statement. I also think it’s deeper than just boys and reading. I think it’s also applicable to men and leading. Men are called to lead their homes and their families. The continual effort of the church to make herself “accessible” to men often lowers the playing field to motorcross jumps during worship and references to ultimate fighting. Instead, we should call men to more. We should call them to love their wives sacrificially, to teach and train their children patiently, and to worship God fully. We should have high expectations of our men because they are each modeled after the True Man, Jesus Christ, who lived a perfectly human, yet sinless, life. Call men to big things, like being “fishers of men”, and they will respond and in the process God is glorified and His kingdom is furthered.