Chiseled: A Young Man's Guide to Shaping Character, True Toughness and a Life That Matters

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INTRODUCTION

SOME THOUGHTS TO START WITH ON BECOMING CHISELED

This book is called Chiseled. What does that mean? Chiseled is a process as much as a result. God chisels a person—He shapes and molds that person—to maturity. When you’re chiseled, the things that are flabby or immature or unneeded in your life are chipped away, and what is left is honed until you’re the man God made you to be.

The chiseling process is ultimately God’s responsibility. But it’s something you have a hand in as well. No one will force you to become mature. It’s something only you can decide that you want.

Deciding to become mature is in your best interest. When you’re mature, you can handle whatever life throws at you. You’ve got the inside knowledge and resolve to know how to really live. When the punches of life come your way, you won’t break, crumble or shake apart. There’s a great verse that puts maturity into perspective:

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me (1 Cor. 13:11, emphasis added).

Putting immature ways behind you is what this book is all about. The older you get, the more you don’t want to be naïve or goofy—someone who’s gullible, foolish or easily influenced. You want to develop a wise, skillful approach to living. That’s true toughness; that’s what it means to be mature.

To be clear, this book is not a call to act older than you are right now. If you’re 18, be 18. Ifyou’re 25, be 25. There are things you can do at 18 or 25 that you can never do the rest of your life.

When I (Shaun) took my first youth pastorate at age 24, I fell into the trap of thinking that age and maturity were the same thing. I thought I had to be mature all the time—and in my mind, that meant looking the part. So I tossed aside my jeans and T-shirts and wore Dockers pants, penny loafers and a polo shirt, and I parted my hair to the side—it looked like I had just walked off the PGA tour. One day, I went to one of the local high schools for lunch. The kids wondered who this nerd was who had wandered on campus to sell them insurance.

When I came home, I told my wife that I’d never do that again. I’d never be what I wasn’t—mistakenly thinking that it was the mature thing to do. Over the years, I’ve learned to dress appropriately for whatever context I’m in. Maturity is most strongly shown when you’re true to who you are yet you still know your surroundings. Today, as a pastor to students, I still wear my T-shirts and jeans when I hang out at high schools, but I save my Dockers and polo shirts for business meetings. So being chiseled is not about being older than you are now. Rather, being chiseled means that you step forward in maturity.

In this book, we’re going to talk a lot about the codes of maturity. Why codes? Think of a code as a system to live by, a series of decisions you make that allows your freedom. Maturity is something you develop. It’s not automatically handed to you once you reach a certain age. That’s why it’s important to develop your codes.

Sometimes when people hear the word code, they think it means a rule. Like, when you become mature you have to buckle down and not have fun anymore and walk around with a constipated expression on your face. But God is not a white-bearded Gandalf who busts your shaft and creates indiscriminate rules to make you miserable. He sets guidelines for your life that actually help you live in freedom.

It’s sort of like this: A while back, I (Shaun) wanted to learn how to barefoot water-ski. So both my wife and I took lessons. A friend of ours, who’s the veritable Tiger Woods of barefoot waterskiing, agreed to show us how. The thing with barefoot skiing is that the boat hurtles along at a ridiculous rate of speed. If you just get up there without knowing what you’re doing and you fall, you’ll really tank. So our friend gave us one caveat: We had to train first. Before he took us out on the lake, he showed us the ropes: We had to learn how to fall correctly, how to sit in the water with our knees in the air and lean back and put our foot on the rope correctly—so many things. It took several weekends of training on land, then several more of working with a barefoot boom. Training stretched to nearly two months. I kept thinking, Dude, when are we going to get behind the boat?!

Finally the day came when my friend said that we were ready. We put on our wetsuits and got behind the boat. All that training paid off. We found that we could zip out of the water without the boom and spin around in our wetsuits and cross the wake, and everything.

That’s developing a code. When you know the guidelines of how something works, and then apply those guidelines to your life, you’re really free.

Think of it this way: Only when you know the code for barefoot skiing can you stay on top of the water and not bust your head wide open.

Only when you know the code for football—when you learn how to throw a spiral and correctly block, tackle and punt—can you survive and truly play the game.

Only when you know the code for learning how to drive—when you stay on one side of the road, stop at red lights and start when a light is green—can you get where you need to go.

When you know and respect the codes for being a man, you have the principles that guide you into the life you were meant to lead. You can take all the punches that life throws at you.

That’s maturity.

In the pages to come, we want to examine what it means to develop the codes for true male toughness, both conceptually and practically. By develop, we mean that we first need to know what the truths of timeless instruction say; then we need to apply those truths to our lives. What’s important is how we shape our lives based on what we know.

With this in mind, each chapter is broken into the following sections:

• Chiseled Training: This is where we examine the truths of timeless instruction as found in the Bible. It’s like we’re still on the beach, and Tiger Woods is still showing us the barefoot boom.

• Getting Punched: This is where we look at values, beliefs, behaviors and attitudes that can harm us. This is where Tiger points out that if we’re behind a boat at 55 MPH,and we wipe out, it’s really going to hurt.

• True Toughness: This is where we see what it means to develop a wise, skillful approach to living. Tiger shows us how to point our feet correctly, how to hang on to the rope and how to eye the wake as it races toward us.

• Developing Your Code: This is where we put it all together—or actually, where you put it together for yourself. Nobody forces anything down your throat. It’s up to you to take what you know and apply it to your life. Sometimes this reflection stage can be done alone. Sometimes it can be done in community with others. This is where Tiger hands you the rope and you decide whether or not you want to start skiing. It’s up to you.

A couple of other comments about this book: First, this is not meant to be a comprehensive treatment of each subject we talk about. We’re not going to tell you everything (we couldn’t, even if we wanted to). Instead, we want to get you thinking and talking, hopefully with a group of trusted friends, then let you figure stuff out for yourself. We hope the material here opens up a series of good discussions in your life.

Also, some of the stories and illustrations we use are from our lives when we were in high school and college—and some are from our lives today. We’ve purposely included illustrations from a variety of life stages both to identify with you and to invite you into the next stage of life. Sometimes we tell stories about the stuff we’ve figured out. Sometimes the stories are about what went wrong.

We invite you to turn the page and begin a journey with us as we explore what it means to develop the codes for true toughness. No doubt the punches of young male adulthood are already landing fast in your life. Our hope is that we will develop chins of steel together.

Shaun Blakeney, Palm Beach Gardens, FL

Marcus Brotherton, Bellingham, WA

1

FACEDOWN

TRUE TOUGHNESS STARTS HERE

When I (Shaun) was a kid, I had this picture in my mind that to be a man you had to be rugged, and that meant you had to camp. Trouble was, my family never went camping. Our idea of roughing it was to check ourselves into a motel without a pool. A friend of mine had a dad who loved to camp; so one weekend, I journeyed with them into the great outdoors.

Camping was cool. You pitched your tent and split your wood and cooked over an open fire raw animals you had caught yourself. But at the end of that weekend, I was pretty much the same as I’d always been. I thought I would come back with bigger muscles, maybe even a mustache—things I was positive that all men possessed. But none of that happened. Camping didn’t provide the magic ticket into maturity that I was looking for.

That’s the challenge in front of us all. We know that we need to transition from guys into men, but we’re not sure how. It’s easy to wrongly aim for maturity by thinking that you can get there simply by going camping.

Or maybe it’s hunting or playing football or eating chicken wings—all of the other activities we associate with manliness. Or maybe we define male maturity by the TV images we hold in our heads. We think that real men fight and scrap and swear, and drop funny one-liners and shoot rifles. In the end, they’ve gutted the villain or drilled a dodgeball at the jerk’s private parts. But that’s not it either.

It can be confusing, even when we hang out with older guys in a spiritual environment. Say you attend a men’s function at church. You wonder if the type of behavior you see is what you want to be like when you get older. A type of forced bravado can sometimes surface—a shallow enthusiasm for how the group thinks real men are supposed to act. Conversations fall into flannel-shirted vernacular. You’ve got to know something about pistons, rainbow trout and tee times to fit in. You wonder why the barbecue receives the amount of reverence it does. As one younger guy at church recently asked me (Shaun), I want to become a man, but I don’t like fishing—what am I supposed to do?

There’s nothing wrong with fishing. The point is that older guys sometimes don’t have it figured out either. The transition from guy to man can often be muddied. And becoming a man has little to do with the age you’ve reached. Even if you’re 25 or 45 or 65, you can still have questions about what it means to become mature. Some guys never figure it out, no matter how old they get. They go through their entire lives acting immature. Becoming a man is not guaranteed—it’s possible to be immature your whole life. Now that’s a scary thought.

So why is the path to maturity so muddied?

Part of it is this: Sorry to say, but there’s no magic line in the sand that signifies when you officially become a man. In Jewish culture they hold a ceremony called a Bar Mitzvah shortly after a guy turns 13. On this date, a guy is said to become responsible for his actions—socially, spiritually and legally. In other words, he’s declared a man. (Even then there’s a good chance that he’s got quite a way to go.)

In Western culture, there is no one moment that signifies when you’ve become a man. All you have are points of reference along the way. For instance, you might get your driver’s license at 16; you vote at 18; you can buy booze at 21; you rent a car at 25. In pop culture it’s the joke that you become a man when you lose your virginity. But none of these milestones sets the deciding stamp on real male maturity.

So how do you begin on the track to maturity? How do you put immature ways behind you and develop a wise and skillful approach to living?

Strangely enough, there’s one place we all need to start.

That place is facedown.

CHISELED TRAINING

The Wisest Man in the World

Facedown means that you bow your heart to God and let Him work in your life. All maturity begins here.

To be clear, the goal in becoming mature is not that anyone would simply act wiser. It’s not that you need to buckle down, shape up, shine up your life, or grit your teeth and try harder. Jesus scorned people who were only interested in changing behavior without changing the core of their being.

Instead, true maturity is an issue of a changed heart—of changing inner motivations, tendencies and leanings. Maturity is about becoming wiser from the inside out. And that only happens when we’re facedown before God.

Think of the difference between behavior and heart like this: When you were a kid and you scrapped with your brother or a friend who came over to play, chances are your mother stopped the fight by making you apologize to each other. You didn’t want to apologize, but Mom made you. Grudgingly, you both grunted out, Sorry. Your behavior changed—you weren’t whaling on each other anymore. But your hearts stayed the same—you still wanted to knock each other’s heads off.

When it comes to maturity, changed behavior is not what’s really important. Getting to the heart of the matter is the challenge. That’s where real maturity begins. What’s important is a changed heart.

A changed heart is ultimately God’s business. Still, God invites us to participate in the process. God provides this crazy envelope of existence called grace. We don’t do anything to get grace; it’s just given to us when we ask. And God’s grace is what changes us. Yet, paradoxically, God invites us along on the journey. God respects us so much that He allows us to have a hand in how we change.

Think of it this way: Developing maturity at a heart level depends on two things:

1. The power of God in our life

2. The choices we make, which demonstrate our willingness to let God’s power change us

If we want to become mature, we don’t just sit back and do nothing. Living by the power of God means that we ask for God’s help in the process. We rely on Him to work in us—and He ultimately changes us. But we don’t ignore our responsibility. We trust that He will help us live as we’re meant to live. And we take steps in that direction.

It doesn’t really matter what place your spiritual life is at right now. You don’t have to be Joe Christian to begin the process. God welcomes anybody, whatever place he is at, to journey with Him. What’s important is your willingness. You have to be willing to step further.

It is with this overarching view of grace and responsibility that a man named King Solomon set down the foundations of all that we want to talk about in this book. King Solomon