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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Lovell
Read between
October 30 - November 9, 2023
To be a good man, you must become a paradox: strong but self-controlled, violent but gentle, ready to go to war one minute and prepared to give piggyback rides the next. This kind of man is fierce in word and deed while remaining compassionate and humble. He is fully soldier, fully lover, whole man.
G. K. Chesterton wrote, “A true warrior fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” Good men do not fight because they love to kill; they fight because they have something worth protecting. A soldier will lay down his life for the cause of freedom, if he believes in it, so that others can choose the kind of life they want.
“We just don’t know how to handle ourselves and take care of the things that need to be taken care of,” he continued. “I’ve seen grown men crumble at the slightest sign of adversity because they don’t place themselves under any sort of voluntary hardship. The more you can place yourself in that voluntary hardship, the more you inoculate yourself against the crises that will eventually inevitably come up.”
Most men are uneasy with the seeming ease of everyday life. They’re bored. So they retreat into video games and sexual addictions and one too many glasses of whiskey at the end of the day—anything to numb the pain of not living up to their potential.
The great British philosopher and Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton was once asked, “What’s wrong with the world?” and his response was, “I am.” He understood that at the core of everything is a pull toward the self. I believe the root of all evil is pride. C. S. Lewis calls pride the very center of Christian immorality. It is easy to be self-centered, and it is quite difficult to care more for others.
As I’ve mentioned, reading the Bible is a daily discipline critical to my spiritual growth. Prayer is also a daily discipline of mine. The goal isn’t to just pray before meals with the family but to “pray without ceasing,” as the apostle Paul admonishes the Thessalonians in the New Testament. It’s a difficult endeavor to be constantly praying in the back of your head as you go through the day, but that’s the call—and it pays massive dividends. Prayer is important to me, because I believe it not only moves God but it also moves me. Prayer helps to shape and replenish me in the most important of
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Millennials have some solid qualities, but, oh man, do we harbor some terrible flaws. Philosophically, we seem to be largely oblivious. Unless you were homeschooled, you probably never had a logic or rhetoric class or anything to do with philosophy until midway through college—which is way too late of a start, in my opinion.
All men, in my experience, long for purpose. We need to believe there is a point to our suffering and a reason for otherwise inexplicable pain. We want something to love and hope it loves us back, to know that we aren’t alone in this world. This is something the existentialists rightly caught on to that the rationalists and empiricists failed to fully appreciate.
The Enlightenment thinkers pushed God out of the center of wisdom and inserted reason in His place, but the substitute did not satisfy the hearts of men.
My purpose is to love and serve Jesus Christ with every ounce of my being. From this source comes a love for people, a motive for protecting them, as well as a deep and fulfilling worldview, not to mention the ground rules for all relationships. The warrior needs more than war to live a happy life. So I ask: What are you living for? What will you fight for? Are you ever concerned that even as you fight, you could lose the reason you do it all? What then? We need a purpose, and that purpose must be bigger than ourselves or the love of our lives. The warrior is helped by a muse in their journey
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What love needs to grow, more than incredibly romantic gestures or grand displays of courage, is commitment. Plain and simple. Keep pursuing your muse, that woman who captured your heart in a single moment and refused to let go. You must never stop the chase, even when it looks like you’ve gotten what you sought. Commit to a lifetime pursuit of her, and she will always take you deeper than you could go on your own.
When you treat your wife the way you treat the guys, you lose her. Contrary to the current messaging of our backward culture, a woman is different from a man. She needs you to be the warrior on the battlefield of life and a poet in the home. Learning to strike this balance is difficult but, again, worth it.
You’re bored, not exhausted; apathetic, not overwhelmed. You’ve got to get your ambition back. Otherwise, the slightest problem or mishap is going to derail you. Part of learning to dance is building up the muscles to take those basic steps.
Consider that your boss will always want a little more tomorrow based on what you can deliver today. That’s just the nature of work. But you can easily dig yourself an early grave if you don’t know your limits. Be careful here; many men give too much to work and deprive the rest of their lives as a result.
I know of no other way to live a long and healthy life than to make sure that you know your limits, set healthy boundaries, and decide to be content with how the chips fall. If you’re living only to please those making their demands on you, you’re going to end up feeling exhausted, frustrated, and defeated. If you’re reading this book (and you are), then you likely care about being better today than you were yesterday. You want to grow. That’s good! Keep going.
Everywhere we look, we see false heroes: people who have achieved greatness at the cost of their own goodness. Your fate is sealed the moment you set foot on their course. A hero, however, is one whose example awakens your soul. These are the people who drive you to something greater than yourself, something more than just power, wealth, and fame. Truth. Justice. Beauty. These are what catch a soul on fire.
A man needs a mission that goes beyond himself and his ambitions, if he wants to be good. Without something to anchor us, over time, we end up reliving our old glory days, replaying scenes from a more intense season of life.
Trauma is a real thing and ought to be dealt with. Depending on its level of severity, you will want to seek professional help, but there is only so much you can clean up by focusing on the past. Every man who is living for something greater than himself is oriented toward the future. We all need something to look forward to.
After destroying your naive and incorrect priority list, write out your priorities as they really are. Get real about how you’re actually spending time, then contrast it with how you’d like to spend it. Then, make the necessary adjustments to right the ship. It’s humbling, but it’s worth it.
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” That artificially boosted self-esteem we give kids will likely morph into a self-centered narcissism, so we must be careful.
Children, I think, would be healthier if they were allowed to struggle a little more. If we let them learn to fail and get back up again, they’d be stronger and more resilient than if we continue to insulate them from hardship and keep handing out participation trophies.
This was not talent that scored that goal; it was grit. And I was proud. Sadly, many boys never learn this; they never acquire such drive from their dads. Instead they’re scooped up by a nurturing mother who means well but isn’t equipped to prepare them for a harsh world. We need mothers to keep our boys alive, and we need fathers to make them hard to kill. Because a boy who is coddled does not grow up to be a good, strong man. He doesn’t know how to be a warrior, because no one ever showed him.
Moms are great at solving all kinds of problems for their kids, but fathers think differently and have an essential perspective that kids need. My dad solved my angry tantrum problem in minutes while my mom couldn’t solve it in years. And to be fair to my mom, she was far more present in my childhood than my dad, who was constantly at work, but he would insert himself at pivotal times like those. And that matters.
There are some things men know better, and if Mom always gets her way, she’s going to unintentionally turn a boy into a weak, entitled, little brat. It is through the mother’s impulse to nurture the children and the father’s instinct to make them strong that a child will grow up best. Parenting, at its best, consists of both a man and a woman bringing their strengths together for the benefit of the child.
The best way to become tyranny-proof is to need very little from your fellow man. Our greatest defense against injustice is to be as free as we possibly can. Just like America’s Founding Fathers intended, we must be willing to speak up against all kinds of hostile forces and be prepared to defend ourselves and our ideals from those who might try to take them away.
