Men, what if you were a man who was confident, secure, intentional, and on mission, not just drifting through life? A man who is trained, prepared, and knows what to do when something is put before him; a man who doesn’t lock up and freeze up and resort to inaction. A man who knows how to love, provide, protect, sacrifice, and do whatever needs to be done so that those entrusted to him thrive and flourish under his leadership, care, encouragement, and protection.

There are two deals on the table, and because being a man like that seems really hard, really tough, really difficult, what we often do is we pick up this deal where we say, “I’ll just change what it means to be a man. I’ll just redefine it.” We dumb it down and blame everyone else for why we can’t step into our strength. "It’s my dad’s fault. It’s my mom’s fault. It’s society’s fault. It’s my ex’s fault. It’s my past’s fault.” We have all kinds of people and things to blame as to why we can’t be that definition of a man and then we become passive and we let someone else tell us what it means to be a man, someone else tells us how to run our life, someone else tells us how to raise our kids. We just abdicate responsibility.

But what if we take a breath, and say, “Ok. I’m going to go for it. I’m going to engage instead of lie down. I’m going to rise up instead of stay seated. I’m going to go on this journey to redefine what it means to be a man based on the Operator’s Manual which is God’s Word, because when men start moving closer to who and what God designed us to be and is still calling us to be now, everyone wins. Women, children, men, everyone wins, and this is what it means to cross The Thin Red Line.