I have a four year old Grandson, named Jake. He is sandwiched between two sisters and has a mom (my daughter juggling life as a single mom). To top it off his day care the last I heard he is one boy among 26 girls. A few months ago they came to our house for a Saturday visit, and Jake looked up at me with those blue eyes and said
“Grandpa when can we do a manday?”
I said “What’s a Manday Jake?”
“It’s where we go and do boy stuff with no girls around”.
Well how can a grandpa resist that? A few days later he was strapped into his car seat in the passenger side of my pickup truck (our man vehicle) and on our way to our first ever “Manday”
We sat on lawn tractors at Home Depot…
and held hammers and screwdrivers and circular saws and wandered the lumber aisle at Lowe’s
We compared the weight of different bricks and building blocks in the garden department (he’s a strong four year old!)
Then we stopped by for a beer, er a frosty at Wendy’s and had a great chat about life from a four year old’s perspective.
And on the way home we stopped at Fresh Market to buy a bouquet of flowers for the woman we both adore, his grandmother. To watch that little guy strut through Fresh Market holding a bouquet of roses was a thrill to my heart.
As we drove home, a grin on both of our faces, we talked about the fact that being a man is doing manly things, but also we love life, we love God and we love and respect the women in our lives to which he said, “and buy them flowers”.
So many of us middle aged, Second Act Men have a gaping hole in our lives because we never had mandays, where a dad or other significant man intentionally spent time with us to challenge and teach us how a man should live. And so as we enter the second act of our lives, we have not a clue on how to be intentional about having Mandays with the younger generation.
so to those men who are reading this, who had an impact on you and why? And how can you reproduce that experience in the lives of sons, grandsons, local kids or young men you come in contact with? Our generation is in desperate need of intentional mandays, to reaffirm who we are and what we have to do. And the generations coming up behind us need encouragement, challenge and mentors. Mentors who pour their lives and wisdom into them.
Now that can and will change a generation.
If interested we have planned two major mandays at Adventures In Mission. A weekend manhike for Second Act Men in the mountains of north Georgia. April 15-17
and a construction trip for men to Swaziland, South Africa May 21-28, drop me a note if interested in either of these.
have a great manday today!
