Living Beyond the Crisis of the Week

So on Tuesday night, I gathered a handful of guys together to talk about what a guys group might look like. As I was thinking more about how to cast vision for the group, I thought about my impression of what most men's groups are about.

Most men's groups seem to spend most of their time talking about issues on the micro level: my marriage/dating relationship this week, my struggles with porn this week, my complaint about work/school/my fantasy football team this week.

This is all well and good. And particularly for college guys, I think this kind of honesty and accountability is crucial to healthy development of a fuller understanding of authentic community.

But the guys that were meeting on Tuesday night were all 29-37, all married, most of us with young kids. In our stage of life there's more that we can and need to deal with than just the micro-issue/crisis of this week.

We're at a point in our lives where we have enough life experience and understanding of ourselves and our marriages and our work and our kids that we need to start thinking on the macro level.

What kind of family culture do we want to create? What kind of relationships do we want to have with our kids when they get to be adults? What kind of marriages do we want to have 15 years from now when the last kid goes off to college? What passions and gifts have we uncovered in our work? How might those passions and gifts be better used and enjoyed?

No one is pressing us to ask these questions. They are the important but not urgent questions that easily get crushed by the crisis-of-the-week that often drives our lives.

But living by the crisis of the week is a terrible way to live. It's too small, too narrow. And we wake up at some point ten years later, twenty years later, and realize that we spent our whole lives just surviving and never really living.

And a men's group that simply helped us through the crisis of the week would be nice but not particularly compelling. If we have no vision for where we want to go, how do we know if our lives week to week are in or out of alignment?

Checking in on the micro of each week without a big picture of where I hope to go is like making sure I'm following the rules of the road without any of us having any clue where I'm going. Does that make any sense?

A micro-level weekly check in to make sure that I'm still on the treadmill isn't getting me anywhere. Spending dedicated time kicking around life goals and dreams and having some men help me take weekly, monthly, yearly steps to get there--that's worth meeting once a week for.

The guys were in. So now we've just gotta' do the easy stuff--you know, set a few whole life goals, gather up our entire lives in a couple quick and pithy vision statements. We should be able to knock that out in just a couple hours. I'll let you know what we decide to tackle after that.