S TU DY G U I D E BECOMING A KING
And more (ask the Holy Spirit to bring to your mind and heart the categories that deserve consideration)
In chapter five of Becoming a King, I share about one of my heroes, Walt Harrington. His classic, The Everlasting Stream, is to me one of the supreme books on masculinity. Walt was born the son of a working-class milkman. He climbed the ranks of society, became an elite journalist for the Washington Post, and spent time with the world’s most powerful and influential people. Yet listen to Walt describe how he viewed his professional accomplishments from his father’s perspective, and what Walt himself longed for as he entered fatherhood: It took my father time to feel proud that I was a journalist. I mean, I didn’t even know how to replace my own car muffler. When I came to own a house, I wasted money on plumbers to fix leaky faucets and electricians to repair broken light switches. I hired a nursery to lay down the landscaping and a gardener to trim and tidy it all up twice a year. Even if he could have afforded it, my father would never have ceded so much mastery of his world over to hired hands. But I had done what young men in America are supposed to do. I had risen in society. I had eaten dinner with the President of the United States. Funny, but despite all my social ascents, my simple and deepest hope came to be that I could teach [my son] some of what my father had taught me about being a man.*
The phrase that catches my heart most deeply is this: “Even if he could have afforded it, my father would never have ceded so much mastery of his world over to hired hands.” Take an honest inventory of all the things in your domain you have ceded over to “hired hands.” Some areas may be necessary and wise to cede to hired hands for one reason or season, but very likely not all areas are, and not at all times. Remember, there is a deep distinction in the masculine soul between hiring out work based on wise discernment and hiring out work due * Walt Harrington, The Everlasting Stream (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 145-6.
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