I was eighteen years old when I was first told I wasn’t a man. For an eighteen year old, it was more than I could bare. I remember sitting next to a beautiful redhead who held my complete attention. She was the kind of girl that led you on every word. But on a Sunday night after church, she leaned in next to me and said, “You know, you’re not really a man.” My heart broke and my spirit sank; my body floundered in my seat. I was humiliated. I looked all around to see if any one was listening—because at eighteen, you don’t want anyone to ease drop on that. She continued to tell me that I’m getting manhood all-wrong, and that I need to grow up. And so, with a violent denial of man hood I began my search of what it means to be a man.
I’d like to think that I’ve learned something since then. But who really knows. I’d like to think that since then I have grown up into something that at the very least resembles what a man—but who really knows what a man is. And since that blazing redhead told me I wasn’t good enough I have been searching. I’ve been searching for some definitive answer to that question, some reason why she would tell me I wasn’t good enough.
    I don’t want to be just a man; I want to be a human. Everyone dreams to be respected and trusted, compassionate and merciful. Some how we seem to have lost our ability to see what it means to become a human. To often we are defined ourselves by our ability to succeed and gain more—if only I had just a little more I’ll be happy, we say, but deep down we know that that won’t be enough. Are lives are filled with wanting more, but we become lodged in fixation of want and neither getting fulfillment nor satisfaction. We have lost our ability to dream beyond what the world offers us. In his book Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard wrote that the greatest gift God gave Abraham was not Isaac but his ability to dream, his ability to be young. God gave Abraham the very thing that life had denied him—fatherhood. But in the midst of such turmoil God had another plan. God promised Abraham a child; he promised the greatest gift of all, sitting with your flesh and blood knowing that the best is yet to come. God offers us to dream, to be young, to live.
    I suppose then that the process of becoming a human is the process of allowing God to give us the ability to dream. To allow God to change our worldview and the way life is into the way life is supposed to be. In the story of Abraham, it was Sarah who laughed at the notion of having a child—after all, it was Sarah who actually had to give birth. But as she laughed, God said “Is anything to hard for me for me to?” Sarah fell silent. Many times we limit God’s ability to do the impossible, but when we relinquish ourselves, God does just that. Part of becoming human is our ability to dream, to be able to know that there is something more than this world. Hope, says N.T. Wright, is when our worldview changes and we know that what we see—violence, greed, corruption and malice—do not rule the world. As I am becoming more of a human, as God is giving me the ability to dream, I am seeing the world not as a evil place but as a place waiting in anticipation.
    This scares me. In fact, it terrifies me. Because I know that when there is a response to a call. When Jesus says, to love everybody he actually wants us to do it. He offers us the ability to be the change, to live as though another world exists. Its so easy to be evil, but so hard to be good. One author writes that following Jesus is simple but not easy. A few months ago, I decided to pray for the people that don’t like me—it was the hardest thing I ever did. As I prayed I began to have an internal conflict: it isn’t normal to pray for these people, said one side of me; this is how its supposed to be, said the other side. Jesus offers us another way to live, another way to be human. That redhead may have been on to something—the people we love the most always know where we fall short. I fall short, that much is true, but I know that my attempts to be human remain in my ability to dream and hope that another way is possible.

Daniel