We aren't meant to figure life out on our own. God wants to father us. The truth is, he has been fathering us for a long time — we just haven't had the eyes to see it. He wants to father us much more intimately, but we have to be in a posture to receive it. What that involves is a new way of seeing, a fundamental reorientation of how we look at life, and our situation in it. 

First, we allow that we are unfinished men, partial men, mostly boy inside, and we need initiation. In many, many ways.

Second, we turn from our independence and all the ways we either charge at life or shrink from it; this may be one of the most basic and the most crucial ways a man repents. I say "repent" because our approach to life is based on the conviction that God, for the most part, doesn't show up much. I understand where the conviction came from, battle it constantly myself, but still — it's faithless, is it not? We must be willing to take an enormous risk, and open our hearts to the possibility that God is initiating us as men — maybe even in the very things in which we thought he'd abandoned us. We open ourselves up to being fathered.

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