Morley - Are You a Man Alive?

B ECOMING A M AN A LIVE
P UBLISHED BY M ULTNOMAH B OOKS
12265 Oracle Boulevard, Suite 200
Colorado Springs, Colorado 80921

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004, 2007. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked ( NIV ) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com.

Details in some anecdotes and stories have been changed to protect the identities of the persons involved. Portions of this booklet have been adapted from Man Alive, copyright 2012 by Patrick Morley, published by Multnomah Books.

eISBN: 978-1-60142-420-4

Copyright 2012 by Patrick Morley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published in the United States by WaterBrook Multnomah, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc., New York.

M ULTNOMAH and its mountain colophon are registered trademarks of Random House Inc.

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O ver the last four decades Ive met one-on-one with thousands of men. Most of them know that Jesus promised a rich and satisfying life (John 10:10). But almost to a man they are confused about what that looks like.

In fact, Id estimate that 90 percent of men lead lukewarm, stagnant, often defeated livesand they hate it. Their instincts are screaming, There must be more!

When men try to put into words what keeps them from feeling fully alive, whats holding them back, they invariably describe one or more of these seven symptoms:

I feel like I am in this thing alone.

I dont feel like God cares about me personallynot really.

I dont feel like my life has a purpose. In fact, it seems random.

I have a lot of destructive behaviors that keep dragging me down.

My soul feels dry.

My most important relationships are not working.

I dont feel like Im doing anything that will make a difference and leave the world a better place.

There must be more!

Do you feel the angst in these confessions?

In my experience, these inner aches and pains correspond to seven primal God-given needs that all men feel deeply. By primal, I mean that as men we have a raw, restless energy that is different from women. It needs to be channeled, chiseled, transformed.

In my book Man Alive, I show men how God has provided the means to harness this energy for each of these seven instinctive needs, letting it propel them away from mediocrity.

You can feel like Gods much-loved son.

In this booklet, I want to share one chapter adapted from Man Alive that is very special to me. You see, Ive spent most of my life struggling to believe, really believe, that God loves and cares about me personally. Not as one among many. But me, Pat Morley.

And in all those one-on-one meetings, I discovered that I was not alone. Does God really care about me? That is the question. Most men are not so sure.

By Gods grace, not only do I believe today that God loves me, but I actually feel like His much-loved son. Special. Fully alive.

You can too. Let me show you how you can satisfy this primal need. No man should have to settle for being half alive.

D uring the summer after tenth grade, I had a terrible argument with my father and ran away from home. I rented an upstairs room in a house near downtown Orlando that had been converted into several rental units, three of which were upstairs. Those three rooms shared a single bathroom, a sink, and a stove in the hall.

I found a job scraping dried cement off metal scaffolds, then dipping the frames in a tub of chrome-colored paint to prepare them for rental. I worked outdoors under a scorching sun that bounced all those ultraviolet rays off the chrome paint. Even my eyeballs got sunburned!

The next two weeks were an adventure. I ate grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner every night at the bowling alley across the street. I hitchhiked wherever I went. Frankly, Im not sure what I had in mindI certainly didnt have a plan.

By the end of two weeks, though, I was getting bored and restless. That Friday night a friend came over and brought two six-packs of beer. We proceeded to drink our way through them, and then he threw up on my rug.

The next morning, head throbbing, beer cans strewn all over, I ached to go home. But I didnt know what to do. As far as I was concerned, I had severed all ties. I figured once you left home, that was ityou could never go back.

Later that same morning I heard a knock on the door. When I opened it, there was my dad. I still have no idea how he found me. Hesitantly I invited him in. He stepped inside, looked around at the mess, and didnt appear to judge a thing. Then he looked at me. Son, he said, your mother and I just wanted you to know how much we love you. We were wondering if youd be willing to come back home.

Well, he had barely finished speaking before I had everything I owned in a paper bag and we were out of there. All my grievances with him had melted away.

All I ever really wanted was to believe that God loves and cares about me.

Today, I realize that I ran away because I didnt think my dad really cared about me. So I had started acting out. I was hanging out with the wrong crowd, doing all the wrong-crowd things. My dad tried to help, but we fought.

Of course, now that Ive been a parent, I realize that when a father really loves his son, he must sometimes withhold what his son wants or make him do some things he doesnt want to do.

Heres why Im telling you my story: because I had such a hard time believing that my dad really cared about me, it deeply affected how I thought about God. Ive spent most of my adult life trying to accept the idea that my heavenly Father cares about me. When I boil everything down, I can see that all I ever really wanted was to believereally believethat God loves and cares about me. Not just in some theological sense either, but deeply and personally.

God loves Patrick Morley.

Pat, I love you.

By Gods grace, I do know that now. But I must confess that it has taken decades. And to be completely honest, every once in a while I still wonder,