This is Pastor Tim’s article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, July 18
One of the previous communities I served in had a volunteer fire department, and for a few years I was a volunteer firefighter there. Man, I loved being on the fire department. They gave me a turnout suit, heavy boots, and a cool hardhat, and we got to go out and break things. I was really good at it.
However, I was not formally trained like the firefighters we have here in St Marys. I took a training course and my biggest takeaway was “don’t make your fellow firefighters have to rescue you.” Essentially, it boiled down to “don’t get yourself killed.”
We fought some enormous fires during my time there. We fought one fire at a huge chicken farm where the only way we could get the fire to stop spreading was to bring in an end loader and knock part of the building down. There was another fire in a grain elevator where two men were killed. I was the first one to find the two bodies, and I still occasionally have nightmares about that. Another time, we used the Jaws of Life to extract a woman from a car. As we were carrying her on the stretcher to the helicopter, she woke up and grabbed my arm and screamed “Pastor Tim, pray for me!” over and over the whole way to the helicopter. She was terrified. Another fire we were on, it was so cold that the water we were using to fight the fire froze my turnout suit. Even with the fire, I had to thaw out before I could get to the buckles and zippers to take it off. During that fire, the equipment froze, causing a water spill because we couldn’t get the valve to close. That made an ice slick the size of a football field right down the main street in town. The mayor was very displeased. It took a week for it to melt. There was another time that we were learning how to shoot the deck gun on the fire truck. We did not realize you had to roll the windows up on the truck the gun was mounted on. We filled the cab with about 2 feet of water before we realized it. That time the chief was very displeased. He called us names I had to look up later because I didn’t know what they meant. FYI, none of them were good.
By far, my favorite part of being in the fire department for those years is it gave me the chance to do men stuff with men. We called each other names, disrespected each other, usually ended up in an argument about something, and would fight all the time, but there was not a doubt in my mind that any one of those guys would literally run into a burning building to back me up. I knew that because I would have done it for any of them. How do I know? I did it many times. They always told me they wanted me in the really bad fires, because if something went wrong, they were going to hang on to my boots in hopes they would go to heaven with me.
I have never had an experience like this since, and I miss it. Nothing against you ladies, but men need men and young men really need men. We toughen each other up because we talk rough to each other, and we bully each other. Why? Because we are friends. It’s a guy thing. When we live in sterile environments all the time and just tattle tale on someone who said something we don’t like, how are men supposed to learn how to stand up for themselves?
There is something to be said for toughness, and that is learned through adversity. Men need to be able to stand up for themselves because that will teach them how to stand up for their mothers, wives, and daughters. We are supposed to do these things because that is the way God designed us. Sure, men can be irritating at times, but it is our role to be the voice of reason in society. That is taking nothing at all away from women. We need the nurturing and caring that women provide as much as we need the stability and protection men provide. There are physical differences between men and women but the differences do not end there. Women and men approach the world very differently. Right now, we are suffering because we men are not taking ourselves seriously.
Men calm situations, men are in control of their emotions and their environment, men always know where the boundary needs to be set to keep people in their midst safe, and men are able to think through situations with reason and logic. We do not need to raise our voice to take control of a situation, we do not need to intimidate or overrun anyone, and when we are pushed into a corner, we are able to settle a situation. Sometimes men settle things with their fists but only against a threat. Men never need to raise a hand to a woman because men only use violence to bring peace, never to express control. Men can use force, but only the amount of force necessary to keep the world in order.
To all of you actual men out there, thank you for who you are. For those of you who are boys masquerading as men, I feel sorry for the people you are hurting. I am sorry you don’t have a man in your life to help you grow up.
If you have a man in your life, no matter if you were raised by him, married to him, or raised him yourself, or if you come into contact with any real man, let him know he is appreciated by you. He is doing his level best to become all God created him to be. Fortunately, for you, if he is a man he is well on his way to that goal.