It is challenging to live in the American South. There are centuries in our blood of what things should be done. It's not from a place of Scriptural merit, or even practicality, just cultural expectations. And those cultural norms emerged from just another cool kids' table in high school.

Recently, I was posed a question, "How can you stay home while your wife plays Rock'em Sock'em Robots at the workplace? Aren't you a man? Did a horse's kick crack your jewels? Who's a man! Woo!"

That might be a paraphrase.

Oh wow, I..uh...have NEVER thought about this...I just figured she just beat me to the car each morning. "Drats, can't go today! Better luck tomorrow!"

Now, the question was posed to me with honest intent so I obliged to answer. A younger me would have given the ol' familiar suggestion, regardless of who said it, but this is a subject of my personal growth as a man. And other men have been alone, strapped to hopeless nights of silence with despair that cannot be shared. Again, if I thought he was pulling out his man card to compare our sizes, then ask for my membership to be revoked by the Overcompensated Crew, I would just laugh at him. I'm NO respecter of men. They are a sorry lot. Vile, despicable and evil is their intent. I don't trust a man far as I can throw him.

It is a poor question because it shoves a guy immediately on the defensive. That said, I'm a hellava defensive fighter, so with one, "I'm your Huckleberry," I began...

Question: If the stay-at-home father is stigmatized by the Southern culture and he is willing and able to work so, why does he homeschool instead? It sure seems he's not being a leader.

Answer: God finds all sorts of new ways to break my pride. For when the world was proud of me, I ignored him. Leadership is not for the proud.

(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty

I began working at the age of 11 for a family-owned print shop. This continued on through high school and into college. I'd pick up second jobs not out of need, but for social reasons and I simply enjoyed working with my hands. I was good at it! In college, I even lived at home and had no expenses. I didn't need money. I had a foundation of working.

I graduated college in 2001 with my MIS degree and a two-year internship with Kraft Foods. How could I not get an entry-level job? Only in June 2002 did I find a job...and it was part-time at that. At a church. I got paid higher when I was an intern.

Fast forwarding to 2005, we married and I told my wife to quit her job. She didn't have to work.

I say all of that to say: I like work. Still do. Do it every day.

There have been times when things just broke. Life is messy. More than once I've been shown my new office and met people only to find I was passed over for the job. And when opportunity strikes, does it matter who makes the play, husband or wife? If there's $20 on the ground, do we NOT pick it up because my back hurts and I can't pick it up?

Men Working as a Chief Good

Southern culture piles unnecessary burden to both men and women with that heavy yoke. Jesus didn't. I cannot think of a passage that says the husband should make more money than the wife. He sacrifices himself. I've done that with my career. I'm laying up my treasure in wealth, quite literally earning generational wealth, instilling all of my value into them.

Is the pursuit of money superior? May it never be! Your Taco Bell Nacho BellGrande is tasty today and thrown out tomorrow

Casting Crowns sings these poignant lyrics from American Dream:

His American Dream is beginning to seem
More and more like a nightmare
With every passing day
"Daddy, can you come to my game?"
"Oh Baby, please don't work late"
Another wasted weekend
And they are slipping away

Command & Conquer

There are those who think God designed man to conquer. While he is to subdue nature, I don't think that means conquer. But, let's consider: what is conquer? Does God want us to conquer the world? Well, yes, we are more than conquerors dealing with the "world" and not the world as "Let's all head down to Jerusalem, y'all, kick 'em Arabs out of town and throw on a fish fry. God wants it and we'll make a buck or two along the way. Just win, baby! Yeehaw!"

Yes, that is the bad theology of our past. We conquer sin, we win at overcoming the evil we do. "For our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the world powers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens" (Ephesians 6:12, HCSB). If we modernize an earthly kingdom way of thinking, our crusades to Jerusalems, are we to conquer the workplace? Make more wealth? Plant our flag in that corner office?

Can we qualify our work "winnings" from this conquering as becoming more like Christ? "I've been ESPECIALLY faithful to God since I made that bonus by ripping off folks in Bedford Falls. George Bailey is going to Hell! He ain't conquering that bread!" Fo shizzle?

No, this quickly falls apart. And it is reasonable to agree with this. So, it's not about physical conquering. But, our culture has something else to say about that.

Eat the Rich

Look at our society. Who do we value? Who do we invite to sit with us? The rich. We equate wealth with leadership. Elon Musk. Bill Gates. You know the names. We listen to them. Do they listen to you? Me? The more money someone has, so it follows we think the better the leadership. Therefore, the leaders of our society make wealth. That stay-at-home Dad? He makes no money; he is not a leader. My kids disagree with that assessment.

(Of course, in practice, our rich kings just sit on securities and don't do squat, shhh...)

The Breadwinner & the Chief Executive Officer

What defines a breadwinner? Pretty easy right? Not so fast...

Who is responsible for the profits of a corporation, its "bread" if you will?

The CEO, of course. They're always getting canned for their poor quarterly results, praised with a wheelbarrow of cash if they win.

How does that CEO make the profits?

Vision, direction, implementation of new programs, going in a different direction, training new leaders...

—Wait, what does that have to DO with the nose-to-grindstone work?

You don't want a breathless CEO.

Do they do ANYTHING that directly puts cash in their pocket from their action?

There's no sweat equity beyond the well-placed wink.

In that corporation, who generates wealth for the organization from production and investments? Who is the breadwinner?

Not the CEO

Shouldn't you be wearing a fedora?

Yeah, probably.

Look, if positionally I am to be the leader of my family, it has little bearing as to if I get all of the gold stars. It is far superior to pursue the spirit of servant leadership. Who am I? And I GLADLY give up my golds stars if collectively we are in a better position if my wife works and I stay home. Pick that $20 up! Long have I championed measures to protect my family in the event of my death. My wife has equipped herself to handle adversity. She shall not be a broken homeschooling mom with nowhere to turn as the autumn winds haunt her. She will be powerful.

And NOW you can see how I have found peace...you can see why I've got half an MBA on the shelf with that MA.

No, the chief end of man is not to win bread down the totem pole of the corporate ladder. Work is a part of life. However, acquiring liquidity that simply acts as a go-between for trade? What does THAT have ANYTHING to do with being a man or a woman? I have a limited resource: time. It's not there to waste on more transactional liquidity than I require. I have a select years amount of years remaining—my kids' have a very limited amount of time to learn the lessons that truly matter. Financial management is just an elective course from me.

No, we need to be far more concerned with loving God and loving our neighbor. My pounding this hairy chest in my masculine pride, a torso built by that 99th percentile Neanderthal DNA and generations of tilling the fields of the Mississippi, is all a bunch of hogwash.

At the end of the day, how much do I trust the sovereignty of God? "I am sure of this, that He who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Philippians 1:6).

In more practical matters, I'm a carnivore and predisposed to hairiness: I'm man enough to just shake my head at them boys. Give 'em time, they'll get it. My current work is a more challenging that any of my past IT positions. And unlike IT lemme pull out my best Charles Barkley, I gotta deal with a whole lotta knuckleheads in this culture that asks why I'm doin' what I'm doin'.

No, my kids are getting first rate classroom instruction as they're being taught by a college adjunct professor. These lessons span across eternity.

May God forever break me on this side of glorification: life isn't about my money. Nor is it about my pride.

All the riches of the kings end up in wills
We've got information in the information age,
But do we know what life is outside of our convenient Lexus cages?
She said, He said live like no tomorrow,
Every moment that we borrow brings us closer
To the God who's never been short of cash

-Switchfoot, Gone

Bringing to action my last post, I reached out on Facebook to friends for which I have yet to connect. Add to it, I began another round of friend invitations, writing a short note to each person as well. Instead of a platform of one-click reactions and sharing content at a nameless audience, I want to bring authenticity; I want to bring love. We are humans with intricate, interwoven stories. And individuality is often squashed by overarching narratives among authoritarian figures, whether political or business. We are more than pawns in a game for the world's richest. At the end of the day, even their stuff, is just stuff. It has all the bearing as the dirt at my feet. And to be honest, from what I understand, they live miserable lives; I would not want to emulate them in this world or the next.

And thus, I wrote my notes. I did not take up my voice on this site—how would that go? "From the dawn of time, man has coveted one thing...a good plate of nachos." I can't even pretend to write a high-brow private message! This example does shows I hoped I was approachable, that I rejected pretentiousness. In the past, people have told me I was intimidating. Whether if it was my INTJ resting face, the way I held myself or my Dapper Dan Pomade good looks—I don't know!

I hope I conveyed a bridge between one soul to another; I hope I laid out something in which I didn't take myself seriously. Look, everyone else seems to do that; they're not confident with who they are and post Glamour Shots on Instagram. Or, in their foolish arrogance, they raise the banner of an underwhelming, middle management kingdom on LinkedIn.

I know I would have turned out just the same. Vanity is older than humanity. I had to earn the lesson of asking, "Who am I?" Ahh, in my failure and setbacks, I am steeped in Ecclesiastes!

And I suspect my notes were jarring for some. It did not fit the expectations. I think we've got that ol' frog in the boiling pot again: they have been convinced their uniqueness does not matter (and subconsciously, they may think they do not matter). They are relegated to a tear-off number, staring in silence at Facebook's feed, waiting in line for someone to care. When someone on that platform does spend minutes—just for them—I imagine they might find that unsettling—who does that? Implying that they have intrinsic worth? That they matter?

I met discouragement. When I thought they would play pong and encourage in turn, they lashed out, dismissing my core way of living with an appeal to those very same political and business authorities that broke their heart. For a split second, I had a flash of anger, but that microexpression quickly returned to neutral. My worn tools, those hammers I once cherished, were put away, back into their rusty toolbox. I know the lives they have lived, the disappointments they had; they were told they were not good enough; they were told they were not pretty enough.

They were lied to.

In time, they may stand apart from the masses. Or, they will grow older like an emotional miser sitting alone on his recliner for one...in an empty living room...the TV flickering for no one. As the Beatles share, "He's a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans for nobody."

Hello, speak up, is there somebody there?
These hang-ups are getting me down
In a world frozen over with over-exposure
Let's talk it over, let's go out and paint the town

-Soul Asylum, Somebody to Shove

Fun fact: you can still get dial-up with NetZero. But you can only get 10 hours of free service per month. And at those speeds, you might be able to pull up Facebook. That assessment is probably not too far off: I used to queue up four MP3's to download overnight.

For all of the lambasting I do of Facebook, I've failed to categorize it correctly. Quite honestly, I should view it through the lens of a NetZero. You'll recall that NetZero was a free ISP in the 90s which served up targeting ads for its revenue stream. And thus, in the dark age before the ad blocker, NetZero users would have advertisements dished up along with the flashing ad banners original to the sites they'd visit. I suspect an apt analogy to the whole show is a three-ring circus. And think, today they warn people of just flashing lights!

What do I mean that Facebook is like NetZero? Clearly, the ads, though they have evolved beyond their static nature, abound. They even have the sheep's clothing custom-tailored. While Facebook mimics a social centralization, a virtual coffeehouse, "they are who we thought they were." They are a 90s web-based email client—think Yahoo before the entrance of Google and its clean interface. Now Facebook is a very bizarre email client with friends and strangers reading your mail—half the time you don't know WHO you're talking to! In my reemergence onto the platform, I get the real sense people have taken a back seat to the ads. There's not the same chatter, the same voice I hear from folks that are uniquely their own.

Maybe I'm wrong; maybe people have changed. Perhaps the 2020 government's land grab for control of lives has squelched their individuality. Sadly, masking and boosters ad infinitum serve up virtue signaling and is a shibboleth. That alone divides and silences restrained voices. We are not lone wolves but are stained by a herd mentality; we want the cool kids' table.

Facebook leadership feeds into this tension. Positive or negative, it is all email engagement to serve up ads. Instead of passively opening up your mouth and having that slop shoved down your gullet, take action. Connect with people. Love them. It's easy to start viewing people as their two-dimensional avatars. But, there is a person there with all the wins and losses you've earned; all of the confidences and insecurities you possess. They hide behind a mask that you wear also.

And try to ignore their mindless chatter as they parrot the shibboleths. That is not who they are. They just want to be cool like everybody else—maybe no one will know that they fall short.

It's OK.

Being attractive is the most important thing there is
If you want to catch the biggest fish in your pond
You have to be as attractive as possible
Make sure to keep your hair spotless and clean

-Nada Surf, Popular