The Turning Point

I wish I could remember the radio show I was listening to, but it just escapes me.  What's important is at the time I happened to have a 100 mile commute to my job, and this obviously afforded me a lot of AM talk radio time.  The show had a guest who had written a book called "Raising a Modern Day Night".  I was really impressed by what I heard, but I had missed most of the show, and later I learned that this was the second of two shows at that.  Fortunately for me they offered a couple cassette tapes of the show, and I could also order the book itself.

I did just that, and a week later it arrived and I was lost in the book for at least two straight weeks of evenings.  I was a little bummed because the book was ideally for a father with a young son, who could be led through a series of lessons and ceremonies as he grows-up that point to Biblical manliness as demonstrated by Jesus.  My son was almost 13, so I beat myself-up a bit at all the opportunities that I let pass in his life where I child have made a stronger impression on him for Christ.

I guess I must have been rambling on and on to my morning work-out buddy (and pastor) Brent "Ace" Bond, because Brent started asking about the 13 year ceremony.  Both of us had been lamenting that it was a shame that there was no "boyhood to manhood" tradition in Christianity, and we decided that since both of our sons would be turning 13 that year that we would each help the other pull it off.

Taking ideas from Bill Beausay's book Boys!: Shaping Ordinary Boys into Extraordinary Men and from Robert Lewis' Raising a Modern-Day Knight: A Father's Role in Guiding His Son to Authentic Manhood we made our plan and sprung it on Brent's son during a surprise January camp-out.  Yes, it IS cold in Ohio in January, and trust me, when we awoke with several inches of snow on our tent I knew we had just had a memorable experience. 

Brent had several church members join us for the camp-out, and each of us took turns walking and talking with Zack about various topics related to manhood.  Brent made several modifications to the content from the book, and while it was a success it wasn't quite what I wanted for my son.  So a few months later we repeated the event in the way that I had envisioned it, in what has now become the model for what we call "The Passage".