torn. This is when disappointment sets in for the
man. This is when the progression begins with
disillusionment, moves to resentment, and in
turn becomes anger and a sense of betrayal. He’s
been tricked. He’s been lied to. What is before
him is far beneath the vision that once danced
merrily in his head. And love starts to dim.
What a man must do to win the war for love is
fight the battle for vision. He has to battle to
keep a higher vision of those he loves living
within him. He must become the Vision Keeper.
“What a man must do to win the
war for love is fight the battle for
vision.”
This is one of the great arts of manhood, and it
plays into a man’s innate gift for vision. He has
to work to keep a loving, compassionate, tender
view of his wife or his children or his friends
constantly alive in his mind. If he doesn’t, then
he can begin to see everyone he knows as having
failed him and then live out his life in bitterness
and anger. You’ll find many men like this camped
out every day at the local bar, drowning their
disillusionment.
These feelings are a possibility for all of us
because everyone we know is flawed. They may
have great gifts and beauty but they also have
deformities, damage, and immaturities we just
can’t escape. If we focus on the negative, if we
allow ourselves to be offended and put off by
what we see, then we lose the things about them
we love that caused us to attach to them in the
first place. For a man to love well, he has to fight
to hold tightly to a vision of the nobility and
goodness of those in his life.
You’ve likely seen the same progression I have.
A man loves a woman. He’s crazy about her.
He marries her. He feels at first like he’s living
in heaven on earth. Then the natural things of
human life start happening. They have some
conflicts. She gains some weight. She’s late
everywhere she goes. It turns out his wife
doesn’t cook as well as his mother does. There’s
also her frustrating loss of interest in sex. So the
man thinks about these things all the time. He
gripes to his friends. Other women begin to look
awfully good to him. Why didn’t he wait and
marry one of them? He feels caught in a great
marital bait and switch.
Now, to be a good man in a healthy marriage,
he’ll need to lovingly talk to his wife about his
concerns. They’ll need to work it out. Yet he won’t
do that if his heart is not still in the game, and his
heart won’t be in the game if he no longer sees
the woman he married as his Guinevere, as a gift,
as the most amazing woman he’s ever known.
She is all these things, but he has to keep them
in focus—despite the sometimes disappointing
realities of life settling in.
This is where a man’s gift for vision serves him
well. He has to battle to see her as she is at heart,
apart from the weight and the last argument
and the bad biscuits and the way he is losing her
in bed. He has to fight for the vision of her that is
true and inspiring. He has to remember how her
words light him up and how she cradles a baby,
and that sweet way she hums while she combs
her hair. He has to feel a bit of her burden in
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