I recently went to church and heard a sermon where I was encouraged to ‘man up’.  Presumably this is because the popular misconception is that man is the stronger of the sexes.  While there might be some evidence to support that in purely physical terms men are indeed stronger, in every other sense men are whimps!  Oh that’s a bit harsh I hear you say on what basis do I make such a provocative statement.  Well, let’s go back to the Garden of Eden – the woman was deceived by the serpent but Adam deliberately chose to disobey God, his response? “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree and I ate it.” (Gen 3:12).  So he not only blames Eve but also God for providing him with her.  Men have been refusing to take responsibility ever since.  So why is this?  Well I had an interesting conversation with my Dad about my birth this week and he said that in the same way that chickens are involved in providing eggs but the pig is committed to making bacon, so he was involved but my mother was committed!  So maybe the majority of men think love is pleasure, women know love is pain.  Thank goodness we have a saviour who is a real man!   At Christmas we celebrate Jesus taking ultimate responsibility for us and our sinfulness – by entering into our humanity, becoming totally vulnerable for our sakes and being prepared to love us literally to death.  So boys if you are going to ‘man up’ this festive season, please do so in the model of our Lord and not some macho Christianity that has more to do with ‘Call of Duty’ than the Kingdom of God.  I am really getting into Franciscanism which Simon Tugwell describes as, “the radically unprotected life; a life that is cruciform in shape”…”It’s to live dangerously open, revealing all that we genuinely are and receiving all the pain and sorrow the world will give back in return.  It’s to be real because we know the Real.  Maybe living the unprotected life is what it means to be a Christian.” (p67-8, ‘Chasing Francis’ by Ian Morgan Cron)