The Making of a Man
Painted in Massacca 2, Mozambique, May 2007
For 6 years, my wife and I experienced firsthand the unforgettable joys and pains of sharing love, life, and faith with some underprivileged youth in Mozambique. As the AIDS pandemic caught hold and spread across the African continent like an uncontrollable wildfire (approx. 17 million African children have been orphaned by AIDS so far), we felt God invite us into the “true religion” of “looking after the orphans and widows in their distresses . . .” (James 1:27)
A central part of our particular call was to help Iris Ministries, under whom we had the joy of serving, with selected at-risk young men who had been raised in orphanages and now needed assistance in the transformation to move them, as young adults, into the fullest possible understanding of themselves and their gifts and potential to become a valuable, contributing part of society. We were asking God to take the raw materials these young men brought to the table (against the backdrop of extreme poverty, struggles with traces of entitlement issues from their institutional experiences, struggles with victim mentality, shocking contact with a bloody civil war that took many of their parents, etc.) and somehow miraculously shepherd them into REAL MEN, marked by wholeness, healing, freedom, and purpose, capable of contributing to the rebuilding of their nation.
It was a daunting, holy, awesome task. In the natural, such transformation was not humanly possible or available. The odds were overwhelmingly in favor of these kids turning to life on the streets, to crime, to a high-risk lifestyle that would likely bring to them the virus raping their society. Life expectancy in Mozambique is only 48 years. Most of those who reach that age will be women.
At the end of our first year of living in primitive reed huts we built in the fields—just my wife and I, with 18 beautiful and challenging young men-- we were preparing to go to an annual conference and report on our initial work. I considered making a painting to accompany our report, sort of a visual aid to bring the point home. Only, I was drawing a blank on what such a painting could look like. I carried a vague idea around for a while, waiting for the visual elements to come together in my mind. They finally did so suddenly one Sunday in the form of a little boy named, Eduardo.
Eduardo wandered across the grassy fields that spread out between the front porch of our primitive communal kitchen and the one little country road that passed by and connected us to the outside world. We were in the middle of the service at the church we had planted; everyone was sitting in focused attention on rough plank benches arranged in rows under the tarp strung up to keep the sun's oven-heat from melting our skin; but when Eduardo unexpectedly walked in that morning for the first time, all attention was redirected to this unusual visitor. He was maybe eleven years old. He stepped into the group without any pretense, humble, but somehow confident. He just walked in and stood there, covered head to toe with a nasty Ringworm infection that had turned most of his red-brown skin into a display of random whitish circles. Patches of his hair had given way to the disease. He looked horrific.
Beyond the condition of his skin, I noticed that his thin frame was dressed in little girls’ pink sweatpants that might have fit a 5-year old, and a tiny pullover shirt that had once been white, both now filthy with the unlaundered use of many days. His collar was turned up as if he was impersonating Elvis. And he wore a brilliant smile that said that somewhere beyond all the challenging appearance, there was a happy child who still had room for hope to fill his sails.
I stopped preaching right away.
Then, without even waiting to be asked, everyone swarmed around this diseased child, lay hands on him and began to pray. We prayed for a long while, then Caryn Beth sent a group of the older kids back to our hut to get medical supplies; in a few minutes, Eduardo was bathed and re-dressed, his skin treated (with the first of several treatments that eventually returned him to a state of good health). Then we sent a team home with him to find out who he was, and if he had family connections, etc.
Standing in the sun after all the church attendees had gone home, I discovered that I had found in Eduardo the visual aid I was waiting for. So after quickly snapping some photos from which to work, I started painting Eduardo as I saw him that first morning: dressed in filthy, ill-fitted girls’ clothes, his hair patchy with ringworm. On the canvas, I posed him with his weight resting on his right foot—signifying his walk in the natural. I then placed in his eager hands an old, dried up, lifeless branch; this was to signify the embodiment of all many Mozambican young men receive in the natural –a broken economy, parental loss or abandonment, little or no access to health care, little or no access to education, patterns of sexual misuse/abuse, the common abuse of power by authority figures, the darkness of tribal witchcraft and related occult violence, etc. These (and many other almost insurmountable obstacles) are the natural inheritance of most Mozambican young men on their quest to understand themselves and their developing manhood.
Yet in spite of the rough raw materials and the challenges to it’s development—ready or not—manhood presents itself anyway. So I have illustrated the move from these dried up useless beginnings, into the powerful gift that becoming a man truly can be. This gift—the inevitability of becoming a man—this I have represented with the sword.
The fact of it being a gift I have symbolized by attaching a gift tag to the swords' head, signifying that Someone thoughtful has paid a price for the design of manhood to be passed on from one generation to the next.
As the design developed in front of me, I felt like there should be a stone in the handle of the sword. I asked my very prophetically insightful wife if she felt it should be any particular color stone. After some quiet reflection, she replied that she felt it should be blue. A little research followed and revealed that Sapphire is one of the very hardest stones in existence, and is one of the foundation stones for the New Jerusalem. So I placed a blue Sapphire in the hilt of the sword, symbolizing the significant foundational strength that a good man brings to society.
I placed the light shining down on Eduardo’s left leg as he is poised to shift his weight forward from the natural (now in shadow) into the supernatural. If this young man is to make the most of himself and the gift of his manhood, he must have a transformational encounter with God. The foundation for such encounter has already been lain by the blood of Christ, spread on the ground below Eduardo in the bottom right corner.
The final “Aha!” moment came after I had finished the painting: Caryn Beth asked me if I had researched what the actual name of my little 11-year old model meant. So I researched his name and was impressed that this child whom I had painted as a representative of the at-risk young men of Africa in their quest to understand themselves and their role in society is named, Eduardo: his name literally means, “Guardian of happiness.”
A central part of our particular call was to help Iris Ministries, under whom we had the joy of serving, with selected at-risk young men who had been raised in orphanages and now needed assistance in the transformation to move them, as young adults, into the fullest possible understanding of themselves and their gifts and potential to become a valuable, contributing part of society. We were asking God to take the raw materials these young men brought to the table (against the backdrop of extreme poverty, struggles with traces of entitlement issues from their institutional experiences, struggles with victim mentality, shocking contact with a bloody civil war that took many of their parents, etc.) and somehow miraculously shepherd them into REAL MEN, marked by wholeness, healing, freedom, and purpose, capable of contributing to the rebuilding of their nation.
It was a daunting, holy, awesome task. In the natural, such transformation was not humanly possible or available. The odds were overwhelmingly in favor of these kids turning to life on the streets, to crime, to a high-risk lifestyle that would likely bring to them the virus raping their society. Life expectancy in Mozambique is only 48 years. Most of those who reach that age will be women.
At the end of our first year of living in primitive reed huts we built in the fields—just my wife and I, with 18 beautiful and challenging young men-- we were preparing to go to an annual conference and report on our initial work. I considered making a painting to accompany our report, sort of a visual aid to bring the point home. Only, I was drawing a blank on what such a painting could look like. I carried a vague idea around for a while, waiting for the visual elements to come together in my mind. They finally did so suddenly one Sunday in the form of a little boy named, Eduardo.
Eduardo wandered across the grassy fields that spread out between the front porch of our primitive communal kitchen and the one little country road that passed by and connected us to the outside world. We were in the middle of the service at the church we had planted; everyone was sitting in focused attention on rough plank benches arranged in rows under the tarp strung up to keep the sun's oven-heat from melting our skin; but when Eduardo unexpectedly walked in that morning for the first time, all attention was redirected to this unusual visitor. He was maybe eleven years old. He stepped into the group without any pretense, humble, but somehow confident. He just walked in and stood there, covered head to toe with a nasty Ringworm infection that had turned most of his red-brown skin into a display of random whitish circles. Patches of his hair had given way to the disease. He looked horrific.
Beyond the condition of his skin, I noticed that his thin frame was dressed in little girls’ pink sweatpants that might have fit a 5-year old, and a tiny pullover shirt that had once been white, both now filthy with the unlaundered use of many days. His collar was turned up as if he was impersonating Elvis. And he wore a brilliant smile that said that somewhere beyond all the challenging appearance, there was a happy child who still had room for hope to fill his sails.
I stopped preaching right away.
Then, without even waiting to be asked, everyone swarmed around this diseased child, lay hands on him and began to pray. We prayed for a long while, then Caryn Beth sent a group of the older kids back to our hut to get medical supplies; in a few minutes, Eduardo was bathed and re-dressed, his skin treated (with the first of several treatments that eventually returned him to a state of good health). Then we sent a team home with him to find out who he was, and if he had family connections, etc.
Standing in the sun after all the church attendees had gone home, I discovered that I had found in Eduardo the visual aid I was waiting for. So after quickly snapping some photos from which to work, I started painting Eduardo as I saw him that first morning: dressed in filthy, ill-fitted girls’ clothes, his hair patchy with ringworm. On the canvas, I posed him with his weight resting on his right foot—signifying his walk in the natural. I then placed in his eager hands an old, dried up, lifeless branch; this was to signify the embodiment of all many Mozambican young men receive in the natural –a broken economy, parental loss or abandonment, little or no access to health care, little or no access to education, patterns of sexual misuse/abuse, the common abuse of power by authority figures, the darkness of tribal witchcraft and related occult violence, etc. These (and many other almost insurmountable obstacles) are the natural inheritance of most Mozambican young men on their quest to understand themselves and their developing manhood.
Yet in spite of the rough raw materials and the challenges to it’s development—ready or not—manhood presents itself anyway. So I have illustrated the move from these dried up useless beginnings, into the powerful gift that becoming a man truly can be. This gift—the inevitability of becoming a man—this I have represented with the sword.
The fact of it being a gift I have symbolized by attaching a gift tag to the swords' head, signifying that Someone thoughtful has paid a price for the design of manhood to be passed on from one generation to the next.
As the design developed in front of me, I felt like there should be a stone in the handle of the sword. I asked my very prophetically insightful wife if she felt it should be any particular color stone. After some quiet reflection, she replied that she felt it should be blue. A little research followed and revealed that Sapphire is one of the very hardest stones in existence, and is one of the foundation stones for the New Jerusalem. So I placed a blue Sapphire in the hilt of the sword, symbolizing the significant foundational strength that a good man brings to society.
I placed the light shining down on Eduardo’s left leg as he is poised to shift his weight forward from the natural (now in shadow) into the supernatural. If this young man is to make the most of himself and the gift of his manhood, he must have a transformational encounter with God. The foundation for such encounter has already been lain by the blood of Christ, spread on the ground below Eduardo in the bottom right corner.
The final “Aha!” moment came after I had finished the painting: Caryn Beth asked me if I had researched what the actual name of my little 11-year old model meant. So I researched his name and was impressed that this child whom I had painted as a representative of the at-risk young men of Africa in their quest to understand themselves and their role in society is named, Eduardo: his name literally means, “Guardian of happiness.”