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has been to discover what it is to be a beloved son, which I never understood in my relationship with my natural father. A beloved son knows that his father will fight thousands for his son's love-I know I would for my sons.

Another line from the second verse says:

"I wanna turn my head/and see you there/I wanna be pursued"

And that, friends, is why I am awake while my family sleeps. It is an alien concept to me, a man who is rather rough around the edges at times. For me to have been arrested in mid-step on a normal day of my life by such a blatantly sensitive and feminine attitude may call into question the quality of my manliness. I need to write this out. Though I am sickeningly exhausted, I am trying my best to never forget what Truth was imparted to me today by making a record of it.

What I realized today after about nine months of feeling trapped in some featureless nebula of existence is that I know what I want, finally. I have been unable to tell my wife, let alone myself what it is I have been looking for in this uncharted territory of our lives. Now I know: I want to be pursued! I hate to use flamboyant punctuation like that, but in this case it is merited.

Imagine what aspects of our faith would change if we admitted to ourselves that one of our base needs, hardwired into us by God, is that we gather quite a bit of our self worth from whether or not we are being pursued and by whom. It has been sold to us as a primarily feminine attribute, this need to be pursued, but I would argue that we all need it to varying degrees whether male or female in physiology.

How many decades have we been claiming and proclaiming that our God longs for relationship with us and then damning ourselves by clinging to a rather exclusively one-sided concept of the Christian life? We are all of us out there trying to earn, behave, stretch, endure, preserve peace, carve out, take, strive, exert and exhort our way into the Kingdom of God, very much content to be malcontent leaving God quite out of all of it. Either we wrest control from him and place him in tidy religious boxes to "enhance" our understanding or we imagine God as Janet Jackson, asking us, "What have you done for me lately?" I have most definitely done this. And it's twisted. On the one hand we forgot to ask for understanding and trust him to give it, and on the other we didn't bother to discover who he really is, instead pasting a cheap identity right over his true face.

Instead of trying to spend yet another

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