Women!

Women… Talk to a man going through a breakup or a divorce and the very word can sound evil. Chances are, the man who reflects that attitude has himself to blame and it’s just easier for him to pass the buck. I think women are the greatest things God ever created! I love their warmth with each other; their natural nurturing and their inner strength. They can put men to shame! Women will hug each other without any self-consciousness at all. They’ll go straight to the heart when they talk about their problems with each other. Men just can’t do that with each other very easily. And I can just imagine telling one of my hunting buddies that his shirt really brings out the color of his eyes or that his jeans make him look more slender!

We men need to be strong. It’s in our genes. (The kind that really make us look slender...or not!) We strengthen each other by setting the bar higher for each other. That’s a good thing! The wisest men among us will open their hearts to the women in their lives though. Women are the keepers of hearth and home but they're also blacksmiths and police officers and Marines... Women are why we fight wars and build skyscrapers. Their very presence around us makes us behave differently. They can make us want to be better than we are. They can trigger a testosterone rush that makes us plain stupid sometimes! They can be the voice of reason when a T-rush gets out of hand too. They see things men don’t because they look at the world with different eyes than men do. The wisest men among us listen to the women in their lives. The fools among us dismiss them.

I had the wife of a minister ask me once if all men wanted a shrinking wallflower for a wife. It seems she had a distorted view of all men from the choice she'd made. I told her she was asking the wrong man…I like strong women! Far from feeling threatened by them somehow, I admire them most of all. Any man that feels threatened by a strong woman doesn’t know what being a Real man is all about. More is the pity… Men and women aren't in competition!

I met a woman blacksmith recently that surprised me when she talked about the art the way I think about it. She wore no makeup and still matched any model I’ve ever seen. This is the kind of woman that radiates femininity. She didn’t try to fit some magazines image of what it means to be a woman…she’s her own woman. It just so happens that she has the figure of a model and the face of an angel to boot! This is the kind of woman that can stop a train with just her smile... and still use a hammer on an anvil! Now 'that' is sexy! She made me glad to be a man and glad there are women like that out there. I wish more men and women would be true to themselves instead of trying to be what someone else tells them they ‘should’ be.

Some men spend their time on trying to understand everything about women…not me. I don’t need to understand how the earth revolves around the sun to appreciate a beautiful sunset and I don’t need to understand everything about women to appreciate them. Some men spend their time trying to be like women…that’s even worse! We were meant to be different!!! We were also meant to get along with each other and to learn from each other. I may not be a wise man yet…but I’m learning…largely from listening to women.

It seems to me that God gave us two eyes to be able to differentiate depth. He gave us two ears to differentiate sounds. He even gave us two brains to process information differently. Well, if we are as smart as we like to think we are, we’d realize that He also gave us two sexes that see the world differently to give us a clearer picture of it. We can be equal without having to be the same! It seems a shame to me that we end up fighting with each other so much of the time when we could be complementing each other. One thing I think the French got right was their view of men and women…”Vive la Difference!”