Young Men Need Encouragement! w/ Michael Foster

A lot heard of men out there, you know, a lot of opportunities. I think they'll men don't need much, right?

Like you praise a guy. It's like, I was a wrestler, big, big time wrestler. And both my boys, two of my boys are wrestlers and you know, your coaches don't actually praise you that much, like you're screwing this up and go run suicides and don't slam down your headgear and do all that.

And I remember this one time I, uh, my first year wrestling, I got moved up to varsity and I wrestled, uh, the state champion of the

SEC. I think he came in second state, right? He didn't pin me in the first period. He did pin me in the second, but I like gave him a run for his money in the first period.

And I was just like going crazy. And I came off and Donnie Stonefield was his name, was my coach, uh, that year.

And Donnie said, Foster, you can wrestle for me whenever you want. It just meant the world to me.

Yeah. Like, like I had just lost and he said he was blown away by the effort and encouraged by it.

A lot of guys just need someone to say, I love you, or you're doing a good job. Yes, you screwed up, but you can do that.

That's what men need. They need, um, kick in the, kick in the butt, but also praise.

Not just be a man. Yeah. Yeah. But not like man up is not helpful to someone that doesn't know what it means to be a man.

Exactly. Man up, man up. Like, how do I man up? Okay. What does that look like? Yeah. And so, I think the boomer pastors mean well, but they grew up before tsunami washed away a lot of cultural memory.

Right. There's like, I remember I shook this guy's hand, Gary Knopper. He was my youth pastor's husband.

I had a woman youth pastor when I first got saved. So, I ran into him at Kroger where I was working as a guy that like bagged and got the cards.

And I shook his hand. I did the like dead fish, you know? Yeah. And Gary's like, son, son, that's not how you shake hand.

Never do that again. Here's how you shake it. Oh, I never shook a hand that way ever again. You know, I remember squeezing an old woman's hand too hard and like, no,

I don't do that either. Right. But there was like, there was fathers, there was uncles, there was a cultural knowledge that slipped away more and more and more.

There's a way that boomers grew up that was good. Yeah. And put them ahead. And some of these guys just have gone on with their life.

They have their own responsibilities or whatever. They're maturing too. You know, I'm 44. I still feel 16.

I'm sure boomers that are 60 still feel 20. They don't know that the world changed. Some of them don't. Yeah. But it has.

It has changed. And some of these guys need really simple, practical advice.

Right. Right. They just need like a few things. And if you're just telling them to man up, that made sense in a world that knew what it meant to be a man.