Introduction
How Does the Gospel Shape Manhood and Womanhood?
Owen Strachan
The lips of the young woman quivered. Tears rolled down her face. Her angry father stared at her. “I thought you were the kind of girl who didn’t get into this sort of trouble,” he said. She looked back at him, confused and adrift: “I guess I don’t really know what kind of girl I am.”
This exchange came inJuno, a poignant film made a few years ago. It’s a quick scene, but it has stuck with me ever since. In this young woman’s reply, I heard the confusion of an entire generation. So many young men and young women don’t know who they are. They’ve never been taught what a man or a woman is. They may have seen terrible pain in their home, and they may have grown up without a father, or less commonly, without a mother. Or they might have had a father and a mother, but their home was compromised by sin in some way. The family didn’t eat together. The parents weren’t happy together. The children grew up without discipleship or investment.
This is 2015. Families are struggling. As one would expect, many young men and young women lack a road map—a script—for their lives. When you’re in this confusing and confused state, you don’t have answers to the most basic questions about your life. This is true of your fundamental identity, which includes your manhood or womanhood. What do I mean by this?
You Need to Know Who You Are
Many high schoolers, college students, and twentysomethings know they have a body (this is kind of obvious); further, they know they’re a boy or a girl, a man or a woman; and they know they want to follow Jesus. But they have little sense of how these realities intertwine. They don’t know what their gender, their sexuality, isfor. So they’re tentative. They’re confused. Quietly, perhaps with some shame, they ask these kinds of questions in their own minds:
- What is my purpose?
- Why do I have this body?
- What does it mean to be a man or a woman?
This book is intended to help you figure out who you were made to be. We want to give you an inspiring vision for your life as a young man or a young woman. We see that our society is training you to think wro