Contrary to what your mother says, you weren’t born perfect. You were born with flaws, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. 

As you grew up, you developed mistaken ideas, hurt people (including yourself), and made bad choices, sometimes for bad reasons.

While you can’t be blamed for not knowing what you didn’t know and making honest blunders, sometimes you failed to act on the things you DID know. Sometimes you tried to cover up those failings. Sometimes you succeeded… but only sometimes.

Regardless, you still know. Those failings probably haunt you at night, like some of mine haunt me.

And you know what? That’s ok.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that any given thing that you or I have done is *morally* OK. I’m merely stating that the fact of having made mistakes, even grave ones, is in itself OK.

That’s an important distinction to get. Robbing that bank five years ago was not OK. But that you were a deeply flawed person who made a dishonorable, harmful decision that affected the lives of dozens of others? Believe it or not, that’s OK.

That may sound like a contradiction but it’s not. Robbing the bank was a thing you *did*. Deeply flawed is what you *were*. But nonetheless, here you *are*, visiting a website about male personal development and transformation, and going with me far enough down this challenging road to the mirror I will now show you, that will reveal to you something about yourself you may not have recognized until right now:

A part of you craves *life.* That part makes what you did and what you were OK.

IF you need to, please sit with that idea for a moment before continuing on.

Hopefully, you’re now in touch with that part of you, because we’re going to give it a name. That part of you is the Son.

The part of you looking at the Son, we’re going to call the Father. The Son has now been entrusted to the Father.

Most men only get one shot at this, which is just after they’re born. They’re baby boys who get the father they get, even if that father’s name is “mom.”

It used to be the father’s job to pass on values, structure, and identity to the son. These tools aren’t meant to be permanent, just temporary until the son can experience enough life to pick and choose his own, even if those are just the same has his dad’s.

If that chain is broken in a man’s life, who else is going to come along and fix it? At what stage after childhood can a male find another man to be his loving and devoted guide?

Unfortunately, there isn’t one. Once the halcyon days of childhood are over, the likelihood is extremely low that any man will find another to step in and give him the daily, or sometimes hourly guidance he needs to grow straight and upright. The military might do it, but that organization has its own purposes and values. Same with sports teams.

No, there is no time in a man’s life past childhood where we can expect to find another man to raise us in the way a father might….

Unless we create it for ourselves.

Return to your Son, that part of you inside that craves life, and that always has and always will. Remember that it’s been entrusted to you the Father.

You now have the chance to bring that part of you forward into the world in the way no man has before you, and the way no man will have an opportunity to again.

Consider what a remarkable achievement that will be, if you’re successful. Imagine the courage and strength required to achieve that feat. Imagine the feeling of having mastered yourself. And imagine the feeling of honor having accomplished it.

Feel into the sense of victory that you now have before you, the opportunity that’s been granted to you to win a great battle, a battle that only you can fight and win, on a field that’s all around you and within you.

And consider how much greater your honor will be to fight and win, versus never having to fight at all. Which man is the better one? The one who’s fought and overcome, or the one who’s never faced a trial?

You know the answer. Every man does. The better man, the more valuable man, the more noble man is the one who’s stood up on the battlefield to quest bravely and be counted, the one who never quits until the job is done, who takes responsibility for making himself and his world into the shining image of what he wants it to be.

That opportunity is yours now and will always be, just as your Father has an opportunity in the Son.

And that’s why it’s OK that you weren’t born perfect.