Two men sit next to one another in a bar.  The first man is feeling lightheaded and sits back on his stool.

“I’ve had enough,” he says.

His buddy slaps him on the back, orders him another drink, and says, “C’mon, be a man!” 

We’ve all seen such incidents, but I doubt that we’ve considered a deeper meaning that this type of situation presents.  Let’s analyze, for a moment, exactly what has happened here.  The second friend wants to manipulate his buddy into drinking more than his limit, right?   To get his buddy to do this, the friend uses a familiar line-”be a man.”  The first man responds because he wants to be a “man.” He has an ideal in his head about what makes a perfect man-in this case, a man can hold his liquor and not be affected.

We all have ideals in our head about what makes a real man and a real woman.  A real man, in the modern American context is strong and brave and has control of his world.  A real woman is beautiful and powerful.  These ideals are pushed upon us by culture, to be sure, but if you consider these ideals in the light of Darwinian evolution, they begin to defy explanation.  If you and I evolved by purely natural means, why do we always feel as though we are less than perfect?  Why do we always strive to be something that we are not?

One might argue that this is further proof that evolution is still occuring; these desires are simply biology’s way of making us better.  However, I find this explanation incredibly limiting.  If you and I are the peak of evolutionary biology, why do we feel like we are not something that we want to be?  Shouldn’t we be “the man” instead of always striving for that goal and feeling like we miss out on it?

I think the answer lies in the fact that instead of simply evolving, you and I were created by Someone greater than us.  Perhaps He has placed those ideals in our minds to remind us that we need Him.  Perhaps the reason that we all feel like we’re not living up to the standard of perfection that we all strive for is that God programmed us to be insufficient so that we would find secular explanations for our world equally insufficient.