The Separation of Men from Boys

by Grace Morgan

    What separates men from boys? It isn’t merely that a man is thirty, a boy is ten, and when you turn twenty-one you’re a “man”, but rather something significantly deeper. Both the Bible and the dictionary say that the difference between men and boys is maturity; I believe the that the three strongest differences, specifically, are work ethic, responsibility, and perseverance. A man will be much stronger in each of these qualities than a boy, and so I will spend the rest of this essay touching on each of these qualities.
    In America today, there isn’t a strong love of hard work. With all of the welfare and free stuff our government has created, laziness is encouraged, and when you do see someone actually working hard, it’s probably a Christian! Think about all the examples from good Christian literature in which boys are trained to work hard. For example, in the Little Britches, Ralphie actually helps his Father to earn money for their family! He learns from a young age to work hard first, and then enjoy the rewards after the work is done. He matured and became a true man faster than any boys nowadays do, simply because he learned that strong work ethic pays off in the end; however, in order to do the jobs that he did, he needed to be responsible.
  



      Responsibility comes hand-in-hand with work ethic; you can’t really have one without the other, and so if American boys and “men” don’t have strong work ethic, then they probably don’t have a strong sense of responsibility either. This can have such strong repercussions; if a man doesn’t grow up learning how to be responsible, than when he marries and has children, he won’t be able to care for his family. He’ll loose his job and his family will end up on the streets, and his marriage will probably end in a divorce. Isn’t that awful? All because this man lacks a sense of responsibility, his entire life will be ruined. When a boy is given a pet rabbit, and he forgets to feed it, the rabbit will die. If this boy never learns the essence of “When I don’t do what I’m supposed to do, something bad occurs”, then he will never become a man. But when the ten-year old has learned this, he is already two-thirds a man, even if he is only ten! I say only two-thirds because if he has yet to learn perseverance, he is not a man yet.
    I may be speaking about perseverance last, but it is certainly not least. It is wonderful if a boy can understand and love hard work and have a very strong amount of responsibility; however, if the boy doesn’t know how to persevere in hard times, he cannot be a man. Say, for example, that there is a man, twenty-two years old, who works in a factory. He works very hard every day and is the most responsible man there, but if he has a boss who is awful and torments the man every day, giving him jobs that test his limits too much, mocking his faith, etc, can this man persevere through it, or will he crumble? It is a test to see how he can respond - in perseverance, or crumbliness. When Ralphie’s Father dies at the end of the book, he doesn’t loose it and just curl up in a little ball to cry. It is terrible that his Father has died, but Ralph perseveres through it, and becomes the man of the family very quickly, stepping up to the challenge that God set before him. He became a man that day.
    So, what separates men from boys and boys from men? Perseverance, responsibility, and work ethic, though not the only components, are the greatest. Though they come hand-in-hand, each is just as important to conquer as the other, and once they are conquered, a boy becomes a man - even if he’s just twelve, like Ralphie in Little Britches. It is sad what our culture has deemed to be the separation between boys and men - they’ve built a gargantuan monument that practically worships the false idea of a “manly-man”, and we as Christians ought to do our best to tear that monument down.