God sent me a SEAL team.

As a young boy, I was always aware I lacked bravado, courage, brotherhood, and confidence in taking risks. All were common features I observed in other males, men, and superheroes I most admired.

But luck of the draw, lack of male modeling, or some of both left me up the gender creek without a paddle.

If you miss some of those critical boy benchmarks, you’ll spend the rest of your life in make-up mode, hoping one day you’ll wake up the mature man you’ve always wanted to be.

I never did.

At least not the one I had imagined.

For years, I mistook masculinity for fearlessness. I thought real men knew how to fix things, fight things, build things, hunt things and, most importantly, never admit they were afraid of things.

They seemed to possess some secret handbook that apparently had been passed out while I was absent.

So I improvised.

Like most people trying to conceal what they believe is missing, I became pretty good at looking as though nothing was.

Life eventually taught me that bravado and courage aren’t the same thing. Neither are acquaintances and brothers. And confidence isn’t the absence of fear. Sometimes it is simply being scared to death and going anyway.

But those lessons took decades.

Then, somewhere in the later chapters of my life, God began sending men.

Not all at once.

One here. Another there.

Men with scars and stories. Men who had failed spectacularly and survived it. Men who had buried people they loved, fought addictions, lost marriages, raised children, questioned God, found Him again, and learned there wasn’t much worth pretending about anymore.

They weren’t superheroes.

That was precisely what made them heroic.

They prayed for one another.

They admitted when they were hurting.

They showed up.

They spoke truth when truth wasn’t particularly convenient.

They laughed mercilessly at one another and loved each other just as fiercely.

And slowly, almost embarrassingly late in life, I discovered the brotherhood I’d spent decades believing belonged to other men.

God sent me a SEAL team.

Not the kind that drops from helicopters in the middle of the night.

At our age, most of us would need help getting out of the helicopter.

Our knees hurt. Our backs complain. Some of us have prescriptions organized by day of the week, and nobody is storming a beach without first locating a restroom.

But we’ve been through some battles.

And we know where the bodies are buried because, metaphorically speaking, some of them are ours.

We’ve buried old versions of ourselves.

We’ve survived things we once thought would kill us. We’ve learned that asking for help requires more courage than pretending you don’t need it. We’ve learned that a man can kneel before God without becoming smaller.

In fact, that’s where he may finally become a man.

I spent much of my life wishing someone had taught me all of this when I was a boy.

Now I’m not so sure.

Maybe some lessons can’t be handed from father to son or learned from superheroes. Maybe they have to be earned through failure, forgiveness, surrender and time.

I never became the man that little boy imagined.

Thank God.

He was looking for a man who wasn’t afraid of anything.

God was building one who finally knew Who to trust when he was.

And because He apparently knew I wasn’t going to make it up that creek alone, He finally sent me some paddles.

They just happened to be carrying Bibles.

My SEAL team.