A note on timing: I’m launching this project the Monday after Easter, April 6, 2026. That’s not accidental. Everything I’m about to argue, that Christianity is true, that it works, that it’s meant to be lived, rests finally on one historical event. If Christ did not rise from the dead, none of this matters. If he did, everything does. Easter settles the question. What follows is an attempt to live in light of the answer.
The Feeling You Cannot Quite Name
You aren’t sure exactly when it started. Maybe it crept up on you slowly, somewhere between the mortgage and the quarterly reviews and the kids’ schedules and the thousand obligations that make up what the world calls a successful life. Or maybe it hit you all at once, one ordinary Tuesday morning when you looked in the mirror and thought: is this it? Is this all there is?
You have the things you were told to want. Or you’re working toward them. Or you have given up on some of them and are trying not to think too hard about why. Either way, something feels off. There’s a gap between the life you’re living and the life you sense you were made for, and you can’t quite close it, no matter how hard you work, how much you earn, how many boxes you check.
I want to say something to you right at the start, before we go any further. You aren’t imagining it. You aren’t weak for feeling it. And you are not alone.
Something really is wrong. And the fact that you feel it may be the most important thing about you right now.
What the World Has Noticed
This is not just your experience. The culture’s own best observers have been tracking it for years, and the picture they are painting isn’t an encouraging one.
Men are disengaging from education, from work, from marriage, from community, from faith. The statistics on male isolation, addiction, mental health struggles, and purposelessness have become so familiar that we’ve almost stopped being surprised by them. Boys are falling behind in school at rates that would have seemed unimaginable a generation ago. Young men are retreating into screens and fantasy and the comfortable numbness of lives that ask nothing of them and therefore give nothing back. Middle-aged men are dying of what researchers have started calling deaths of despair. Older men are finishing their lives quietly wondering whether any of it mattered.
The cultural conversation about men has become loud and often confused. Some voices tell men they are the problem, that masculinity itself is toxic, that the solution is to become something less than what they are. Other voices push back hard, telling men to reclaim their dominance, to embrace their aggression, to stop apologizing for being male. Neither of these is speaking the whole truth, and most men know it, even if they can’t say precisely what’s missing from both accounts.
Viktor Frankl, the Jewish psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps and spent the rest of his life studying the human need for meaning, said something that has not lost any of its force since he first wrote it: the deepest hunger a human being carries is not for pleasure or power or comfort. It’s for meaning. It’s for a sense that one’s life adds up to something, points somewhere, matters to someone, and is going in a direction worth traveling.
That hunger is not going away. And the fact that so many men are struggling to name it, let alone satisfy it, is one of the defining crises of our time.
The Remedies Being Offered
The culture has not been silent about all of this. There’s no shortage of people who have noticed the crisis and want to offer a solution.
Some of what they’re saying is genuinely helpful. The voices telling men that they need responsibility, that meaning comes through bearing weight and doing hard things, that isolation is deadly and brotherhood is essential, these are not wrong. They’re pointing at something real. The diagnosis, in many cases, is accurate.
But the prescription keeps coming up short. And it keeps coming up short for a reason that the secular world, by definition, cannot fully see. When you are trying to understand a man without reference to what a man actually is, when you are trying to locate meaning without a source of meaning, when you are trying to fill a hole without knowing its true dimensions, you will always underestimate the problem and therefore underdose the cure.
The philosopher Blaise Pascal, writing in seventeenth-century France, described what is often referred to as a God-shaped vacuum in every human heart, an emptiness that nothing in this world is sized to fill. Men try to fill it with achievement, with pleasure, with distraction, with status, with adventure. Pascal called this diversion, and he wasn’t condemning it so much as diagnosing it. We keep ourselves busy, he observed, precisely because we can’t stand to sit quietly with the hunger we feel but can’t name.
The secular world can see the hunger. But it can’t tell you what it’s for.
Two Men Who Went Where the Men Were
I want to introduce you to two men who understood all of this long before anyone thought to run a study on it.
Richard Baxter was a seventeenth-century English pastor who lived through one of the most disorienting seasons in his nation’s history. A civil war had shattered the social order. The world men had grown up in, the certainties they had inherited about crown, church, community, and calling, had been violently upended. Men were adrift in ways they couldn’t fully articulate. Baxter didn’t lecture them from a safe distance. He moved to Kidderminster, a town in the English Midlands known for its poverty, its drunkenness, and its spiritual emptiness, and he went house to house. He sat with men in their homes, asked them about their lives, and told them the truth about what he found there and what he believed could heal it.
John Wesley was an eighteenth-century Anglican priest who rode into the forgotten places of industrial England, into the mining towns and the manufacturing centers where men had lost not only their dignity but their sense that their lives pointed anywhere at all. The established church was not going to these men. Wesley went. He stood in open fields and preached to men who had never been spoken to as though their souls mattered. He created structures, small groups of men who met weekly to ask each other honest questions and to refuse to let each other hide, because he understood that a man cannot become what he is meant to be in isolation.
Neither Baxter nor Wesley began by going to where the men were. They began with the conviction that these men mattered, that their hunger was real and not shameful, and that the answer they carried was genuinely good news.
That’s the spirit in which this project is written.
The Restless Heart
Seventeen centuries ago, a man named Augustine sat down to write the story of his own restlessness. He had been, by any measure, a man of the world: brilliant, ambitious, sensually alive, relentlessly searching. He had chased meaning through philosophy, through pleasure, through career, through relationships. None of it held. None of it was quite enough. And then, at the age of thirty-one, something happened to him that changed everything.
He addressed God at the beginning of his Confessions with a sentence that has never been improved upon: “You made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
That sentence is the north star of everything we’re going to do together in this project. Not because it’s a nice sentiment, but because it is a precise and accurate diagnosis of the human condition. Men are restless because they were made for something they have not yet found, or found and then walked away from, or found partially and know in their bones there’s more. The restlessness is not the enemy. It’s the sign. It’s the compass pointing toward home.
The question is not whether you feel the hunger. The question is where you are looking to satisfy it.
What This Project Is, and What It Is Not
Practical Christianity is not a men’s self-improvement program with Bible verses attached. It isn’t a weekend retreat or a camping trip or a set of principles for becoming more productive. It is not another voice telling you to man up without telling you what that actually means, or why it matters, or where the power to do it comes from.
What it is, is an invitation to the good life. Not the good life as the culture defines it, which turns out to be mostly a better version of the life that is already not working. The good life as Jesus of Nazareth defines it, which turns out to be the most comprehensive, most satisfying, and most demanding account of human flourishing ever offered.
We tend to think of Jesus primarily as Savior and Lord, which he is, fully and without qualification. But the New Testament also presents him as the one in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He is not simply offering forgiveness, though he offers that freely and we need it desperately. He is offering a philosophy of life, a way of being in the world, a comprehensive account of what human existence is for and how it is meant to be lived. Jonathan Pennington, in his careful study, Jesus the Great Philosopher, describes Jesus as our great philosopher of the good life. Ben Witherington calls him a sage in the biblical tradition and beyond. These are not diminishments of who Jesus is. They are recoveries of dimensions of who he is that we have sometimes allowed to fall out of view.
Christianity is practical because Christianity is true. It works because it corresponds to reality as God made it, because when a man lives according to the truth about who he is and what he is for, he is living in alignment with the grain of the universe rather than against it. And it was always meant to be put into practice, not kept in a theological cabinet to be admired and left alone.
Where We Are Going
In the posts that follow, we’re going to work through ten spheres of life: meaning and purpose, personal faith and spiritual formation, the war within, marriage and covenant love, family and the generations, friendship and brotherhood, work and vocation, culture and citizenship, suffering and hope, and legacy and finishing well.
These are not ten separate topics. They are ten dimensions of one life, your life, the life you’re actually living right now. And in every one of them, the same question is at stake: is Christ Lord here? Is his wisdom shaping what happens here? Is the truth about human flourishing (or abundant, new life in Christ) actually being put into practice in this corner of your existence?
I’ve been a pastor for over thirty years. I have sat with men in some of the hardest moments of their lives. I have watched men thrive and I have watched men collapse and I have watched them, by the grace of God, get back up. I’m not writing to you from a position of having figured it all out. I’m writing as one man on the road to another, passing on what I have received, pointing toward what I have found to be true.
The hunger you feel is real. The gap between the life you are living and the life you sense you were made for is real. And the answer is not a program or a principle or a discipline, though disciplines will be part of it. The answer is a person. And that person has been looking for you longer than you have been looking for him.
Reflect
Head: When you are honest with yourself, what is the gap you most feel between the life you are living and the life you sense you were made for? Where does that gap show up most clearly?
Heart: Augustine said our hearts are restless until they rest in God. Does that resonate with you? Where have you been looking for the rest your heart wants?
Hands: This week, set aside thirty minutes with no screen, no noise, and no agenda. Just you, a journal if you have one, and the question: what is my life actually for? Do not try to answer it immediately. Just let it sit with you.
Closing Prayer
Lord, you know the hunger I carry, even when I can’t name it. You know the gap between who I am and who I sense I was made to be. I’m not asking you to fix everything today. I’m asking you to help me be honest, to keep looking, and to trust that the restlessness I feel is pointing somewhere real. Lead me to the life I was made for. Lead me to you. Amen.
- Christianity is practical because Christianity is true.
- Christianity is practical because Christianity works.
- Christianity is practical because Christianity was meant to be put into practice.
Soli Deo Gloria
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