There is a subtle but vastly significant shift that I think many of us men need to make in our thinking.

Many of us wake up each morning with a pamper-me mindset.

What?!

I hear the objections rising up from everywhere right now. Pamper-me?! Are you kidding me? I’m a man! I don’t even use the word pamper, let alone let it anywhere near my mindset.

Bear with me.

Instead, what we need to approach each day with is a warrior mindset.

Ah…that’s better.

So, what do I mean?

A Pamper-Me Mindset

A pamper-me mindset is one where we wake up and approach the day looking for how it’s going to make us feel better. Is our wife going to kiss us how we want? Is our boss going to pat us on the back? Is our product finally going to sell? Are our kids going to behave?

We look for any number of things to go right so that we can have whichever itch properly scratched and consequently feel better about ourselves. Our day becomes all about how WE feel. Do we get to feel affirmed, and do we avoid feeling like wastes of space and time? Do we get happy feelings coming at us and not crappy feelings?

As I’m talking about it right now, it sounds somewhat extreme. It sounds obviously like a way in which we do not want to live.

But it is sneaky and not always so obvious.

The pamper-me mindset can be boiled down to something so simple as, “I hope my day goes well today.” A seemingly innocuous statement with poisonous effects.

So even if you don’t explicitly confess that you hope you get affirmed and not slammed each day, you probably have this simpler, plainer, “I hope my day goes well” thought run through your mind more often than you know.

Here’s the problem with this innocuous, pamper-me type of thinking.

It sets you up to be a victim.

Jesus promised something…and it’s very easy to take this promise as sucky. He promised that, “In this world you will have trouble.” So if we are promised trouble from square one, but we approach life with nothing more than, “I hope my day goes well,” then we’re screwed before we begin.

Jesus himself promised that your day WON’T go well. (Obviously, life is full of joy and blessing and happy things, but you get the idea…trouble happens.)

So if you let your well-being depend on what will or won’t happen to you during your day, you are effectively a victim. And this will create all kinds of havoc for you because this isn’t authentically you. Whether you like it or not, you are given no room to be a victim anymore. In all things, you are more than a conqueror. You can do all things through Jesus.

Sorry. No room for victimhood there. Every. Single. Thing. Is yours to defeat.

So stop waking up hoping for good things to happen. It’s false. It’s a trap. It’s crap.

Start waking up being the good thing that’s going to happen to your day.

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Be a warrior.

Warrior Mindset

Approach each day with the confidence that you have the power given to you from your Father to change the world. To turn the tides. To shift entire atmospheres. Will you be perfect at it? I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not. But either way you’re going to change something for the better.

Instead of trying to avoid or minimize conflict and then getting eaten by it, flip the script and eat the conflict for lunch. Literally feed on it so that it makes you stronger and you become more man than you were before.

As a warrior, you train for battle. Battle is a part of your life. It’s not something you expect to be exempt from, it’s something you expect to come at any time. And it’s something you live for because it is where your honor, your valor, your strength get to be displayed. Obstacles in front of you are not obstacles at all. They are opportunities for you to live out your sonship. All enemies are defeated anyway. Victory is already yours. You have nothing to lose in the face of conflict, because, as Isaiah 54:17 says, “No weapon formed against you shall prosper.”

It’s time we live like we believe this.

It’s time we approach our days with confidence and boldness to slay lions and bears, and dare I say…giants.

Then, the promise of Jesus that we WILL have trouble becomes a good thing.

So what this looks like is, “This is going to be a good day no matter what happens. I am in it. Jesus is in me. Things may happen that suck. I may have pain in some form or another. There may be struggle. But I was born for this, and through the struggle I get to take more territory for the kingdom of heaven in my body, my mind, my marriage, my marriage bed, my kids, my finances, my neighborhood, my church.”

Now we don’t have to run around trying to hide and protect ourselves. We can spend our time where it belongs: creating value for the people around us. Being men of worth who pour worth into our families. Being men of strength who offer strength to our wives. Being men of boldness who boldly risk when maybe we “shouldn’t”.

We become men who don’t need anything, because nothing can touch us. We love freely because pain of rejection only grows us.

Be a warrior, my friend.