What is the manliest thing a man can do?

If somebody asked me the most manly thing to do in the entire world, I would say it's prayer. It's silence. Hands down. Silence is the destroyer of all boys. When you are forced to sit by yourself in silence and pray to God, you are facing the abyss of whether God is actually there and hears your prayer, and you are also facing the existential reality of who you are as a man, or the lack thereof, and there's nothing to hide it.

Silence reveals everything about a person: personality, insecurities, fears, anxieties. It's all brought to light in silence. There's a room, I believe on a college campus, considered the most silent room in the world, with such levels of noise dampening that you can hear your own heartbeat and the blood pumping from your heart, and they say no one has lasted 24 hours in it.

That highlights the point: it's not about doing something noisy and boisterous and difficult. It's about being with ourselves. And when we're with ourselves, we're also with God, because God is everywhere present. Try to lay out even 30 minutes a day of silence, just silently saying the Jesus prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. You will never feel like you've run into such a rock wall of difficulty.

But in that you are actually exposed to God. In silence there's nowhere to go. Either you connect with him or you don't, but you're fighting to make that connection.