My Bunkie

​Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the last several years of my life’s journey to recover that elusive inner place called integrity. I don’t mean the moral sense of integrity; doing the right things. But rather, that deeper integrity of personal being. That place of integration; that place where my shattered soul has been bound up (Is. 61:1) into a solid, real and emotionally connected masculine being. That place from which I “stand and deliver” my own unique self with conviction and reality; walking in my own boots and running the race marked out for me…and doing so with others of the same desire.
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I’ve also been reflecting on the number of men I know, and the reports of other men I don’t know, who have been blown out of the saddle in battle. 

​Some dazed and confused, others wounded terribly and bleeding out on the ground. In either confusion or despair, they have given up. Given up being men; being real men. The world, the flesh and the devil have picked them off and then that same evil counterfeit trinity has the temerity to woo the wounded to themselves for comfort.

It’s at this critical moment that men must see that “The Lord is a warrior; a man of war” (Ex.15:3), a man’s Man who doesn’t abandon His wounded in the field. He fights for you; risks for your rescue; retrieves you to become the man, husband, father, brother He knows you were created to be.

That’s what this image is all about. Here is the Trinitarian God coming to you. He is a Warrior! He is for you. Your wounds are not disdained by Him. Like Rublev’s Trinitarian Icon, Schreyvogel’s “My Bunkie” conveys our Trinitarian God’s heart for you to discover or recover what it means to live from integrity with the strength He provides and to get back into the fray.

​Philippians 4:13 is still true, “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me.” As you view these three riders, who do you see as Father, as Son and as Holy Spirit?
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Blessings- Mike

 (The Schreyvogel painting was brought to my attention in John Eldredge’s book “Wild at Heart”. If you’re a man whose been blown out of the saddle and struggling to own or recover your own unique self in a world filled with voices contrary to the gospel, you may find the Trinitarian Cavalry riding to you in its pages. Charles Schreyvogel (January 4, 1861 – January 27, 1912) was an American painter of Western subject matter in the days of the disappearing frontier.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/12543 )