I Am Not Enough

March 6, 2025 D. Michl Lowe2 Comments

I’ve concluded that there is apparently something deeply unlikeable and untrustworthy about me. There is a reality of who I am that others must see, that I do not. Maybe those who truly care about me know. Maybe they have tried to tell me. Maybe they have tried to help me understand, and I have stuffed cotton in my ears and closed my eyes to their kindness. Maybe I have been willfully blind to my own shortcomings. Maybe I still am.

For the last couple of years, I had been through over twenty job interviews and had had no luck at all until just recently. For over ten years, I have been nominated for a leadership position but have never been voted into that position. And I don’t blame the voters; I believe they are voting truly and in good faith! It is myself that I see as a failure. It is an observation of my own persona. I would say I am lazy, but really, I don’t think that is it. I value being able to live with the money I make, but I struggle to see my efforts as valuable.

So, is this a depression, then? I assume so. I have heartache and am searching for passion and purpose. I would like to be a true writer, but I have never felt as though I am good enough to truly be called by the title author or writer. Am I proud of my books and writing? Yes, of course, but in the back of my mind, I continually downplay them and question their validity.

I love my family; they give me unending joy and satisfaction, but I feel inadequate at the task of being a father and husband as well. I wonder if this inadequate feeling comes from a lack of my ability to fully support them financially, but then again, maybe it goes beyond that.

I seek purpose in God but feel a failure there as well. I wrote a book in an attempt to harden my devotion and zeal for Christ, but even in all I have done, I feel a failure. As if I should have done more or not done enough. I understand there is continual growth in Christ, and I do see that growth within myself, but then I look back on where I was before. Back then, I thought I was wise, but truly, I was very foolish and didn’t know it. So how am I to believe I am now wise, knowing in ten years I may look back and see my current foolishness for what it is?

They call it a mid-life crisis, but the crisis is a realization of a lifelong inadequacy. How do you make a life worthy? How do you understand what you can change to make it better? There are some things you are locked into, some things that cannot be changed. How do you turn listlessness into motivation and purpose? I don’t trust myself to know that my answers are right.

So what am I to do? Am I meant to meander along, continuing to live in a miasma of stale living? Should I continue to be burdened by a raw and open self-inflicted wound to my ego? Or should I accept the truth, accept the truth that I am not good enough? That I am not worthy of praise? That I am not enough? Because I will never be enough. I can’t do it.

However, when I am weak—because I am weak—He is strong. When I am not enough—and I am not—He is enough. When I am lacking, and I am lacking, He is full and true. When I am down, and I have been down, He is more than enough to raise me up. When I am through with giving effort, and at times, I feel as though I am through, He is there to carry me on.

I am not enough, and I never will be. The reality is no one is enough. No one is truly able. We are all frail and slowly dying, the conscious dead. It is only through the light of Christ we become anything else. In truth, we are only ever meant to be the marionettes of God, allowing the Master to bring us to life and give us His purpose. Am I enough? Yes, but only because I am His. Do I have meaning? Yes, but only the meaning He brings to life within me?

I am the resurrected corpse, Lazarus. I’m stinking but smelling better as the light hits my gaunt face. Undecaying from my death – being brought back into the world of the living, color returning. It is not I who now lives, but Christ who has chosen to live within the destitution of my life, giving it a robust and full justification.

He is worthy, so I am worthy.

Why I Cry – Every Time – When I Play Chrono Trigger

May 20, 2024May 24, 2024 D. Michl Lowe1 Comment

I’ve written about it previously, but Chrono Trigger played a large part in my childhood. It was my first real RPG and the first game I played with my buddy all night. It was short enough that we could finish it in nearly two sittings, so over the course of the weekend, we were able to beat the game. My buddy didn’t even own the game; he borrowed it from a friend. However, I was hooked. That year, our local videogame rental store, Hollywood Video, was cleaning out its old stock and bringing in new. My birthday was soon, and my mom saw that this game I loved was being sold for cheap at the rental place and bought it for me. It was beat up, but it came with the box and manual.

Nowadays, paying the amount she did for it would be unheard of. I think she might have bought it for twenty dollars at the time. The current going price for a complete in-box with the manual version of the SNES version of Chrono Trigger is around $792.40. Either way, though, I think I valued the gift. It was my favorite game. I played it religiously, playing “new game +” after “new game +.” I grew to know these characters. I cared about them; they were my friends, and I invested in their little virtual lives.

That might sound odd to some people. I say that I cared about them and that they were my “friends.” Why would I feel that way about characters that are not real? Isn’t it the same as reading a book or watching a movie, I hear some of you saying? No, it’s not. The idea of the silent protagonist in this game, Crono, allows the player to insert themselves into the game as a character alongside the other characters. Because Crono doesn’t have any lines himself, he becomes an avatar for the player to place their own will, emotions, and decisions into the game.

Spoilers below for the latter half of Chrono Trigger: you have been warned!

This form of control over the story, even though it is mostly artificial in most cases, allows the player to become more emotionally engaged and involved in the story. The characters are no longer characters outside of the player but meaningful companions with whom the player has gone on adventures with and, in some cases, even died with. As most of you reading this article now know, Crono dies near the end of the game, sacrificing himself in an attempt to save the other companions.

Suddenly, you, the player, are no longer in the story and can witness the sadness and despair your companions feel at the loss of you. This brings about an interesting emotional journey. Like in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, you are allowed to see that sadness. You become a witness at that point. You are suddenly thrust out of the story and that disconnect makes you feel in some ways as if you have truly died in some way.

It might not be clear from just my writing, but I am, in fact, a man, a 42-year-old man. So my perspectives here are from a decidedly masculine perspective. Several years ago, I wrote a book entitled Men of Valor, a devotional for Christian men. In that book, one of the things I discussed was how men often gravitate toward video games in which they can be the hero, which honestly is many. Men naturally desire to be heroic in some way. Our naturally competitive and aggressive tendencies allow us to, at times, do amazing things. That is in no way meant to diminish the feminine contribution to life; I am just addressing the masculine.

However, life – at least in modern American society – does not often allow for heroic, life-threatening, and life-saving deeds. So, men have turned to artificial means to satisfy those desires. A videogame allows them to experience saving a town from a dragon or, in some more light-hearted situations, to save the Princess from Bowser, even if she is often in another castle. This might be an artificial experience, but the emotions are real.

So that brings me back to Chrono Trigger. After Crono dies, you have two choices, you can choose to leave Crono dead or go on the quest for the Chrono Trigger and use that device to stop time right before Crono is destroyed and save him. You can then replace him with the Crono doll to make it appear as if he was destroyed but really saving him. If you choose to save Crono, and you have Marle (Crono’s love interest), you get the emotional scene pictured above. Depending on who you bring in the party with you to save Crono, the scene changes, but I always take Marle; it just feels right to me.

That hug, as Crono lies back on the tree, brings me to tears every time. It’s a scene that we humans often wish could happen in our real lives—the ability to bring a loved one back from the dead. The player feels that emotion more keenly because we are part of the story. We are Crono. It is not this character we are watching go through something emotional; it is us. We are part of the story.

I know this happens to some degree in all stories, but in video games, and especially in games with silent protagonists like Chrono Trigger, we are the characters, so I would argue that, at times, we feel these emotions more deeply than in a typical entertainment medium. Growing up as a pre-teen, playing this game for the first time it allowed me to explore more mature emotional states and practice the emotional states of loss, love, and sadness in meaningful ways.

So yes, I cry almost every time I play through Chrono Trigger, which is about a once-a-year ritual for me. As a man, there are a lot of times when showing emotions is not acceptable to us. Not because of societal pressures or culture but because of our desire not to allow our emotions to impact those we care about. Showing weakness as a man can often create a feeling of insecurity in those we love. Sure there are times when it’s okay to see Daddy cry, but we often feel like those times should be few in number so as to create stability in our families. Daddy is strong; he can handle the bad times because he is tough. It might not always be correct, but it is how many men feel.

But in the safety of my own little game room, I can allow myself to feel. I can allow myself to connect artificially to my companions in a way that allows those emotions. It allows a man, or anyone really, a free space to feel and be vulnerable. I would argue that there are other good options for men to do this in real life, too, but having this sort of outlet for our feelings is important. I remember when I was a kid, there was a lot of talk about how video games bred violence and social isolation. I believe that view was false. I believe that video games, can and do allow people a safe environment to practice emotional stability and understanding. I don’t have research to back that belief up, but it is my personal belief.

Can it be a problem? Sure, like anything else, we can get overwhelmed by our fantasies and allow them to take over reality. That is a danger. But like many other things in life, I don’t believe this is the norm. I think that, for most men, video games are a way for us to explore ourselves and our relationships. For many of us, the stories and adventures we have shared in this form of entertainment is a meaningful part of our lives.

For me, I always bring Crono back from the dead. Because for me, it’s as if I have been brought back to life each time. I have been given another chance to save the world. I have been given the opportunity to continue to be the hero, even if it is only in a pretend world. In that pretend world, I mattered. In that pretend world, I was a hero. In that pretend world, I was able to create meaningful change. And if I can do it there, maybe I can do it in the real world as well. Maybe I can… and maybe you can too.

D. Michl Lowe

The Need for Honorable Men

June 29, 2022May 28, 2025 D. Michl LoweLeave a comment

This is the introduction to the book Men of Valor, by D. Michl Lowe.

I have sat back and waited. Waited on the church. Waited on my friends. Waited on society. Waited for them to start moving, to wake up and see that our world is dying. The earth itself seems to be groaning. There is a palpable tension in the air. Evil is no longer allowed to be called evil and even those who prey upon children are starting to no longer be vilified. Not to mention the devastation of abortion. There is a great need in our culture to begin unraveling the problems that most of society no longer calls sin. It must start with Christian men. It must start with them standing up to be counted.

Creating a new way of living. Showing the love and truth of Christ to the dying world, but also working to show that men are culturally here to stay. That masculinity is not something shameful, but a prideful way of expressing gender that sets us apart from our wonderful ladies. We are strong, resolute in our faith, and gentle in our demeanor. We are silken iron.

The sad truth of today’s culture is that it has become normal to understand that men are stupid, clumsy, fat, lazy, and just useless. We see characters like Chandler and Joey from the sitcom Friends who are bumbling idiots only really interested in sex. The women of the show manipulate them constantly using sexual innuendo to get what they want. In one episode, the boys have rightly won the right to live in an apartment from the girls, only to have the two girls kiss each other in front of the boys in payment for the apartment. The boys leave the apartment saying, “Totally worth it! Then go into their separate rooms giving the impression they are going to go masturbate with the memory of what they have seen. These types of scenarios play out constantly in this show.

Or we see the characters Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin from The Simpsons and Family Guy, who are always doing stupid things. Countless times in shows like these, men are nearly always seen as the idiots and women seen as the voice of reason. I understand that this is done for comedic purposes, but men are the butt of jokes nearly all the time. It is rare to see a woman portrayed in this manner. Sitcom comedies do this so often, that the idea of masculinity is now seen as negative or even wrong. This is sad because masculinity is needed. Yes, that is a bold statement to make, but one that needs to be made. Masculinity is seen as unintelligent and even crass and uncouth. To some degree, men have not helped this stereotype with our sometimes-stupid antics, but this does nothing to degrade the need for masculine men.

Matt Walsh a popular online blogger and conservative commentator said it well;

“Disrespect for men is a joke to us now. A little while ago I stopped on the way home from work to buy my wife some flowers. As she rang me up, the cashier quipped: ‘Uh-oh, what’d you do?’ I wasn’t particularly amused, but I chuckled. She continued. ‘I don’t know if that’ll be enough to get you off the couch tonight!’ Ah, yes, the old “husband is punished by his wife and sent to the couch” meme. I’m not sure if this actually happens in real life, or if it’s an invention of 90’s ‘all men are fat, witless, oafs’ sitcoms, but the popularity of the stereotype is telling. Is this how we see husbands now? A man gets ‘in trouble’ with his wife, she scolds him and puts him in time-out on the couch. Now he must placate his alpha-bride by showering her with flowers and jewelry. Men are painted like children or dogs. They can be shooed off their own beds by their wives and sent to cower in the living room until she permits him to return. This is only slightly less offensive than the cliché of the sadistic wife who punitively withholds sex from her husband. ‘You didn’t clean the garage like I told you. No sex for you, mister! Next time, follow my instructions!’”

In our schools, typical male childish behavior is seen as deviant and a problem. Psychologist Michael Thompson has famously said that girl behavior is the gold standard in schools and boys are treated like defective girls. It is sad that boy behavior is so misunderstood and hated. Our young boys are treated with disdain and are misunderstood, recently in the news, I saw where a young boy in grade school bit a pop tart into a gun shape and started playing with it. He was promptly expelled from school. This type of intolerance isn’t right. Our teachers are hamstrung in being able to implement discipline for actual negative behaviors and mandated paperwork for oversight has made it difficult to even teach what needs to be taught, so time afforded for simple physical play (an important need for young boys to exert energy) has become a secondary thought even though it’s also a mandated requirement.

This is not to say that women are less than men in any respect, but the idea that the sexes are both the same is not just silly, it’s dangerous. We are different right down to our chromosomes. Men have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome while women have two X chromosomes. Chromosomes are basically the fundamental building blocks of humanity. They contain DNA, which is the pattern by which humans are created and built. Within every human DNA is what makes a person an individual. The combining of their mother and father’s DNA has created each person; those patterns are used to create a completely new human being. Men and women are not the same and to pretend otherwise is honestly just silly.

I feel as though men are lost in our culture today. There isn’t a place for men to truly be men and embrace our masculinity. They search for meaning and purpose. One of the biggest forms of entertainment in the modern age is video games. It is estimated that by 2019 videogame yearly sales revenue would be around 41 billion dollars, not a small industry to be sure. It is a well-known fact that men tend to be consumers of the higher-end video game industry. While many women have broken into casual gaming, which accounts for many of the skewed statistics stating that women make up more than 50% of gamers, they continue to be underrepresented in the mainstream gaming market.

We would refer to most male gamers as “core” gamers in this respect, not players of Candy Crush or Angry Birds, as fun as those are. Some of this trend is changing with games that are marketed directly to women, but now it’s just the way things are. Why do so many men flock to video games? Besides the sports genre (which I believe is popular for different reasons), many of the games we see men playing involve stories and situations in which the player may assume the “role” of a hero of some kind.

Within the role of the male hero is the question, “What does it mean to be masculine?”. This idea of masculinity is idealized in the role of the male hero. Most men have a desire to be the hero of their own existence. In many PC games, one takes on the role of a hero that starts off as mostly a normal person, but through adventures and fulfilling quests begins to gain great power and becomes a leader in the vast world in which the game takes place.

In first-person shooter games on consoles and PCs alike, players often take on the role of a super soldier in a world of the future where aliens are trying to basically end all life in the universe. Through these super-soldiers, players can become the hero of the entire universe, saving humanity. It is often as if the player can save their game, sealing themselves away for a time when humanity might even need them again in the future. Self-sacrifice is a very pure form that often rises in these storylines.

While not a videogame, pen and paper role-playing games like the classic Dungeons and Dragons present a very solid argument that men are gravitating towards the realm of role-playing for a reason. In these games, you choose a “role” to play and through a form of guided storytelling, you can become the hero of your own story. Now there are a lot of reasons why all genders play these games, but for men, it often has to do with this innate desire to gain significance. God gave men this desire for significance and heroic inspiration. In Psalms 57:2 David says, “I cry out to God Most High, to God who fulfills His purpose in me.” God calls all his people into glorious purpose. For men, this is often a desire to achieve significance and meaning. This isn’t a bad thing. In the realm of working towards achieving Christ’s purpose and meaning for our lives, men can find a true significance, but when we look past God to the world for significance, something is lost.

A while back, I sat in a very questionable chair in the back of a dirty and rundown shop in a very bad part of town. My wife was worried that I was going to this place; a day before, someone had been shot only one block from this store. There were about eight of us and the unkempt appearance of the other men around me might have off-put many (along with the smell), but I was comfortable in this place. Dungeons and Dragons had a way of bringing people together. However, on this day, the man on my left was not very happy. He had failed in several rolls of the dice and his character was on the verge of death. He angrily shouted at the Dungeon Master (the leader of the game) that it wasn’t fair, letting multiple expletives leave his person.

After the game was over, he was packing up all his books and little plastic figurines he angrily threw his pack on and stormed from the table, leaving the shop. His manhood, his meaning for life was so wrapped up in the fictional character he had created, that losing it was like losing part of who he was. It was sad to see. Shouldn’t there be more for men in this life? Shouldn’t there be more for them to strive for than just a fictional monument of meaning?

The men of this generation are lost, children. Society has taken away the villains and often even denies that such a thing exists. It is no longer good or evil, there are only differing opinions and cultures. No one is wrong, and everyone is right. There isn’t an outlet for masculinity in American society that is not in some way shunned. Men are now the aborted children of society and it is time for them to take a stand and become something more than just a joke. It’s time for true purpose to come back into the darkened hearts of men.

The truth of the issue is, there is evil in the world. Some issues are not questions, but facts. There is a great need for men to be willing to stand up and be accountable to the society they live in. It is time for us to step onto the dais of history once again and take a stand for what is right. There are certain truths in this world that should be observed and should be written in stone. There are ways of viewing the world that is right. The way men treat their fellow human beings matters. One of the greatest tragedies in this life is that evil prevails because Christian men choose to do nothing. The children of God have set on the sidelines for too long and allowed the truth to be kidnaped.

The truth has a nasty way of being unpopular. No one wants to hear the truth; people want you to agree with them and validate that what they have already decided is okay in their minds. There are no real attempts to understand the other side; there is only the manipulation and deceit of tolerance. It is this idea of tolerance that’s only there to convince you that this other person is on a higher moral level. Do not be deceived into the idea that tolerance and understanding are right because “everyone is okay”; that every idea is right and moral. Acceptance is only possible if you don’t disagree and don’t speak out. According to society, the status quo of tolerance and acceptance must be maintained above all other ideals. Understand the spiritual and intellectual warfare that is going on and continue to speak the truth regardless. This is a verbal war that will not stay in that realm for long, violence and death are already in the streets.

The stance of moral and Christian truth will only be allowed for so long. Freedom as an idea is slowly moving towards being parallel with the status quo. This isn’t a call to rebellion in the sense of militaristic action, but it is a call to a rebellion of conscience and behavior. Within a framework of honor and Christian faith, men can begin to unravel the current culture of compliance and tolerance. Standing for Christian truth is not hard, but it will cost you. In fact, at some point in the future, it could cost you everything. Still, what is your soul worth?

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” Mark 8:36.

Men are becoming what society has wanted them to become, pitiful creatures that are ashamed of their own masculinity. The men make a case to dismiss God so that they can ignore his law and live their lives in selfish admission. Distractions and sin have led to a willingness to live a blinded life; a life ignorant to their own destruction. Hedonism is the new vogue and it is the greatest lie that men believe to be true. Brief moments of pleasure and fun are constantly sought out and chased after. Downtime is filled with small screens, meaningless memes, and videos of cats with bread on their heads. What are men doing with their lives? What purpose is there? What meaningful significance is there to this existence if we pass into history without changing anything for God’s better plan?

As Paul Bois said in his Oct. 17th, 2017 Daily Wire article,

“…when knights surrender their swords, beasts shall devour maidens.” In a country and culture ruled over by Harvey Weinsteins, one can only raise the question; as Paul asks, “Are there any knights left”?

This has been the Introduction to Men of Valor, by D. Michl Lowe. Available now in full from this website. or at the link here:

https://amzn.to/3Pi WUoz

D. Michl Lowe