Heroes

On a family road trip once I asked our children who their heroes were.  Being good Sunday School students they answered, "Jesus" - the safest answer to most Sunday School questions.  I pushed them beyond that and asked, "who, beside Jesus?"  There were a number of answers ranging from family friends to a favored babysitter.  I think it a good question to ask both children and adults.  I think that we need heroes.

Heroes are people we admire and respect, whom we would like to emulate.  I think that I have historically been a bit afraid of having heroes.  Perhaps it is because I have felt the pressure to "be my own person" or some narcissistic need to unique.  Perhaps also I have been hero-adverse because I think it is envy.

A few thoughts.  First, I am not my own person.  This is true both biblically and practically.  Biblically I am physically shaped by God (knit together in my mother's womb - Psalm 139).  My life, my personhood is also under his sovereignty.  I am not my own, I was bought with a price (I Corinthians 6).  Practically I am influenced by those around me - parents, teachers, coaches, friends.  I am who I am because of the others who have influenced and shaped, both positively and negatively.  The advantage of having conscious heroes is that I am making choices on whom I want to influence me.

Second,  I am unique but also like everyone else.  I have physical, intellectual and character traits that are in combination unique, but at the same time individually very much like mobs of other people.  My strengths and weaknesses I share with many others in the human race.  Temptation with which I struggle is as St. Paul says, "common to all men." (I Corinthians 10)  While there is a grandiose desire to be one of a kind, there is greater comfort in knowing that I am part of a large common family who laughs, hurts, hopes, sins and triumphs just like me.

Third, there is a difference between admiration and envy.  Envy, as I have written about before, is about emptiness, a craving of the characteristics or possessions of another.  It does not produce love but division and hatred.  Admiration, rather, impels me to be like that other - not that I resent his or her having those characteristics, but because I think them good and worth emulating.  Admiration encourages me to become more.  Envy does not.

I have heroes.  Some are authors I have read, among them Dorothy Sayers, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.  Some are people whom I have met and who have profoundly influenced my life.  These are people I have tried to emulate.   It is interesting to note that most whom I would name as heroes would be appalled at being called out and named as such.  They are people who are not inclined to have attention focused on them, but rather on Jesus.  That's one of the things I admire about them.  Humility. Something I would like to emulate.