Superheroes

I have a confession to make: I love superheroes. I spent a fair amount of time growing up pretending to be one. I still love superheroes. And heroes in general, really. Today I was thinking about why that is. Part of it is because I am a romantic in the English major sense. The original romances were the stories of knights, chivalry, daring-do, and doing the right thing no matter what. Action-adventure stories. That's really what superhero stories are. The knights of the old stories were often aided by magic or some other unknown, superheroes have powers. Same concept. However, the heroes are never perfect. Yet another reason I'm so drawn to the stories. Who wants a perfect character? It sounds good in theory, but really, that would be one boring character. There would be no tension and no room for development. Flaws make the character real. We're rooting for them to overcome their issues and the right thing, the thing we know they are capable of, if they can just see it. Then I thought about that list I posted the other day. The one that listed the issues of various people in the Bible. Flawed people who accomplished the impossible. People who were called to do things they legitimately weren't capable of doing. They didn't have super powers to help them out either. But the had something better. They had the God of the universe behind them.Nothing would have happened without Him. We don't usually think about it this way, but I feel like they deserve the title of hero. Not because of what they did, because it wasn't them at all. But because they trusted God and allowed Him to work in their lives. As I admitted earlier, I'm a romantic. I like to see my life as a grand adventure. The idea of living a mundane life, being comfortable, and waking up one day to realize I haven't done anything in my life scares me more than almost anything else. But that adventure isn't something out of my reach. I just need to trust God enough to live it.