Heroes

Nimrod, Genghis Khan, Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Alexander, Caesar Augustus, Elijah, Elisha, David, Solomon, Luther, Tyndale, George Fox, Napoleon, Victoria, Elizabeth, Henry VIII, George Washington, Kaiser Wilhelm, William “Wild Bill” Cody, Sherman, Lincoln, Grant, Hitler, Stalin, Eisenhower, Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus, John Kennedy, Reagan, Mother Theresa, Buddha, Ghandi, Desmond Tutu. Each of these has her or his place in history; each is famous, infamous or both. Each has books written about them; they are included in histories. We know their names, can tell their deeds. To some extent, we feel we know them and can identify with them. Therein lies the rub.

In some way, as we read their stories, we transmogrify into the hero. It is I who am conquering the invincible Persian army; Europe; the far, middle near east and eastern Europe; modern Europe. It is I who reign over vast empires or change the course of history with marches and strikes. I am the servant who achieves fame in a Calcutta slum or in a resistor’s prison cell. I become, for the few hours of the book’s read, the hero.

In the flyleaf of my first Bible, given to me by my parents at my eighth-grade graduation, my mother wrote: “Someday you will do great things for God.” This one sentence colored the whole of my life from then on. Looking back at that distant time from near-retirement, I realize that I haven’t done great things for Him. On the contrary, I’ve been more trouble to Him than accomplishing great things for Him. Now I know that His grace, love and forgiveness are sufficient; that He died for me just like He did for you, but that is not the point of this essay.

In reading biographies and histories; when considering high-sounding and well-meant challenges, I find myself faced with a dilemma. Urged to do and be great, challenged to achieve, led by example and story to expect to accomplish “great things,” I find myself a great disappointment rather than living the life of a world changer. I find that I have lived a rather ordinary life: some ups, some downs; some accomplishments in a limited sphere, a dash of being known and recognized among some small groups, a bit of infamy in others. Nowhere among all the days of my life can I point to one experience in which I did, said or demonstrated some great act either of evil or of good. Humdrum, boring, ordinary, are the adjectives that describe my life. The most exciting thing that happened to me was riding in a police car at age six after being kidnapped by an escaping psychiatric patient (a story which stood me in good stead all through my elementary school years.)

Enough whining.

So what am I; what are we, the ordinary, to make of our lives when faced with so much pressure to excel? How do we deal with our ordinariness; our seeming lack of accomplishments? Are we to feel cheated? Should we feel we haven’t lived up to our potential? Should we do some horrendous deed in order to go out in a blaze of well-televised terror? Just how are we to justify our lives to ourselves?

Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying, “God must love ordinary people, He made so many of them.” Of course, we quote him because He made profound statements but he was also at the top of his game-president of the United States. Does being a part of the “so-many-of-them” justify such ordinariness or are we not so much destined to be ordinary as we have just failed at the greatness test?

At one time, I owned a crystal (the name of which I cannot remember). Its dimensions were approximately 2” long by ¾” wide by ½” thick. The top and bottom surfaces were parallel, but the top layer was skewed as if someone had pressed on the bottom left corner to make the top surface slide up an right. Of course the sides were all slightly angled to accommodate this shift. The crystal was clear or almost so. Holding the crystal over a line drawn on a piece of paper would show the line as a single line. Turning the crystal a few degrees, however, split the single line into two. Rotating it further, the line would once again appear as a single line. This has something to do with diffraction, but don’t ask me to explain it as Wikipedia is down today in protest against SOPA.

Perhaps, viewing our ordinary lives in one direction, against the backdrop of a mothers’ hopes and dreams; against our identification with heroes; the internal dreams of wealth, fame and recognition, our lives appear as a single line-common and pointless. Re-oriented just a few degrees, each ordinary life dissolves into an alternate vista: hidden in its everydayness, perhaps, is a jewel of constancy, a golden crown of faithfulness; an unseen act of bravery, sharing, giving, kindness. We may perform some single unseen act, unknown even to us. Perhaps that act will mellow into a rich loam from which a an exotic plant will eventually grow. Perhaps the branches will produce a fruit essential to one or many or all in some future generation. It is, after all, in soil produced from rotting vegetable matter and worm castings in which we grow our food--not in a bed of diamonds.

We can, I think, still enjoy the biographies of great people while realizing that each of us, in our own small worlds unsung, unrecognized, unremarked, may just be that great one to one other person. Perhaps we ourselves will not even know it.

So, if you, like me, have lived an ordinary, unremarkable life, let’s join together and sing of the greatness, the fame, the glory of the multitude. Let’s look for that greatness in the ordinary lives of those around us. Maybe in the noting of it in their life, we may recognize it in ourselves. But even if that doesn’t happen, we can know that, together, we make up the soil from which greatness springs and know, in that small contribution, we made our mark.

Live on in joy and contentment, we ordinary ones. Look through the prism at the alternate image; Look at yourself through God’s lens: You are holy, blameless, adopted, redeemed, forgiven, heir, priest – chosen before you were born to this great destiny.* It is in His recognition of you, viewed through the glorious lens of His Son, that we have identity; in Him we are heroes.
• (See Ephesians 1:3 and following verses)

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