Everyone who knows me well, or at least for a long time, knows I love heroes. Not necessarily superheroes – I’m not much on the tights.
Heroes were everything to me growing up. It wasn’t ever something I chose to love. I just one day found someone that caught my attention and thought, “I have to be them.” So every ounce of my mind and energy was spent in boundless devotion to these people. What I found along the way is that my obsession wasn’t even just with the person – it was with this image I had in my head of who they were. I honestly never paid attention to what they did after they caught my attention initially. I had moments/phrases/images that ran through my head and were enough to consume everything I did.
My mom always said my little brother and I had good imaginations. Let’s be honest, imaginary worlds are way better than the real world. Imaginary worlds meant that your mom had to draw the hair from Dragon Ball Z so you could tape in on your forehead and go spar on the trampoline (I did this every single day, by the way).
As I’ve gotten older, I still carry this characteristic with me. It runs so deep into who I am. I still have heroes, some of them the ones of my youth. Heroes stay heroes if they are good heroes, I guess. And I’m grateful to have found good heroes when I was young. But I also have discovered that there is a flip-side to having a hero: you can’t actually be them. The little boy that Spider-Man swings in to say 'hey' to one day realizes that he can’t be Spider-Man; he’s got to be his own version of Spider-Man.
I think it took me longer than most to realize this. I am not my heroes. No matter how many times I wear the costume or say the catch phrase, I am stuck as me. Now that sounds like bad news, but I’m hear to tell you that there is something so much better. I am me and you are you. In the end, I always find another hero. Why is that the case? In reality, no one is yet who I am becoming because only I was made to be him, for good and for worse.
I’m discovering that both my desire to be someone else and my desire to stay me are the same desire. I, like you, am an image bearer of the One God. There’s a part of me that’s not content to just be me. But that’s a good thing because I am not yet who I was made to be. Sure, a person is a process and I am still being saved from things that are wrong, not to mention I am still learning about what I actually like and don’t like.
Heroes are good because you see in them things that you want to be and can tangibly follow in their lead. Most likely, they probably learned it from someone else along the way. I’m here to encourage you to choose your heroes well. You probably have already chosen some. And also to remember that you are different from them in a wonderful way. You only speak like your parents as long as you are learning to speak and then you begin to speak in your own way. Who knows, maybe you’ll end up being someone else’s hero.
