I am guilty of letting my care and attention wander with the public eye. I am easily distracted by sensationalist headlines about the latest political debacle. But as Christians, we must struggle against this attention deficit.
The great lie of our lives is that we are the main subject. The great villainy is the idea that we are the heroes. We have a debilitating hero complex.
But what else? What more can we say about heroes and villains? I don’t think it requires much life experience to realize that our heroes are often not so heroic, and our villains hold some goodness somewhere in themselves.
It is nigh impossible to neither seek nor desire our own justice, to remove the impulse for vengeance, to love utter mercy. But so too is it impossible to be holy as He is holy, and still that is our aim.
We’re immersed in an rapidly evolving environment, demanding from individuals more entrepreneurial energy rather than trusting an institution like a company, academy, or government, to carry us from cradle to grave.
We need to remember, Stokes says, that sometimes, we are someone else’s hero. Sometimes, we are someone else’s mentor. Sometimes, we are simply a minor character. Sometimes, we are someone else’s villain.
In the majority of cases, this is because I feel that I have been inaccurately assessed: that my abilities, knowledge, and effort were not reflected by the grade I had received.
So what are we to do? We can’t go back to the original garden, where all was good and very good, now that we’ve eaten the fruit and know the direction of evil is also an option.
There is security in thinking that I don’t own a gun or make prejudicial proclamations to my friends or have a backwoods-y bowl-cut. If I can see a villain, I can know I’m not one.
I think I spent my whole childhood waiting in anticipation of 6th grade. In kindergarten, we got 6th grade buddies who would read to us once a week and play with us on the playground.
