Ask RC: Which is the greatest super-hero?

We could, in the spirit of political correctness, suggest that such a question is out of bounds. We could affirm that everyone is special in their own way, and protect the self-esteem of the supers. On the other hand, we could have a debate over the right criteria by which to judge. Are we asking who has the coolest super-power? Who has the best alter ego? Whose transformation story is the most compelling? Indeed once one finds the proper criteria by which to judge, the answers just seem to come naturally.

I have two competing criteria that I value highly. Not wanting to choose I will therefore divide the question in two, affirming which is the greatest classic super-hero and which is the greatest modern superhero. First the classic.

By classic I mean those supers whose beginnings came in the heyday of the comic book. Here we find some astonishing super-powers, some engaging alter egos, and some compelling back stories. The best standard, I would argue, however, is this- who makes the most of what he’s got? Which means, of course, that Batman wins, hands down. Batman, frankly, has no super-powers. He is not from another planet, or a lost civilization.  He has not been infected with radiation, nor visited by ancient gods. No, Batman fights with his wealth, his wits and his will. The first two, wealth and wits, create the technology that is so vital to his battle plan. It is his iron will, however, that brings it all together. Criminals fear him not because of what he can do, but because of what he wants- justice.  In the first “battle” of the first modern movie account Batman holds a terrified petty criminal over the edge of a skyscraper. The terrified thug squeaks out, “What are you?” And Batman had me at “I’m Batman, and I want you to tell all your friends about me.”

I’m not the most physically gifted man in the world. I never was growing up. But I have always been competitive. Will means quite a bit to me, and so Batman receives one crown.  On the other hand, as a dad raising eight children I have in recent years come to see the heroism called for in leading a family. Most supers are socially awkward, isolated, islands. One modern hero, however, exhibits the greatest of virtues- he loves his wife and children. Indeed he loves his wife and children enough to endure the crushing weight of hiding his super-ness.  Mr. Incredible wins my vote in the modern category not because of his astonishing super gifts, but because of his ordinary and therefore inspiring love for his family.  I want not to be like his super-identity, but his alter ego, for that, in this instance, is not only who he really is, but who he really wants to be.

In the real world we value the wrong things. We value skills over drive, abilities over willingness. We think our job rather than our family is our calling.  Which is why it’s good to have heroes, but why we have to choose them with care. 

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Missing Missing

My wife would be pleased with me. As I do far too infrequently, I uncluttered my desk today. You should see how nice it looks. In so doing, however, I came across another old stack of sympathy cards sent months ago from friends and strangers. I read through them, and found myself lonesome for a surprising time, the day my Denise went on to glory. In a previous piece I wrote about how, crossing the barrier of forty days of mourning made me fear that I would miss Denise all the more. I suggested that the more I mourned the more it seemed she was with me. Turns out I was right.

As I read through those cards I was taken back to that first day. Denise passed very early on Sunday morning, December 18^th. After taking care of necessary details in the nursing facility I headed home to tell my children. After we talked and cried and hugged I got myself cleaned up, and headed off the church. My thought was that what I needed most of all at that moment was to meet with Jesus, and to be reminded of His grace, His gospel. Turns out I was right.

As I sat there that morning however, I didn’t have the sense that she had left me. Indeed I felt more like we were going to go through this together, that she would walk me through my mourning. She would speak to me the words of life. She would hold me when I could not sleep. She would encourage me to do the next thing. She would remind me to give thanks. Though I do not pretend to know if she sees me. I believed she would make certain that I sensed her with me.  Turns out I was right.

As I look back on that morning, however, somehow now I look back alone. Of course I still cry. I still mourn, even as I type. I miss her laughter, her hand, her beautiful eyes. But somehow as time moves on what I end up missing is the comfort and closeness she somehow gave even after she had gone.  She doesn’t sit beside me when I’m alone in the car anymore. She doesn’t look over my shoulder when I am typing and crying alone anymore. Somehow the more time passes, the farther she is gone, not because I am forgetting her, but because I am remembering her. The great heartbreak is that she is now becoming my past, rather than my ever present.

Denise was carried by Jesus out of the valley of the shadow of death. She now dances with Him on the mountain of the lightness of life.  She has, rightly, wisely, and through the very love of our Savior, left me. And I feel lost. By His grace, however, I have a path to follow. For His pieced feet leave bloody prints all the way out of the valley, all the way up the mountain. I will follow Him, who promised to be with me, even until the end of the age. He is a blessed man to dance with her. I am a blessed man to follow Him.

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Apples to Apples

Because there is such a great divide between the city of God and the city of man, though both occupy the same space, it is not always easy to judge how the battle is going.  To compare the sweetest, most joy filled full-quiver homeschooling family with the most dysfunctional broken family hardly seems fair. That’s because it isn’t fair, though it is equally unfair to compare the government educated spiritual super-hero evangelist with the meth making family that “homeschools” only because such a claim might keep the government at bay.

The hard truth is that the unbelievers’ best sometimes looks a lot more honorable than the believers’ worst. But the more honest question is, how are each of us doing in the middle? Is the average professing Christian living a more God-honoring life than the average unbeliever? In short, yes.

Tonight I attended a celebration of a couple that has been married for fifty years. This couple belongs to a church that was less than fundamentalist, less than conservative. This couple had three children, and sent them all to the government schools, all the way through college.  When the children were young the mom stayed home while the dad earned a living to support the family. 

Compare this ordinary but God-honoring faithfulness with the average unbelieving family. Is it likely that this family is untouched by adultery, divorce, drug abuse? Is it likely that this family is even still a family? Forty percent of children in America are born to unmarried moms.  Another 1.2 million are murdered by their moms. Forty percent of marriages end in divorce. Government dependence, crushing debt, dysfunctional families, substance abuse are average in the average modern family.

The point is not, of course, that Christians are by themselves better people than non-Christians. “Such once were we” is something Christians must never forget.  Nor should we ever lose sight of our continuing struggles with sin. Rather such a comparison actually demonstrates this truth- as the Christian faith becomes an alternate culture rather than shaping the broader culture, decadence in the broader culture will be defined downward. The Greatest Generation were not all Christian. But they knew what it meant to sacrifice for others. My parents’ generation were not all Christians, but they knew a thing or two about commitment.

One of the blessings of a culture leaving the Christian faith is it becomes increasingly difficult to confuse cultural Christianity and the genuine article. Christians have to choose between being normal and being Christian. One of the great disadvantages is watching our neighbors in Babylon create such spectacular car crashes with their lives.  Worse still is when they crash into our lives.

Our culture is in rapid decline. That decline is more likely to increase rather than reverse. Being salt and light includes preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. It includes loving our neighbors, without identifying with them.  It means looking like oranges in a world full of apples. It means also, however, living in peace and quietness with all men, as much as is possible. When a man honors the wife of his youth, when he saves rather than spends, when he commits his time and energy to his children, the beauty of the reign of Jesus Christ shines forth.

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Ask RC: What should I do when feeling completely overwhelmed?

What should I do when feeling completely overwhelmed, with a "to do" list as long as the Matterhorn is high, while wanting only to pull the bed covers over my head?

Three things. The first is to give thanks. Like most clichés, this one became a cliché because it is a powerful and pithy truth- I cried for having no shoes, until I met a man with no legs. This does not mean that all of us should find one person who is having a harder time than we are, and all of us, save one, the winner of the Job of the Moment award, would perk up. And when the winner loses his title for some other Job, he can begin to cheer up. Rather it reminds us that we all have much for which we should be grateful.  Being joyful for what we have doesn’t tempt us to rest on our laurels, but motivates us to act, to get up and fulfill our calling. If we are in Christ and are ungrateful, we are being blinded.

Which brings us to the second thing we ought to do- repent and believe the gospel. We should in fact be ashamed when we are overcome with that “pull the sheets over our head” feeling. Jesus told us that His yoke is easy, His burden light. When we are feeling overwhelmed we are calling Him a liar. Having faced our failure, having entered into our shame, however, we move quickly to believing the gospel. Jesus died for our shameful feelings. He died for our calling Him a liar. And He not only forgives us, but loves us with an everlasting love. He knows everything there is to know about us, including those sins we can’t even face ourselves, and still, He loves us.

This, of course, brings us back to step one. That is, as we believe the gospel, we once again must give thanks.

The last step is as simple and easy as the first two-I must do the first thing on my list. When it is done, I must do the next thing on our list. Of course, when we give thanks, when we repent and believe the gospel, we notice a few things about our list. It begins to shrink. What we discover is that the more we are persuaded that we have all that we could ever want or imagine in Christ Jesus we discover we don’t need to do this or do that to try to satisfy our souls.

All that ought to remain on our list is loving our neighbors. That may mean doing dishes, or folding laundry, but when we do these chores we are actually loving our neighbors. We are serving them.

Since my wife passed I am constantly asked how I am doing. I am so grateful for people’s concerns. The truth is I do have a long to-do list, even without my honey making me honey-do lists. I also feel the weight of the sorrow of missing her that beckons me to spend the day in bed. I can’t, however, curl up in a ball because of my life’s work. I have eight children to care for, children who miss their mom every bit as much as do. For all my sadness over the loss of my wife, I yet have what we have made, by His grace, together, these precious children. They need their dad more than I need a day in bed. In loving, in serving them, my wounds begin to heal and I am reminded I am not a man without shoes looking at children without feet. I am instead the richest man in the world, because of the children who are my, and His heirs. Give thanks. Repent. Believe the gospel. And get to work.

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Lambs to the Slaughter

It is a sure sign of the perversity of our world that we find ourselves having to grade, to rate, to rank the perversity of our world. There is not one evil out there, nor even one evil in here. Instead evil has as many faces as the world has fingerprints. It is a second sure sign of our perversity that we succumb to the temptation of grading perversity on a scale of its closeness to us. That is, because we are evil, we judge our own evil to be good, our friends’ evil to be fair, and only evil in distant time zones to be truly evil.

Because I am pridefully averse to jumping on both cultural and sub-cultural bandwagons, I have only just today watched the Kony video. Like everyone else, I was appalled at the great evil of this one man. Like everyone else, I wept with Jacob over his lost brother. Like everyone else I not only wanted Kony stopped, but wanted to help. As the father of eight children there are few things that pierce my crusty exterior than when children are so badly treated. These children, thirty-thousand of them so far, have been taken away from their parents. The girls have been turned into sexual playthings, the boys turned into child-killers.

One need not, however, have a potent imagination to conjure an evil greater still. One need not have an imagination at all. One need only walk down ones own street. There is no Kony in America. There are instead 1800 men and women in this country alone, far more evil, far more perverse than Kony. These 1800 do not steal children from their parents. Instead, the parents, over a million of them every year, give their children freely. Indeed they pay to have them taken away. These 1800 do not turn the girls into sexual playthings, though they do help ensure their moms can continue to be sexual playthings. They do not turn the boys into child-killers. Instead they are child killers, mutilating little unborn babies to pieces.

That the world has been dutifully outraged over Kony’s outrage is not, I’m sorry to conclude, a hopeful sign. I did not come away from the film either discouraged by the evil of men like Kony, nor encouraged by the goodness of those who wish to stop him. I came away sick to my stomach. How many of those earnest young people, I wonder, have murdered their own children? How many of them would show the same passion for protecting their “reproductive rights?” Worse still, how many people like me, convinced Christian pro-lifers, will wear the Kony bracelet, but won’t ask their pastor to preach against the greatest evil of our day? How many people like me, convinced Christian pro-lifers, will be swayed by the magic of viral internet marketing to “get involved” on Kony, who at the same time are embarrassed when hard-core pro-lifers carry around pictures of aborted babies?

Kony, to the minds of most evangelicals, is a war criminal. Abortion, in the minds of most evangelicals, is a political issue. Kony must be stopped in 2012. Abortion, well, we’ll just keep voting in moderately pro-life politicians, hoping they might appoint moderately pro-life judges who might one day hear a case that might one day put a dent in Roe v. Wade that one day might be overturned, but not, thank goodness, until our daughters are all safely married.

There is great evil in the world- an evil that responds with polite, hushed tones to well-heeled white people, living in our neighborhoods, who murder babies for a living. And there is a great evil in me, that I accept this.

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