There He Goes, A Hero

Many spend their childhoods dreaming of behing heroes. With great imagination, curiosity, and innocence, we spent time dressing up as our favorite characters... some real, some imaginary. One of the most popular "hero" costumes of all times has to be the firefighter. Heck, I still dress as a firefighter on Halloween, but that's generally a combination of laziness and a lack of creativity. But who wouldn't want to save the day? Children have an innate desire to emulate heroes; they spend time dreaming about being the hero.

Sometimes I think back to when I first joined the local fire service. My buddies and I joined at the same time and honestly thought we were going to spend our time running through fire and saving people. I still spend some of my time in training in preparation for the times when a life does need to be saved. It's in every heartbeat of a firefighter: Save people. Be a hero. Save the day. Even though I am a little less "wet behind the ears" in fire service now and have a little less of a naive approach to the tasks I complete, I still like to study about notable rescues across fire service. When a notable rescue comes available in some report or news story, I jump at the opportunity to read it; I even catch myself sometimes imagining how I might have reacted in the same situation. Do I have the abilities to do what this hero did?

Too many people grow up and forget what it is like to dream of being the hero. Sometimes we still want to be the guy that saves the day, but we imagine ourselves in our own skin being the hero. Remember when we were children and, when we imagined being the hero, we literally imagined ourselves in the very suit of the hero? Sometimes the imagination carried us to a place where we wore the giant 'S' on our chest... some other times it was a fire helmet. Other times it was a set of handcuffs in a game of cops and robbers. One thing was always the same. We weren't just being ourselves dressed as some hero. We WERE that hero. We were literally emulating one specific human being or character. We WERE Superman... just ask us.

What is it like to be an adult and still imagine ourselves emulating a hero? I'd say that's the definition of a follower of Jesus. Take the following examples into account.
-Jesus gave us instructions to have the faith of a child. (Matthew 18)
-We are to be transformed into the very image of Christ. (2 Corinthians 3)
-We are to emulate Christ's very actions in this world. (No link to a verse on this one; just read the Gospels and you'll get the idea.)
-We are to be "Little Jesuses" (ReJesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church)

Look, bottom line is we get to be heroes. Much like the comic books we combed through as a child, searching for clues as to how we could be a better Superman... we are given the blueprint of how to emulate the savior of the world... someone even Superman could look up to.

I still want to be a hero. The only difference is that now, when I picture a hero, he's not wearing bunker gear.