My secret identity

I’m sure everybody reading this blog knows what a big geek I am, so it should come as no surprise that I love superheroes. One of my clearest memories from childhood is running around my grandparents’ house pretending to be Firestar, working with Spider Man, the Wonder Twins and Ice Man to beat the bad guys. (I was an only child, so to say I had an active imagination might be an understatement.) I was somewhat conflicted in my desire to be a superhero in that I occasionally would get captured (damsel in distress!) and have to be rescued before going back to beating up bad guys. But I loved pretending to be a superhero. I still love superheroes, although I think I've come to love warrior princesses more. I never pretended to be Snow White or Sleeping Beauty (well, except for singing slightly operatic songs around the house), but Princess Leia was awesome, and even now one of my favorite LOTR characters is Lady Eowyn.

I have often daydreamed of being something bigger than myself, preferably with the talent for the awesome and witty one-liners. I LOVE awesome and witty one-liners. I’m sure I’m not the only one, or nobody would have saved the reported response of the Spartan King Leonidas when told that his comparatively tiny army should lay down its arms at Thermopylae – “Come and take them.” Or the Spartan who, when told that the enemy arrows would be so numerous as to block out the sun, said “we shall have our fight in the shade.” Or Maximus, in the movie “Gladiator” – “what we do in life echoes in eternity.”

Don’t we all want to feel like our actions echo through eternity, like what we do makes a difference? You often hear about mothers making such a difference, but I’m not a mother. I would love to be a warrior princess with the awesome one-liners. But without pain. I don’t like pain. And without fear would be good. A little fear is okay, but nothing too serious.

And this is where I acknowledge that my desire to be a witty warrior princess is completely divorced from reality. Because let’s face it, I don’t go to the gym enough or have sufficient hand-eye coordination to ever be a good warrior princess. There was one time I was really in a position to help make the kind of difference that would echo through the years – when I was leading a pastor search in a city where intense spiritual warfare is pretty much the norm (there are groups that pray every week for the destruction of the Christian church in that city). I ended up curled in a ball on my bed crying to God that I can’t do this thing I’ve been set to do and if He wants it done, He’ll have to do it through me and in spite of my many weaknesses. 

But you know what? He did!

That’s the amazing thing about all of this – God is the ultimate “superhero”, who doesn’t just operate outside natural laws in a few areas, but who created all of those natural laws and operates outside all of them. And He chooses to use His people – mere jars of clay – to accomplish great things if we’ll only let Him. 

You can only go forward

Maybe this is incredibly self-absorbed of me, but I always find it to be a bit surreal to leave a job or a home. It always seems odd to me that after the goodbyes are said, I quietly walk away and people go back to living their lives. Life goes on without me, and the role I played in that relationship or organization is filled by somebody else.

Moving on is a part of life, and I can never really go back. I can remember my time there with fondness, but it can never be repeated. I’ve changed; those people have changed; the circumstances have changed. We can get together, relive old memories and catch up on what has happened since then. But our ability to pick up as friends again depends on whether they like and accept the changes in me since our last meeting and vice versa. If I’ve turned into a brat while I’ve been away, no amount of fond memories will entice my old friends to hang out with me again.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in meditating on Psalm 119:3, stated, “With God one does not arrive at a fixed position; rather, one walks along a way. One moves ahead or one is not with God. God knows the whole way; we only know the next step and the final goal. There is no stopping; every day, every hour it goes farther. Whoever sets his foot on this way finds that his life has become a journey on the road. It leads through green pastures and through the dark valley, but the Lord will always lead on the right pathway (Ps. 23) and he will not let your foot be moved (Ps. 121:3).”

Looking at my life, I can say that it definitely feels like a journey. My hope is that I’m always moving forward in the direction that God is leading. My trust is in the understanding that God has a plan and a purpose, that He is working my life into what will one day be a glorious tapestry.

This may seem like a non sequitur, but…  Loving people is risky. You make yourself vulnerable. What makes such a risk possible is the knowledge that God loves me dearly, is always by my side and will never leave me. May I carry this knowledge always in the depths of my soul. But people come and go, and at this moment in time, I know that person will be me. 

I’ll be leaving in a year and a half, and I know that leaving friends and family will hurt horribly. Any friendships I now have will be put at risk of fading away into fond memories. True, there is email and skype and facebook and any number of other ways to maintain the friendship when you don’t see the person on a regular basis, but that takes effort that is not seen much in this day and age. However, if I try to protect myself from pain by locking up my heart and not developing deep friendships, I will miss out on the most precious moments of life, and I won’t be the woman God has called me to be, a woman who loves God and loves others. So I must continue to build relationships, to love. Lord willing, my dear friends and I will be close for decades to come. At the very least, I must treasure these moments of the journey and hope that I have touched lives in a positive way.