Lore

Time tends to exaggerate reality. The longer a memory sits & marinates, the longer the tale grows. 

The first time I went back to my home town after years of separation, everything seemed so much smaller than I'd remembered.  The lake that went on forever had somehow adopted a new boundary.  The houses on Lake Shore Drive that used to intimidate the snot out of me had shrunk down into what seemed little more than middle-class homes.  Even the Civic Center looked like an average-sized venue.  It was as if I'd returned from the Land Of The Giants.  It was all sort of dizzying. 

And yet, what I just described, is exactly how legends are created.  The character traits in people from the pages of history books end up looming much larger than the pages of reality.  There tends to be a disconnect between them and us; and, for the sake of having heroes, we force relevance out of the picture.  We'd rather believe in a fictitious version of their life's account if it gives us an added hope to cling to -- no matter how false that sense of security may be.  In so doing, we've immortalized these figures into an almost demi-god level of status.

As a Christian, the dangers of buying into this tendency is in that disconnect I mentioned.  We start assuming that the disciples & the apostles of the New Testament were given some exclusive gift of "sainthood" that enabled them to live out their struggles from an otherwise, unattainable level of divinity.  I believe in having heroes to model our lives from; but, when the relevance is lost, it's almost as if we start exercising our spiritual walk from the foundation of denial instead of the rock of reality that Jesus so longed to build beneath us.  These guys were just like us.  The very reason their lives were included within the canon was for the sake of relevance.  The ferocity of their struggles was just as impossible as ours.  Their flesh was just as thin & weak as ours.  They were us.

What we are to read, internalize, and walk away with is how they overcame.  Not what level of sainthood they attained.  Their accounts are there for us all to unearth that enemy-clouded hope of actually winning this thing.      

Comments

[Jennifer Eckert]

Good words Marty. They are something for us to think about and remember.

[Susie]

So true indeed. I have heard so many sermons which seem to have an underlying assumption that when different biblical heroes were going through hard times, they never doubted or struggled...yet if you look at it, even John the Baptist, the one who said "Behold the Lamb of God", later asked his cousin "are you really the one?" Or in the book of James where it talks about the power of Elijah's prayers shutting up the skies for three years, and yet he was "a man, with a nature like ours."

Thanks for the reminder, Marty!