I remember back in the days when nothing in this universe would stop me. I had trained under the best ninja’s in the world; the ninja turtles. At any given time I was outside making weapons and living in this place where I was a super hero. I was going to save the world and defeat all the evil so that this world would be a better place! So I kept training… picking up my BO staff mimicking every move Donatello did, then grabbing my nun-chucks only to hit myself in the face and family jewels countless times. Taking my sai and throwing them at a target that I put on trees all over my backyard and coming nowhere close to even hitting them. But that wasn’t enough to master evil, I had to make my own swords out of cardboard and sticks to be just like my favorite ninja turtle, Leonardo. Every move he took I wanted to be just like him, I don’t know if it was because he had swords or wore blue, that was irrelevant. Cow-a-bung a dude, and radical came out of my mouth frequently because the more I talked like him the more I thought I was him. With this training nothing would stop me from saving this world from evil and I was prepared for anything that would be thrown my way.
But something happened, I started to mature and that phase began to fade. A reality about life started to become real to me that this world is harder than just training to defeat shredder and the foot soldiers. There was something more evil out there that I couldn’t defeat. In middle school I had a really good buddy get in the car without wearing his seat belt and was ejected. He died on impact and there was nothing I could do to save him. I didn’t have a super hero power that could bring him back to life and in fact I was helpless. He was gone! That was the purest of evil that I could ever experience. Why would he have to die like that??
Lately I can’t hide from the reality of this world. We live in a place that will experience death, pain, sorrow, and hurt! Cancer is becoming more common, suicide rates are rising, and this world is just getting worse and there is nothing that I can do to change that… That is a tough reality because the bible foretells the future of mankind. It tells us that we are living in the end times and the more we take our super hero Jesus out of the equation the more we will see it get worse. So what do we do? All of our hopes of changing the world and making it a better place will only work if we can bring more Jesus into this world. He is LOVE, and LOVE is what diminishes HATE.
It is pretty simple, if we want to be a super hero to anybody we have to save them from an eternal separation of God and His love; and how we do that is bring them to the one who has already defeated death and has all authority and power over all creation. We have to tell them the good news of Jesus Christ and how sin requires justice for its wrongfulness, that He stepped in and paid for. Only through His Grace can we find joy through the pain and struggles before we go to heaven which will be perfect. Jesus is the real super hero, but the question is…. Do you believe and have faith?
