Have I Got the Heart of a Hero?

Do you have the heart of a hero? Do you have the spirit of a superhero?

My favorite superhero stories are the ones in which the protagonist has no supernatural ability, no bizarre biologic mutation. His main superpower is his iron will to act and keep acting against anything the bad guy can throw at him.

How about you? Do you have the heart of a hero? We would like to say yes. But what do our actions say? What do you do…

• When life gets hard, when unexpected boulders fall flat onto your plans and leave you bewildered and in pain?
• When life feels hard, when everything unexpectedly gets gloomy, when a mists rolls in over the life which seemed great yesterday?
• When you’re exhausted, when you feel it’s torture to pull another once of effort from your aching body?
• When everything people around you say and do feel like the grating sound of fingernails scraping slowly against a chalkboard?
• When the constant weight of anxiety seems finally to be too much, and you find yourself obsessed with worry and smothering in it?

Do you give up? Just stop caring? Go hide in a room, disappear on your phone or laptop? Do you mope? Do you feel sorry for yourself? Do you replay in your head, again and again, all the pictures of how you wish life would be?

Do you get angry with people? Do you fume inside about the way you wish other people would react in your hard times? Do you get outwardly angry, and yell at the people closest to you and treat everyone around you like you’re a grumpy bear? 

What you do can change now. Take on a superhero’s willpower to do some of these:

• Get up and work on something.
• Decide things don’t need to be different; instead, be different to things.  
• Choose to think about how you make people around you feel, instead of how they are making you feel.
• Punch through that wall when you hit up against it: fight the exhaustion and do what needs to be done.
• Stop wishing things were different, and go enjoy the way things are now. Work to make things better.
• Have faith times will change if you can only last long enough to see it.
• Get up and work on something. Exercise. Clean the house. Take your kid out for an adventure… Anything to get your mind off the gloom, and also do just a little something to make the world a better place in spite of the gloom.

 “Why are you cast down, O my soul,
    and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
    my salvation and my God.” – Psalm 42:11

We all can have superhero hearts if we want them! Anyone (yes, even you) can have the iron will of a superhero. And I think that if more of us exercise that iron will and superhero-selfless heart, the world will become a better place.

Often our hard times have more to do with how we respond to circumstances than the circumstances themselves. We may well be surprised to find our superhero acts change our whole outlook on life and lift the gloom completely.

Act! Love! Make the little world around you better, in spite of the enemy. Yes, it’s work; but it’s work well worth the trouble.  

You don’t have to be bit by a bug or bathed in chemicals to change the world. Be that everyday, normal person with the heart of a hero and spirit of a superhero.