A Hero Comes Along

"For everything comes from God alone. Everything lives by his power, and everything is for his glory." - Romans 11:36

My first comic book was Daredevil #181. I remember it clearly. A pure white cover, with Daredevil in his bright red costume crumpled to his knees, hands clutched to the sides of his head, in agony.  I was about eleven years old, in the drugstore killing time as my mother shopped that day, and I was fascinated.

Though I also became a Batman fan in the years to follow, and X-Men, and many others as I built a collection of thousands of comic books, no hero held my loyalty and fascination as much as Daredevil, the man struck blind by a radioactive isotope that also heightened his other senses to compensate in his fight against evil. To me he was special. I just never knew why.

Then, twenty five year later and just after my son’s second birthday, the doctors told my wife and I that Anthony had cerebral palsy, and might never walk.  You learn a lot about yourself in a moment like that, more importantly you learn a lot about God. 

In church and in our group we have been discussing what it means to be a hero, to go beyond ordinary and be extraordinary.  I think this is not something we can will into being as much as it is something that we are blessed into being.

I know another superhero that was struck blind, a real life one named Paul, who had that magical moment on the road to Damascus, only to find when he regained his sight that he also had heightened senses; of spirit, of purpose and of mission. We should not forget that God does not know the meaning of “random”, and in gifting us with whatever super powers we may have he does not waste a single moment in our lives.

Like that moment in the drugstore, when I was a child.  The Lord knew that the young boy who was thumbing through all those comic books would someday have a little boy of his own….a little boy who would need a Daddy who truly believed that the greatest superhero in the world could be handicapped. 

From a simple comic book came a way of thinking that became the faith that I clung to amidst a storm of uncertainty. Until that blessed day when my superhero, my son, against all odds and at the age of three, cast aside his walker, said “Look Dad”, and took his very first steps.