Take heart. If it hurts, you may just be a hero in the making. I recently saw a movie whose main character was a young man who spent most of his teenage years speaking up for what he felt was right while regularly losing fights with those who didn’t agree. Short and skinny don’t always make for a good match with the neighborhood bullies. While he may have been an undersized advocate for good, he had some irresistible traits. He wouldn’t give up. It took five attempts to join before the army changed his status from 4F to 1A and let him enlist. Plus he really cared about others. When a fake grenade landed in the middle of a line of young army recruits, he was the only one who threw himself on top of it to save the others.
Even once he got super-strength, for he was, after all, a super-hero, he must fight the army bureaucracy and the jeers of his fellow soldiers before he found the opportunity to fulfill his mission. His destiny was hidden in the resistance of those who could or would not recognize his worth. This is the stuff heroes are made of.
We admire those who go through the deep in order to accomplish the great. In his book The Horse and His Boy, CS Lewis tells a story of a young orphan on a journey to freedom. Along the way he encounters every kind of resistance. After racing across a desert and facing a lion to warn strangers of an impending invasion, he ends up exhausted at the house of the Hermit of the March. His companions cannot go on—they are either wounded or too weary. He is the only one who can finish the mission. “Run, always run,” the hermit tells him. And the narrator of the story goes on to tell us that this is what often happens. Those who have done one good thing are often given an even harder thing to do next. Thus a young hero is born. And all he did was to keep running, even when he didn’t think he had the strength.
If you have been through or are currently in a seemingly hopeless situation and you continue your race despite being worn out, you have the makings of a hero too. Why spend your time wishing you could be like those who seem to have it all, the stress-free and thoughtless idols of our age? It is those who keep hoping and keep going who have the opportunity to become timeless examples for those of us who live in the valley as often as we live on the mountaintop. You are probably a hero already to someone and my guess is that you will have many more opportunities to be one again during your life.
So if you are on the hero track, remember this. Hope is like oxygen to the heart. Breathe it in and keep going. You will end up someplace better if you do. And then others, who are looking for a hero of their own, just may follow you there.