A Note From Tom: March 23rd, 2012
Hey, everyone!
Hope you’re having an awesome day, filled with praise! Speaking of days filled with things…
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about people who are heroes because on Sunday mornings, I’ve been sharing stories about heroes in Scripture who would encourage people they'd never meet to keep goin'. Maybe thinking about men and women who are heroes to people has made me more aware of awesome people. Lately my days have been filled with reading about or hearing about heroes!
Like eight year-old Emma Hicks of Clemburne, Texas who climbed out of her seatbelt and over the backseat to take the wheel of her grandmother’s speeding SUV after Granny passed out in the driver’s seat! "And her foot was on the gas pedal and then we were going!” Emma said. She missed a turn and crashed through a fence and into a shed. Gramma woke up and had missed her granddaughter’s finest moment! Too bad! But Granny almost “woke up dead”, so, we’ll call it even!
You know, one thing about people who are my heroes is that they’re not perfect people…
It’s discouraging to try to be like someone you think is miraculously perfect…because no one is! One of my heroes was a pastor in England named Charles Spurgeon. He was amazing and awesome…but he smoked! A lot!
One woman wrote him and said she had heard he smoked. “I can’t believe it’s true…” He wrote back this note, “Dear Mrs. So-and-so, I cultivate my flowers and burn my weeds. Yours truly, C. H. Spurgeon”
Another woman was upset that he was smoking at the table during a dinner and asked if he could find any verse in the Scriptures to support his tobacco habits. “Sure! Psalm 84 says we pass through the Valley of Baca!”
“My Heroes”, by Tom Job
It’s not someone I could never be.
It’s someone who’s a lot like me.
But who trusts the One no eye can see.
Lord, make me be a lot more like he…or she!”
Sometimes, in making heroes of others, things are “remembered”, told, and passed along that didn’t really happen.
This doesn’t help.
A book about the shootings that happened more than ten years ago at Columbine High School, explains that Cassie Bernall, who died on that day, and who became famous for saying “Yes!”, when asked if she believed in God, one second before she left our world, actually wasn’t the one who answered that question. Cassie was never given the chance. Even though her life story was entitled, “She Said, ‘Yes’!”, it was actually a survivor of that awful day, Valeen Schnur. Valeen, who was asked by the one who shot her if she believed in God, after he had done it.
She said, “Yes.”
But even though Cassie Bernall might never have said the words she is known for, she is still a hero to me. The day after she went home to be with the Lord, only two years after she had trusted in Him to be her own, her brother, Chris, found a piece of paper on the seventeen year old’s desk in her room. She had written these words…
“Now I have given up on everything else-
I have found it to be the only way
To really know Christ and to experience
the mighty power that brought
Him back to life again,
To find what it really means
To suffer and to die with Him.
So, whatever it takes, I will be the one who lives
In the fresh newness of life
Of those who are alive from the dead.”
Lord, make me be a lot more like…she.