Confessions of a Superhero Wannabe

By Scott Hunter

“I am Spiderman!!!” my 3 year old yells from the top of his lungs as he is sporting his said costume. Let me try to explain why this is important. My son Aiden for the past year has been consumed with superheroes… not an unusual thing for a boy his age.  I was the same way.  I remember tying a towel around my neck pretending that I was superman. There is something about super heroes that makes every little boy want to be one. I don’t know what it is.  Maybe it’s the super powers or catching the bad guy or maybe it’s getting the hot girl. But there is something about it that consumes us. Maybe it takes us to a place where we are something different… something more than we have become.

I long so much to be a super hero to my kids. Sometimes I am far from even acting like a superhero.  Like when I blow up after a hard day, or blow them off when they just want to spend time with daddy and all I want to do is veg out in front of the T. V. Then I think to myself, “what a loser superhero”.  Where is my cape? Where are my powers? In those times of feeling like a loser superhero my personal worth goes out the window. 

I am ashamed to say, but I’ve been trying to get my super powers from the wrong source. I’ve been believing a lie and basing my faith on a deception. A new friend of mine enlightened me on the matter. He explained it like this. Man has three deep needs: to be significant, accepted, and secure. These three things give me personal worth. Now, the world teaches us that we get these deep needs met through marriage, children, education, possessions, power, job, popularity, looks, and encouragement. God’s word teaches something different. My friend went on to say that we as Christians tend to look for our identity through the world we now live in, believing that if we could get enough of the things in the list above working for us then these things would filter down and give us acceptance, significance and security and finally a sense of personal worth. The truth of the matter is that these things produce only a fading glory. 

I was happy to be reminded that my worth is not based on the things above, but on what Christ did on the cross. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). I had forgotten what kind of words were used to describe our worth through Christ; like Saint, holy, blameless, beyond reproach, priests, ambassadors. My super powers come from the cross. Not the cross and something else that only takes away from the power of the cross. Christ alone is sufficient. I am a new man and I want to teach my little spiderman this same thing.

Today’s post is from RAL contributor Scott Hunter.  Scott is a writer at HeartAlive — a like-minded site of men writing about their lives.  Be sure to check out their work!

Photo credit:  macwagen