Hero.
Images of epic movies come to mind.
A one-man-show of a courageous guy saving the entire planet from evil/aliens/nature.
A coach who inspires his team to keep fighting even though they are way behind.
A family who stands together through fits, struggles and misunderstandings only to experience a happy end.
But well, those are movies. How about real life?
Most of the time we’re not heroic at all.
We feel tired in the mornings even though we just got up.
We despair at the sight of the pile of work waiting for us.
Hundreds of emails are sitting in our inbox, waiting to be answered.
We do not make an extraordinary amount of money, we don’t fix problems per second, we don’t save relationships just like that.
We sometimes have to force ourselves to read the bible, to go to church, even though we actually feel lost and slightly disconnected to God.
We struggle to be perfect friends, perfect spouses, perfect parents, perfect Christians, perfect people.
We try to so hard to be heroes for ourselves, for our families, for our friends, in church – only to be reminded every day that we are just ordinary people. We fall down, we get up, we live.
And I wonder if the heroic in all of this is not the trying to be different (and failing at it), but the honesty to admit the ordinary.
Instead of upholding a fragile facade let’s promote a new culture of honesty.
Instead of holding on so tightly to an image of fake perfection, let’s celebrate our imperfections.
Let our lives and churches be places where we complement each other’s imperfections and heal each other’s shortcomings.
“Cause in the broken we shall see restored the image of the king.” (Andy Flannagan)
[By the way: this is just one line of a truly amazing song from Andy. You should check him out at: http://www.andyflan.com/!
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More thoughts on heroes? Visit Lisa Jo Baker‘s page!
thisiskatha.com 
Thanks, Daniel, for these wonderful thoughts! Absolutely agree, the courage to continue is so important. It's (sadly) true that many give up dreams (or don't even start dreaming)….
Side note: precious few heroes ever walked the hero trail alone. Even they needed others to help them along. So yes, I'd definitely agree with your last sentence: “Let our lives and churches be places where we complement each other's imperfections and heal each other's shortcomings.”
Perhaps we have a wrong image of heroes. Bravery after all is not “not being afraid”, but rather “acting in the face of fear”. Perhaps a hero is not be somebody who is perfect, but rather one who knows how to deal his (or her) imperfections and still fight for what he (or she) believes in. Of course heroes are not perfect. Of course heroes fall. And of course heroes need help too. But that doesn't disqualify them from being a hero. In my opinion, what is much more important is that they do not give up. How many people do we meet every day who've given up on dreams, on life, on themselves? Or, much worse, who've never dared to dream big in the first place? As Churchill said: “Success isn't final, failure isn't fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.”
I hope being willing to admit that my life is messy makes me a hero today! I shall fly my Superhero Mom cape as I valiantly try not to let my little ones kill each other. 🙂