The Hardships of Heroes

In JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Bilbo, the eponymous hobbit, finds on his front porch a wizard who declares, “I’m looking for someone to share in an adventure.” Bilbo informs him that adventures are nasty, uncomfortable things that decent folk don’t want to get involved in.

Nasty, Uncomfortable Things

When I was little, I didn’t agree with this at all. I was dying for an adventure to show up on my doorstep; I would have grabbed a backpack and set off then and there! I don’t want you to think I’ve changed my mind about that part of it; I haven’t. There’s a reason I’m writing this from Japan. But the older I get (I know, I’m saying that a lot lately), the more I realize Bilbo had a point.

When I was little, I thought an adventure went something like this: “the main character has an exciting time wandering around a marvelous world doing important things.” But honestly, when you look at it, adventure stories could equally well be described as: “the main character has a ton of problems, makes a bunch of mistakes, and suffers a great deal until, finally, and often unexpectedly, everything comes right in the end and is all worth it.”

At first, this rather disappointed me – to discover that even in an adventure, there are still a bunch of problems. But the more I think about it, the more I like it. It means that even in a world with a bunch of problems – in fact, especially in such a world – we can still have adventures. You see, real life actually is an adventure. It’s just an adventure where you don’t get to run out of the room at the scary parts or skip past the boring parts, and you can’t jump to the end to make sure everything turns out okay.

The heroes’ hardships

This was driven even further home to me when I went back to probably my favorite passage in the Bible: Hebrews 10-12. Hebrews 11, in particular, is like an index of Biblical adventure stories: Abraham, Joseph, David, Jephthah, Jeremiah, Daniel – not to mention the New Testament figures such as Peter and Paul with all their wanderings.

The more I looked, the more I realized that being the hero of a Biblical adventure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Abraham wandered around in the desert. Joseph was a slave. David hid out in caves. Jephthah was an outcast in the desert. Jeremiah was thrown in the bottom of a well, ridiculed, and finally saw his nation destroyed. Daniel saw his nation destroyed and was carried off into captivity. Peter was thrown into prison and eventually killed. Paul was shipwrecked three times, stoned, falsely accused, starved, imprisoned, and finally executed for his beliefs.

Doing big things for God, it turns out, isn’t generally a walk in the park. It doesn’t generally involve being big and important, or even sitting back and taking it easy. Over and over and over, we are told it will be hard – very hard – and not to be surprised when hardship comes. If the world were all smiles and gumdrops, we wouldn’t need heroes.

Adventures don’t feel adventurous

I’ve known all these stories for a long time; they just never really sank in. I’d hear about Daniel and the lions’ den, but I never really thought about it from Daniel’s perspective. He didn’t know he was going to come out alive; he just knew it was dark, and cold, and he didn’t have any food or water, and there were lions, and there was no way out. I guess, until now, I didn’t fully realize that when they’re at their most exciting, adventures don’t feel adventurous, not from the inside. They feel nasty and uncomfortable and sometimes terrifying.

Of course, in listing all these biblical characters, I’ve left out the chief example of suffering in accordance with God’s will. When God himself came down to do big things, he didn’t even own a house. He rarely had time to himself or to rest; he was always dealing with people who wanted to make trouble. And, of course, in the end he was crucified. There was no swelling music in the background during the actual crucifixion, no Scripture scrolling on the screen. The cross didn’t feel dramatic, or adventurous, or heroic. It felt humiliating, excruciating, and lonely.

The Joy

And yet – I think there was a joy. I have said before that there is a grace to be found in suffering, a joy that goes deeper than the pain. I wonder if that is a dim shadow of how Christ felt on the cross: the deep, deep pain, far deeper than any of us could imagine, deep enough it could break the whole universe – but deeper still, infinitely deeper, his own joy.

I described an adventure as “the main character has a ton of problems, makes a bunch of mistakes, and suffers a great deal until, finally, and often unexpectedly, everything comes right in the end and is all worth it.” We’ve all got the first part down. In order to live life as an adventure, we need the second part – we need to know what we’re striving for. We need to find something that’s worth it, that can make it come right in the end.

Have you found what you’re looking for?