As we walk through our front gate, the kids on the street swarm around us. We have been visiting the place where we got married, a dusty Middle Eastern town where the children stay up late and play football on the vacant plot next to our house. We pause to chat with them; “Messi or Ronaldo?”, they ask, knowing full well that my husband is Argentine. They tease him and several loudly claim that Ronaldo is the better player. We laugh with them but beg to disagree. “For sure, it is Messi!”. The World Cup is underway, and these kids are rallying around their football heroes, excited to watch each match unfold. 

I have been thinking about what it means to have a hero.  At the beginning of the year, I decided to do a deep dive into a hero of the faith. Perhaps I could do this every year, I thought. Pick a hero and do my research; read their books, learn from their convictions and watch how they lived them out in weakness and in crisis. 

I glance to my right, at the novel sitting neatly between Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and Driving over Lemons by Chris Evans. My last name is written in bold capitals down the spine. I snort as I picture the ghost of Tolkien, a distinguished man with a comb over in coattails, standing with his hands in his pockets and looking between me and my bookshelf with arched brows as if to say, ‘You really think it belongs there? Next to me?’