And how hero-worship reveals our God-deficiency.
God, the greatest of all time, owns a galaxy for every grain of sand. So why do we often settle for less?
Probably because every time the gifts of fellow men rise before our eyes, our hearts, often starved of divine wonder, find a temporary patch of grass to hold onto, lest we drown in our emptiness, without God.
In the month the talented Argentine Lionel Messi mesmerized the world and broke soccer records at the World Cup, I saw the Lord high and lifted up.
Instagram/LeoMessi
That month, two statistics I heard competed with the exalted media feeds of this flesh-and-blood Argentine from Rosario; my Instagram feeds had already done a loud job keeping him in front of my eyes. (yes, football obsession gets to those levels among men, if you are asking.)
The first statistic I heard was from Oceana, a sea study organization that indicated that only 20 percent of sea creatures have ever been discovered by men. Imagine we’ve been here for 2000-plus years, and we only know 20 percent of all sea creatures. 20 percent? What else could exist? What a wonderful God we serve!
Second statistic: this was paraphrased by somebody, but it hit home too: there is a galaxy for each grain of sand you see; 2 trillion galaxies spotted in the observable world, and yet you and I are in this other one called Earth, busy streaming wonder celebrity wonder-kids from a tiny corner in Argentina.
C.S. Lewis, whose Chronicles of Narnia series stretched imaginations too, once said, referring to human idolatry, “We are half-hearted creatures fooling around with food, drink, and sex, while infinite glories are being offered to us; we are like a child playing with mud pies at the beach, unaware of what it means to sail at sea.”
Two nights before I wrote this, I’d stayed glued in awe at Lionel’s two assists against England, yet I am also grown enough to say I once lived in a day when Ronaldo Da Lima, Mike Tyson, Martina Hingis, Andre Agassi, Tiger Woods, Magid Musisi, and Ronaldinho rocked their days, which qualifies me enough to reflect on the passing glories of mere men.
Some earthly lives, Argentine or not, are lived with so much glam and glitter that you never imagine those exalted “under the sun” would ever speak like the one who first used those words, “All is vanity; it is chasing after the wind.” (Ecclesiates 1:14)
Even for ordinary Ugandans like us, living like a dot on God’s earth, life, however pleasant, passes by fast. One day you are swirling with your second born on your shoulder; another day your joints are aching from age, unable to help them pick their toys. One day you are seamlessly doing your makeup routine; the next day your finger is marveling at a sudden wrinkle that appeared overnight.
Another day a school teacher is referring to you as the “leaders of tomorrow”; the next day you are shaking your head in disbelief at someone your body size saying they were born as recently as 2013. Life, glamorous or not, is meant to pass you by too if your gaze is only “under the sun.”
The roots of our hero-worship that often get us obsessed with our favorite sportsmen and celebrities need to be studied; perhaps a small view of God is what often descends us into a high view of man.
Gifts are still God’s gifts, even Lionel Messi’s; perhaps we mean well to call him the greatest in soccer when we say “G.O.A.T.”—hopefully nothing more. But what do terms meant to be ascribed to God do to our hearts when we address ‘mere men’ by them?
Humans were made to marvel; true worship is basically that, beholding. In fact, our praise rings loudest when our hearts and imaginations are seized by the God who distributed all these sea creatures, yet how we highly speak of gifted men says a lot about how little we view God instead.
See, Psalm 8 opens and ends with two sentences: “How majestic is your name in all the earth?” Then somewhere in the middle is where you get to hear of man. And what do you hear? “Who is man that God is mindful of him (Ps 8:4)?” Huh? Scripture is questioning mere men in light of who God is.
A little story in Acts 14 tells how Paul and his accomplices were once physically hoisted in the air on a mission field with chants that went, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” Paul and Barnabas could have inhaled in the praise, yet they didn’t. Instead, they replied, “Friends, why are you doing this? We too are only human, like you.” (v15)
“Only human.”
Those who first embodied the gospel knew the place of men and God and did not confuse the two, nor did they confuse gifts with the giver. Lionel Messi’s (and all other celebrity gifts we often exult) are still gifts from God.
