We need heroes.
Mostly, we need to know how to be heroic in our daily lives.
Unless you are a narcissist, the biggest fear is that you don’t matter.
That your entire life was for nothing.
That you have no purpose.
That you are just taking up space on the planet.
That if there is a God, he is, as Bette Midler once sang, watching from a distance, indifferent. His job was to wind up the clock, and now he can sit back.
Who cares about one tree falling in the forest and whether or not it makes a sound if no one hears it, when a world full of people all around you doesn’t seem to hear you falling?
We don’t always recognize this fear that we’ve all had cross our minds and hearts once or ten thousand times.
Facing this fear is hard because the indicators that it is unwarranted rely on faith, not facts or feelings. Facts are about cold equations, and feelings lie. The search for significance is—whether we like it or not—the search for God.
Without God, we face that fear poorly.
We turn to addictions and distractions. We give room for suicide. We enslave ourselves to achievement at any cost, hoping to earn value and importance through works. We fall into depression because if there are no highs, the lows are less noticeable. We are apathetic about life. We become mockers of anyone and anything trying to rise above or push through.1 We turn ourselves into victims in the hands of fate and those with power, living life by blaming and complaining. We overcorrect and force ourselves to be special in the same way everyone else does.2
What does it mean to live a life that matters? What does it look like?
Despite what you may have heard, it is not about whether we’ve created generational wealth or built our legacy. It is not about man-made eternal existence, with our minds being offloaded into an AI computer or some form of cryogenics. It is not about how many people know us during our lifetime and remember us afterward. It is not about awards. It is not about the list of impressive achievements listed in your obituary. It is not about how far-reaching the ripples of change from our lives extend.
But if not that, then what? Because that is the rat race we know.
Do I matter? Does my life matter?
This is the question that lurks, that drove the Christmas classic, It’s A Wonderful Life or even About Schmidt. It’s what drives us to pay for fancy headstones and the Taj Mahal.
It is the question answered by Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
This past Easter weekend, we saw an illustration of the value of a life. An American plane was shot down in Iran, and no effort or expense was spared to rescue the pilot and weapons system officer. There was some mockery or disbelief online that so much money and resources would be spent to rescue one person, but in that moment, the American military and leadership—living out “no man left behind”—modeled how we know each life matters, even if, in our own minds, we question whether our life matters.
Jesus left Heaven for Earth. He left perfection and glory for dusty human pain. He leaves and goes after the one (Luke 15:4). All of this, because a single life does matter. Across all of time and billions of people, individuals mattered, and God knew their names. And that is why it requires faith to fully grasp this, because the world views human beings as groups, as demographics, as cannon fodder, as a bargaining chip, as a market to sell to, as an audience, as a polling group, or a voting block. They matter in number, not in individual.
And then, on the Saturday sandwiched between Good Friday, marking Christ’s death, and Resurrection Sunday, the day of our hope, an astronaut halfway to the moon said it out loud.
“You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe,” Glover said. “Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you — just trust me — you are special.” — Astronaut and Pilot Victor Glover, Artemis II, April 4, 2026
We are emerging, barely, from winter.
I mean that in many ways.
Winter is months of too much darkness and cold. There is a need to look outward for a point of light. The doom scroll on social media promises light, but rarely provides it. It is a distraction, maybe, so that time passes and breaks the monotony, but it is not really light. Time passes with daily patterns, a good thing instead of chaos, but the purpose of time isn’t just to pass.
At home, the live NASA feed for Artemis II is going non-stop, muted at night while I sleep. I made a paper-and-string tracker (Earth and the moon to scale; Orion not), knotted off at 50,000-mile chunks, and have been regularly moving the paper Orion capsule ever closer so that at any given moment I can look up at the wall and remember to pray for the four astronauts and marvel at what is happening as the created traverse the creation.
This brings me joy; it makes a big, global event personal. It feels like, at least in my small sphere of influence, I have a role that matters. I update my family, whether they ask me to or not.
After five days of listening to CAPCOM and the astronauts talking, I’ve started to acronym my life, calling my phone and tablet my PCD (personal computing device) and calling out when it’s CFT (cat food time). Supper is first either a go or no-go, then a countdown, and MECO (main engine cut off) when the oven is turned off, and you’d better be at the counter with a plate. My day is broken up into a timeline with specific activities that may, depending on my PCD, have to be adjusted. I’m recognizing the voices of the live feed announcers. I’m frantically jotting down distances and refreshing my understanding of statute and nautical miles—breaking Apollo 13’s record by 3,366 statute miles, out to 252,021 miles!—and have bits and bobs of notes all over the place.
This also brings me joy in the same way the string trajectory tracker does. I’m riding the far, far shirttails of the NASA astronauts, scientists, and experts who made this happen and have been sharing it all with us so openly and so well, letting us know that we matter enough to go along on the journey if we’d like.
The question of whether we matter is easier to bear in the presence of heroism rightly understood. The Artemis II event is larger than life and, like the Apollo astronauts, has hero written all over it.
We need things that are so big, so incredible, that our understanding of daily time reboots, and we use it differently, even if only for a little while. A shared moment of excitement, whether personal or national, will work. It is a gift when this happens, and it is a shame when it is stolen.3
With Artemis II, it is odd that NASA representatives have been asked, more than once, essentially, what the point of this mission is. What is there left to see if probes have gone by and taken photos? What can we learn from four humans looking at the moon that we cannot with a probe with a good camera? The moon landing hoaxers, flat earthers, and “we could use those tax dollars for more practical things” folks have made their presence known online, too, a presence that is to be expected in a divided nation where at no time shall we all stop for a moment and have some joy.
Finding any joy at all in this world is its own act of heroism in light of this tendency, frankly.
“Why bother going back? We already checked that box.”
“Why not use that money for some social program? Wouldn’t that serve humanity better??
“Going back? Ha! All those astronauts and the 400,000 people involved in the Apollo program and the American citizens who watched the launches live were lying schmucks!”4
No heroism will avoid the pragmatic or pouting beat-down. There are motives and methods that the Monday morning quarterback must question. This is the double-edged sword of expressing joy; you share it online or with loved ones around the Thanksgiving table, and activism and conspiracy culture come along and slit its throat.
The hero’s journey has never been more needed nor more confusing.
For over a decade, our understanding of a hero was what Marvel sold us, leaving us adult men wearing T-shirts and caped costumes at comic cons, latching onto some kind of proxy heroism that I’ve always found sad. We don’t reward much heroism these days; either we don’t recognize it when we see it because we think it wears a cape, we have associated heroic behavior as aggressive against our intersectional critical theory understanding, or worse, we think we’re hapless victims pinned down by outside powers, and, like Bonnie Tyler, we’re waiting for someone else to be the hero in our daily lives. The balance is precarious in this world of if’s.
If we don’t matter.
If we don’t have agency.
If we are always a victim.
If our mind is always set to rot in disbelief and joylessness.
If we misunderstand what heroism is.
Of course, then, heroes are something outside of our reality. Maybe mostly in movies and books, larger than life with superpowers and magic and impossible situations no regular person could ever survive, the land of the physical and mental elite, leaving us with the nagging sense that it is impossible to be a hero if we are just a normal person living a workaday life. We want to be heroic, but how do you do that working the afternoon shift at the corner gas station? And if we cannot be heroic, does our life matter?
We really, really want heroism, and so we look for it—if we haven’t hardened our hearts to joy—in Big Moments, like the heroism of an airman and his rescuers or the Artemis II astronauts.
We don’t look for it in the Small Moments, because we don’t believe they are heroic. Struggling to wash the dishes and do it for the glory of God, day in and day out. To get the kids to school. To clean the bathroom. To sit through another staff meeting. To drive the garbage truck. To finish your shift at the factory. To mow the lawn.
In a world hungry for heroism but suffering diabetes from the Marvel version of a hero, our internal system no longer activated by CGI, the truth remains that we need heroes, but more than that, we need heroes who model for us how to be heroic in our own lives.
I suppose that is why I appreciated astronaut Victor Glover’s statement, that reminder that each of us, as created by God with a specific purpose, is special. That He bothered to create us, and to create this delicately balanced blue marble of a home is the clue. God sees individual hearts and all eternity, and is not fooled by our definitions of heroism or what a valuable individual human life looks like.
A hero lives life to the glory of God, a concept hard to grasp if it ends up being a life that few see or care about. A smile and kind word can be heroic, but we’re not sure. When we’re told that the larger the audience, the more we matter, living for an audience of One is impossible.
It requires faith, which is heroic, and a gift from God.
As of late, what is known as the blackpilled doomer online culture—a truly poisonous, nihilistic culture that views the world as rigged against them, where everything is fake, conspiratorial, out of their control, and has removed their personal agency to live as anything but a pawn or puppet because negative outcomes are both inevitable and cannot be overcome—has seeped into just about every response to anyone trying to have faith that their life matters and that even a tiny life lived with purpose and joy has value. It is especially aggressive on the far right, partly thanks to the pandemic.
In his AmFest 2025 speech, Ben Shapiro mentioned this. He reminded us that we all have personal agency, and I would add, we are commanded by God to live as that being true, since we do have free will and are responsible for what we do and do not do, what we allow to have room in our hearts, and what we allow to control our minds. Regardless of what power or actions others have or take, we cannot live in a reactive tandem to them. We simply cannot slip into a blackpilled doomer mindset. We can and should improve ourselves, our personal surroundings, and the world we come into contact with, Shapiro said, and he is correct. God didn’t command us to change the entire world and fix all the problems; He will do that. He did command us to live our lives—which are smaller than the world but have eternal impact—faithfully and obediently, making the place better than we found it as far as it depends on us.
“If everyone is special, no one is” was a central theme in the movie The Incredibles. The point was that forced equality according to a defined standard (i.e., everyone has superpowers, everyone looks a certain way, etc.) makes no one special. Individual strengths and uniqueness in personality, skills, and life experience are not celebrated. I’ve talked about this before, and it falls into the human tendency to overcorrect and get off on a bad trajectory rather than to find and fight to stay on the correct course.
The fine point we don’t grasp is that everyone is special because God created us as such. However, we haven’t learned to value and appreciate all of the ways God made humans unique and instead have placed more weight on certain kinds of skills or characteristics (for example, being athletic or having a high IQ). The invalid, the average, the non-productive—these aren’t special to our version of the hero economy. The outcome is obvious: everyone struggles to be “special” in the accepted way, and those who simply do not have those abilities either conclude their life doesn’t matter, or they find identity groups, latch onto strange behavior, change outward appearances, and whatever else they can do to simply stand out from the pack. They aren’t generally honoring their true God-given uniqueness, but simply fighting around in the red ocean, trying to make a mark.
The rare and precious nature of this kind of gift is why I continue my aggressive pursuit of avoiding wet blankets, those people who, through pessimism, a complaining spirit, raging TDS, or a conspiratorial “everything is wrong with this world, and everyone is in on it, you’ve been lied to your whole life” squelch all joy, hope, and laughter, turning it into a dark and shameful thing.
Charlie Duke and Jim Lovell recorded greetings for the Artemis II astronauts, which were played on the mornings of April 5 and 6, respectively. These two men are/were devout followers of Jesus Christ. (Lovell passed away in 2025.) The insult to say they are lying and faked the moon landings is beyond reprehensible to me, much less all of the endless and obvious proof, both scientific and historical.