David is not alone, whether it is presidents, sporting fixtures, celebrities, community leaders, teachers, or our own family - we have plenty of examples of fallen stars.
While we respond to the ideas of Hero’s and Villain’s in our just and ordered world, it is never quite that simple. This ‘us and them’ mentality is not reality. We are all children of God, we are all here to learn and we all get things wrong. We have a tendency to minimize our mistakes and maximize others, to write our story as just and theirs as unjust, in the process justifying our behavior no matter how terrible or unfair.
But finding out you are the villain is often the best thing that can happen to you, especially if you realize it before you do something really dumb. Understanding the fact that you are the villain can free you to really love, and work in partnership with the Lord. It will make way for mercy to overcome the demands of justice, rescue you from yourself, and ironically make you the conquering hero after all.
While David’s sin was almost the worse it could be, he spent the rest of his life striped of pride, begging for forgiveness, and doing all he could to rectify his mistake and the ramifications of his actions. He would need the Lord – so do we all.
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| Nathan helps David realize his need for repentance. |
Sweet, sweet Lego man first of all... As I read this post there was one part that made me think about something. When this post talks about how discovering that we ourselves can be the villains and that by doing this we can even turn around and become heroes it brought my thoughts to a lot of the movies in today's world. One in particular stands out to me called Firewall with Harrison Ford but a group of criminals take his family hostage so that he will steal money for them through his own bank. One of the criminals who is just kinda the computer science nerd and wouldn't really strike you as a criminal anyways starts to realize that what they are doing has gone way to far. Originally he might not have thought that it would be that horrible of a job, and he didn't expect for anyone to get hurt. But these other criminals are extremely violent and demoralizing to the family that is held hostage and he finally just gets enough of it and steps in to defend them. I feel that at this point, though it is a movie, marks this character building as a person because he wasn't someone that seems like he would stand up for someone and in the end he realized that he was the villain and he did the right thing in the end by helping them to escape. Movie or not situations like this happen all the time and personally I would rather die knowing that I did the right thing and overcoming my own interest with money then not saving a poor family.
ReplyDeleteAnother part that interested me in this post was when it talked about the "us and
them". I feel that almost everybody has a tendency to think about themselves first rather then others, and this applies to the Hero and Villain profiling as Brother Cherian talked about in class. When he claim ourselves as the hero we are almost at fault for putting ourselves higher then someone else and saying that we are better then others that we may know. I feel that we have to look at everybody as an equal human being but also acknowledge their special talents as well. I still agree that we should do our best to acknowledge when we are the villains because this will help us to move on and be better people.
So, the idea of villains and heros turns my head a little. As a child you always remember the villain first because they make a large impact on you. To test this I asked my family a couple of questions about some Disney movies I know we almost all have watched. The questions went like this
ReplyDeleteWho are the characters you remember from this movie? I asked about the little mermaid, 101 Dalmatians, and the lion king,... Each of one them first answered with the antagonist. I even remembered them first Apposed to the protagonist. While people say that the hero is the best part we often overlook which part has taught us the lessons and made the biggest impacts. Ursala tried to steal prince Eric from Ariel and ended up turning into an unfortunate soul. We learned that we shouldn't bribe people it ends up being thrown in our faces, 101 Dalmatians , Cruela tries to steal the puppies for her own selfish gain and gets throw in jail. We learn not to steal or covet over people's possessions. Scar in the lion king is my favorite. He has to be one of the scariest villains I can remember and I think he teaches. Me the best lesson of them all.... We are who we are born to be and even through deceit we will continue to follow the plan Heavenly Father has for us. So, point of this being I think Disney did a great job letting us children learn from the mistakes of villains, because those mistakes are the ones that we learn from and keep in our minds
Don't get me wrong the heros sometimes have some good lessons too