Life's Trivialities - or Why I Stopped Reading Superman Comics

One of the things I’ve recently realised over the past year since I started training as a Student Minister is how things that once seemed to be really important to us can become trivial, unimportant, lost to a bigger vision of life.

Once of my big passions until comparatively recently was American superhero comics (or comic books as the Americans call them) and I really needed my weekly fix of Superman and Batman.  I would go to the local specialist comic store the day they came in, almost the hour they came in, such was my enthusiasm for them.  This was a weekly habit and I would really resent it if I had to go later in the day; or even worse, on a different day.  Since Christmas though my interest has suddenly waned.  It isn’t that I can’t afford to buy them, or that the quality of the writing and art has deteriorated (far from it) or that I think there is anything intrinsically wrong with a 43 year old reading superhero comics; it’s just that I’ve lost interest completely.  What was so important to me has become a triviality, unimportant, irrelevant to my life.  I almost feel that I wasted time reading those comics when better things could have been occupying my time and grabbing my attention.

I wonder if there is something about ministerial formation, about the way the God is working in my life and bringing transformation that is working on a deeper level than I had realised.  I expected to learn and grow during my time at college (I refuse to use the word seminary – far too American) but I hadn’t realised that the change would be at such a fundamental level that interests I had held for years, consuming passions almost, now seem to be trivial and unimportant.

Knowing that one is being changed is an interesting feeling and should be a scary proposition.  What if I don’t like who I become?  What if my family and friends don’t like who I become?  These are the fears and yet for me they are nothing because the one changing me is the one who gave up everything to save me and sinners like me.  What safer place can I be in than the hands of God? 

Lord Jesus, let these dry bones live again to do something great in your name.  Amen.