Identity, Purpose and Community – and Heroes!

I’ve written previously that I think that I believe that people, in their search for significance, ask three main questions.  Who am I?  Why am I?  Do I belong?  They are questions of identity, purpose and community.

Recently, I started watching the show Heroes.  It’s an awesome show.  But what I find most interesting is that, as the characters each discover their abilities, those three themes of identity, purpose and community continually resurface.

Identity – Here, in season 2 of Heroes, the Bennet family has gone into hiding.  Claire has, on numerous occasions, said to her father, “Why do I have to hide who I am?”  Interesting that she did not talk about hiding what she can do.  For Claire, it was not an ability at stake.  It was the very core of who she is – her identity.

Purpose – One word and one question continually resurface in the show.  The word: Special.  The question: “Why did God make me this way?“  Intriguing, huh?  The characters all know, somehow, that they are supposed to matter in this life.  The show really follows their journey of figuring how what it means to be special and the unique calling on their life that results from being special.  God made them with this abilities for exactly the purpose of being heroes.

Community – “We just kinda found each other.”   We were not meant to go through the challenges of life’s journey alone.  We were meant to do it together.  The characters found others with special abilities and they came together.  Their search for identity and purpose was to take place within community.  They found each other because they knew and understood what one another was going through.  Together, they were able to thrive when alone they would have failed.

These themes of identity, purpose and community go way deeper than any TV show.  But it is interesting that the top TV show on right now continually shows people asking these questions.  People want to know that they matter.  they long for meaning and to know that they have value and they are accepted and belong.  The challenge is, for us as believers, to figure out how to invite people into the identity, purpose and community that can only be found in Christ.