This morning as I was getting ready for work, enjoying a cup of warm pumpkin spice flavored coffee, a local news station ran yet another story of some poor woman who had somehow managed to run her car off of the road and into a retention pond. Those darn retention ponds...
Lucky for her, there was Fred.
Fred, a 36 year old father, was driving by at just the right moment when he noticed her car almost fully submerged, with nothing but her taillights poking out of the chilly evening water. According to Fred's wife, he stopped the car, and without saying a word, jumped out, took off his shoes and bolted towards the pond, diving in to rescue a woman he didn't even know. Upon entering the water, Fred was unable to open the door to the submerged car or break a window successfully, at which time, another observer offered him a rock, and according to him, after asking for 'God to help' him break the window, shattered it on the first strike, saving the woman inside.
Don't you just love a happy ending?
As I was watching the local news team interview their hero, Fred, I couldn't help but notice a detail in this story that is quite common in stories like this-we're not really that interested in the victim.
Not that the victim isn't important (after all, it's kind of difficult to have heroes without victims, isn't it?), it's just that when we compare the situation of the victim to the risk taken by the hero, all of a sudden, the victim's story just usually isn't that interesting.
What is interesting, however, is your everyday run-of-the-mill guy who just two minutes earlier was listening to talk radio and taking his daughter to a doctor's appointment, suddenly springs into action, risking it all to save a person he doesn't even know, or for that matter, would even like if he did. After all, what's in it for Fred? Nothing, of course. His own wife, who witnessed the entire incident, told reporters that she kept thinking, "what are you doing?!?" Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
In Ephesians, the apostle Paul puts it this way:
"As for you, you were dead...in your sins...but because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy made us alive in Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions." ESV
In other words, we were dead in the water, drowning in the retention pond of our own sins, when Jesus, at his own peril, ran to us, broke into our lives, grabbed us by the hand and pulled us to the safety of the shore. So often, I think we are tempted to think this story we find ourselves in is all about us, as if we were the main characters. But we're not, are we? Jesus is our Fred, and the story is not about us-it's all about Him.
It was Jesus who left the safety of the heavens to put on human skin, get tired, catch colds, and slam His thumb with a carpenter's hammer. It's He who walked mile after dusty mile, reminding his own people that He was the one they had been looking for, only to have them try to throw him off a cliff. It was He who allowed those He had lovingly created from the dust of the earth try him in a court of law-unjustly-and eventually murder him in the same fashion as the creepiest, scummiest, nastiest criminals of the day-on a splintery wooden Roman cross. It was all for us, so that one day we could be with Him forever. All for us.
"While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Romans 5:8
He died so that we could live. This is the profile of a hero.
