Bored to Be a Hero by Peter A. Speckhard

View

Bored to Be a Hero

Peter A. Speckhard on Finding Molehills to Conquer

My wife and I really enjoyed the movie Juno, so we downloaded the soundtrack. The songs mostly go for a sort of half-serious folk, half-goofy summer-camp sound, with Kimya Dawson using a deliberately amateurish, unpolished sound for a sort of innocent-yet-world-weary authenticity.

You get the feeling these songs are meant to be performed by peer leaders during group time—they’re almost daring you to comment, so they can call you judgmental and part of the problem, while they’re all trying to be happy and mutually affirming in this mixed-up world. My problem with them isn’t that, but is with the lyrics and with the delusion that current geopolitical events somehow define our personal lives.

No Tough Times

But first, a disclaimer. I do not think I have ever experienced “tough times.” Having been born in 1969, I have a vague recollection of our family devotions including prayers for “Uncle George and Uncle Tom, who are at war in Vietnam,” which I probably only remember because it rhymes. The 1970s for me were all about childhood, not world affairs.

Then, in the early 1980s, seemingly everybody except me began to worry about a nuclear war. I knew that one might happen, and we were told that we lived in a key strategic area sure to be targeted by the Soviets. I daydreamed about being a survivor, having fended off the blast by holding a textbook over the back of my neck while kneeling under my desk.

It was never more than a story of adventure and survival (and personal heroism, I might add) to take my mind off whatever the teacher was going on about. I never lost a minute’s sleep because of the arms race. Whatever innocence my childhood lacked was traded away fair and square by me, not stolen by Ronald Reagan.

Then we were all supposed to get mad about how greedy everyone suddenly became in the mid-to-late 1980s. But pretty much everyone I knew was related to a Lutheran school teacher, so that issue never hit home, either. I went to college, got married, went to seminary, had children, became a pastor. The headlines didn’t really affect me.

Only twice in my life do I remember really pondering national or global events as though they really might fundamentally unite the course of my life with that of my whole generation. On the first day of the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, I was a college exchange student in Germany and in the US Army Reserves. Many people look back at Desert Storm as a big joke, but heading into it we had been promised the Mother of All Wars.

About a dozen of us Americans gathered in one dorm room listening to Armed Forces Radio. Everyone was thinking, “This could be it. This could be a turning point in all our lives.” Iraq would bomb Israel. Israel would respond, uniting all the Islamic countries with Iraq. Massive chemical and biological warfare would ensue. But that feeling lasted at most a few days.

The second time was, of course, 9/11. Like most churches, the church I pastored called a special service that night, and the church was full. When we sang the refrain, “Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, for the facing of this hour,” suddenly the words seemed to refer to a pretty specific hour. Only rarely does a whole nation or generation face a common hardship together in a way that really defines our personal lives as well.


Peter A. Speckhard serves as senior pastor of St. Paul's Lutheran Church and School in Munster, Indiana, and the author of Connected to Christ: Why Membership Matters. He also serves as associate editor of Forum Letter, a monthly publication of the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau. He is a 1997 graduate of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis and a veteran of the U.S. Army Reserves. He has previously served congregations in Green Bay, Wisconsin and Spring Grove, Illinois. He and his wife Heidi, who teaches Latin at St. Paul's, have six children.

Print &
Online Subscription

Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!

Online
Subscription

Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!

bulk subscriptions

Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.

Transactions will be processed on a secure server.


more on culture from the online archives

18.2—March 2005

Long Shadows of Eden

On Conservatism as Vexation, Vanity & Near Impossibility by Graeme Hunter

22.3—April 2009

Wasted by Watching

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by J. Daryl Charles

33.1—January/February 2020

Do You Know Your Child’s Doctor?

The Politicization of Pediatrics in America by Alexander F. C. Webster


more from the online archives

24.5—Sept/Oct 2011

Pupils Delighted

on Wondering or Wandering Through College Education by Anthony Esolen

31.4—July/August 2018

The Names of the Christian

Labels & the Ecumenism of Discipleship by James M. Kushiner

24.2—March/April 2011

Our Numbered Days

Certain Death & the Last Lectures of Socrates & Jesus by Randall B. Smith

calling all readers

Please Donate

"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand

"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor

Support Touchstone

00