If you're like me, you don't watch much cycling on TV, nobody does. Yet a few years ago I found myself watching the Tour coverage so that I could root Lance on against the world (and especially the annoying French who always hated him for winning their race); it seemed impossible that he had that extra gear, that ability to dig deep when it mattered most. I admired that drive because I remember it well from my days of competitive running, although I had no more talent than the next guy, I always managed to pass somebody at the end.
And now Lance is going to admit to the world what he's been denying loudly for decades, he cheated. It seems that everybody in cycling was cheating (Baseball fans may recognize this notion), and he felt the need to join them to have a chance of winning. I really did like Lance as an athlete, not so much as a husband, but athletes are rarely good role models (as Charles Barkley famously said). And now this.
Even though I know that putting your faith or trust is another person opens you up to disappointment, I can't help myself. The theology of it I understand, Paul makes it clear in Romans that there are none righteous, none that we can put on a pedestal, all have flaws. Certainly the lives of the O.T. saints confirm the need to proceed with caution (everybody's hero David certainly have a dark side worse than most).
And yet we, myself along with you, find ourselves believing that this person will be different; that this politician, actor, athlete, teacher, pastor, or friend will be different. They'll never let us down and they'll always do the right thing. When the inevitable letdown happens, we can't help but feel the disappointment.
So why do we do it? Why do we keep on believing in people when only God can promise to never disappoint us? Simple: we need heroes. This world is too full of moral evil for us to cope with our own struggle against it without having heroes to look up to. Real people living right now (on top of the comic book and fictional characters we escape from reality with) that can encourage us by their own example.
In the end, that's a good thing; we need to put our trust in people too, we can't simply say that we trust in God because our faith is lived out in this world; it is here that we must make our stand, it is here that we must sacrifice of ourselves to help others, and it is here that we need to believe that a guy can come back from cancer to be a champion, even if that belief hurts in the end...It turns out that it's worth the occasional pain of being let down to find people in life worth believing in; after all, God believes in you, his Son came to prove it.
