So, if it wasn’t clear by now- I love the Avengers first movie. However, the second movie kind of annoyed me. If you don’t follow Marvel, here’s the gist of it- the Avengers are a group of superhuman people who have incredible abilities and the goal is that they could come together to fight the battles that humans cannot handle (like crazy space monsters in the first movie). So, they have the Hulk with his incredible brute strength, and Iron Man with his awesome suit, and Thor with his big hammer, and Captain America with his guidance, etc…
So, in the second movie, they basically have a computer program that gets compromised, takes on an evil personality and wants to destroy the world. He uploads himself to the Internet and is doing major damage. So, they go after him- fighting this hard drive, destroying that mainframe, that accomplice… They’re taking out all kind of systems and people, but the “Virus” is basically still doing his damage elsewhere every time.
At this point during the movie I got exasperated, trying desperately to send brain waves through the screen to the characters to get a new battle plan. They did well in their own individual movies- realizing that sometimes the real fight isn’t necessarily what’s right in front of you. Even in the first Avengers movie- they fought the war with the space aliens, but also destroyed the machine that let the space aliens come to Earth to begin with!
But in the second movie, they got lost from their original goal and their original plan. Because let’s be real- you can’t kill the Internet with a gun or a really good punch- no matter how strong you are! You could destroy a computer. You could kill an individual. You could delete a file, but unless you get back to the source of the problem or the millions of connections that can get on wi-fi- you just plain can’t kill the Internet with a gun!
But it’s exactly what we do in our lives so often. We go after our problems, after each other’s problems, or after our negative thoughts with the only weapon we know- assuming our own self-control can shoot down the very thing that’s destroying our life. We think “trying harder” will fix all the problems in our life, never going back to the basics to what may be causing the issue to begin with.
We cannot live our lives spinning our wheels on our own hard work. And for those who are able to keep the negative actions at bay for long enough, it just leaves us with a whole lot of pride in our own abilities. And it leaves us looking down at those around us who don’t have as much self-control. As the Bible puts it, “Having begun in the Spirit, are we now being made perfect by the flesh? (Galatians 3:3).” I don’t know about you, but I used to do it all the time.
I started college as a bad perfectionist, and most of my trouble was with schoolwork- I wanted good grades. When I admitted what God wanted for me and how He saw me was more important than my own plan for life was, I set out to change my faulty habits- to “just stop it”. But as soon as I tried, I got confused. I wanted to just “stop it”, but I couldn’t stop the behavior entirely- I would’ve failed college! I still needed to study, but how much was reasonable? Was 16hrs a day inappropriate and 2hrs a day better? Was two hours of studying a good choice since I was taking six classes? If I didn’t get good grades was that now a good thing? If my problem wasn’t an activity you could totally stop, how would I even know where the line between right and wrong was?
The answer is somewhere in between the lines. Because it’s in between the lines of having your actions determine your value and knowing that your actions still have value that we need to live in the marketplace. We want to create things that are excellent, because our excellence glorifies God. The things we create are echoes back to the amazingness of our God, the Creator of the universe, who gave us the ability to walk in his footsteps. And if He has called us to a certain profession, He doesn’t call us there to watch us fail, but to help us redeem and create and sow where darkness has reigned for far too long.
But first we’ve got to make sure we are going to the root of our problems, and not just after the most obvious solution. When we are able to do that, we can get to truly incredible places, both in our influence at work and in our personal lives.