Artie Sposaro

As a kid I loved watching cartoons on Saturday mornings. The Super Friends were my favorite by far. In case you didn’t see this cartoon or don’t remember…Superman, Batman, Robin, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and others took on evil together using the Hall of Justice as their base. They foiled incessant plots hatched by seedy characters like Bizarro, the Black Manta, Brainiac, Lex Luthor, and the Riddler who formed the Legion of Doom.

I always wanted a superpower or two…and to have super friends. I kind of hoped I would grow into it…and find others who had as well (like a non-soap opera, real version of the current day Heros show). I found it mysterious and cool that every Super Friend was super and unique, offering their superpower for the team’s best interest.

Every now and then I would attempt to spin a web, telekinetically move a cow in the pasture out back, or jump off of something dangerously high hoping for flight. With my powers concealed I would retain my superficial identity – Artie, chubby, sporty, 5^th grade, pimple-faced trumpet player, but beneath my awkward exterior I would be something supernatural and powerful. Not only this, other Super Friends would watch my back. Together we would live out of our deepest identity foiling evil plots and helping people everywhere. I prayed for this more times than was normal or rational for a kid my age.

Doesn’t my “super” obsession describe an authentic expression of Christianity?

- together we live out our deepest identity foiling evil plots and helping people everywhere.

These days I realize my longing was from God. I am in fact indwelt by God himself, the Super Spirit, who created us all uniquely super…and natural. God is our superpower, having within himself every power. As partakers of divine nature we possess God-given abilities and graces to be wielded at the discretion and by the enabling power of God’s super Spirit. This same profusely imaginative Spirit creates and sustains everything seen and unseen, eternal and temporal. So, though superficially we may feel ordinary, chubby, awkward, terribly human, or even worthless, we are nothing short of super-natural. We are simultaneously super and human expressions of God. In reality, our Super Friends are more than friends, they are family – together we create one body. Along with our do-gooder community of Super Friends we live from our innermost super selves as members of a Kingdom of God whose mission is to go about foiling evil and helping people everywhere. We do so by brandishing a sacred superpower that no legion, gloom, or doom can overcome – God’s love.