When there are no heroes, no sense of nobility, there is nothing to fight for, to preserve, to hold sacred. Sarcasm becomes the norm and everything is open for ridicule. When all the heroes and even the character qualities required to be a hero--courage, loyalty, integrity, love, patriotism, self-sacrifice, compassion, generosity, bravery, endurance--are disparaged and ridiculed as "out of date" and "old fashioned", then a culture will fall apart from within.
Cynicism, the mistrust of anything virtuous, has taken over our culture. Innocence is ridiculed, submission and humility is despised. And so there is no place to understand the holiness of God.
Unless we build a sense of heroism and sacrifice into the very values, nature, love and oxygen of our homes, we will not have heroes in the next generation--those whose imagination is captured by investing their lives for the benefit of others.
Heroes are built in their own homes. Heroes are made in the training moments of life, those times when we inspire our children that they were made for something more, they were chosen by God to bring light, to preserve beauty. Heroes are made by mothers who have the foresight to understand that the soul shaping work, invested in the quiet moments of life when no one else sees, are the very seeds that are planted into the future character of a nation, and a world.
Today, understand that all of the invisible moments are the places where heroes begin to imagine themselves to become soldiers of righteousness in their own generation, the place where darkness is spreading, but where they are called to bring the very redemption and power of God.