live, our lack of any exceptional talents, is that we already know that the banality of their lives is temporary. In fact, so sure are we that this is the case that, in many ways, those first few minutes of a film are the most exciting part. Those are the minutes that make us stuff our mouths with popcorn in sheer anticipation. The film hasn’t had the chance to fail to thrill us yet. The tension is building with every scene because we know something is about to happen and we are taking note of all the ordinary things that we know the director wants us to take special note of because these will be referred back to later on in the plot.
The hero’s pre-call life is full of clues about his or her adventure life. All the ordinary things that make up the “once upon a time” of the hero will later be transfigured into the ingredients of high adventure. Every day’s filming costs thousands of dollars so nothing will be wasted. Nothing will be left in its original banal condition.
Not only on-screen heroes, but real life heroes seem often to suffer from very inauspicious beginnings. Isaac Newton was a sickly infant and did not, to begin with, excel academically in his schooling. Abraham Lincoln was brought up in a log cabin in grinding poverty, and, in his own estimation as he looked in the mirror at his out-of-proportion arms and legs, wrinkly skin and ears that seemed to “flap in the wind,” he was “the ugliest man in the world.”1 He suffered persistent rejection and failure in his political career before gaining, in 1860, the position in which he would become the most celebrated president in American history.
Some people begin in obscurity and are destined to remain there and yet have cast a long shadow across history anonymously. Such a character was New York pastor Jeremiah Lanphier. Born in New York, Lanphier was converted there in Charles Finney’s Broadway Tabernacle in 1842. A former businessman, at age 49 he was asked by the trustees of Old Dutch North Church to conduct a visitation program in a last ditch effort to get the dying church back on its feet. There was little success but he was a man of prayer. His prayer to God was a simple question: “What wilt Thou have me to do?”2 After getting permission from the church, he distributed some leaflets inviting “merchants, mechanics, clerks, strangers and businessmen” to a lunchtime prayer meeting, he opened the doors to the first meeting on 23 September 1857 at noon:
Five minutes went by; twenty minutes; twenty-five; thirty—and then at 12.30pm he heard a step on the stairs and the first person joined him. A few moments later there was another, and another, until they numbered six and the prayer meeting began. On the following Wednesday the six had increased to twenty; on the third week there were forty intercessors. . .3
The same week news came of a revival that was happening under Phoebe Palmer in Canada. Then, on 14 October came the Bank Panic—a massive financial crash involving 18 leading New York banks suspending operations and the subsequent failure of 5,000 American businesses over the coming year. The onset of the financial crisis had a remarkable affect:
The prayer meeting grew to one hundred, then others began to start prayer meetings; at last there was scarcely a street in New York that was without a prayer meeting. Merchants found time in the middle of the day to pray. The prayer meetings became daily ones, lasting for about an hour.4
By early 1858, Lanphier’s original Fulton Street prayer meeting was happening on all three floors of the building. By March of the same year, an entire theater was commandeered for the same purpose. This was packed with 3,000 businessmen who came, not only to pray, but also to listen to a powerful preacher: Henry Beecher. Soon, the newspapers were reporting estimates of 6,000 people across New York attending prayer meetings every day. Soon, most of America’s other big cities followed suit: Boston, Chicago, Washington (where there were 5 meetings a day: 6.30am, 10.00am, noon, 5.00pm & 7.00pm), Buffalo, Newark, and Philadelphia.
Soon, people began to be converted. By May 1858 there had been some 50,000 conversions in New York (the total population was 800,000). In New England the newspapers were claiming that there were some New England towns where not one person had been left unconverted.5 By the winter, there were reports of the ice on the Mohawk River being broken so that baptisms could take place there.
In short, one pastor who is as little known today as he was then, was instrumental in transforming the spiritual state of a whole country. Not only that but news of the Prayer Meeting Revival reached Ulster leading to the 1859 Ulster Revival, which was begun by an even more obscure person: a young man by the name of James McQuilkin and his three friends who also started prayer meetings. Once fully underway, this revival became known for the frequent occurrences of people prostrating themselves, sometimes even kneeling down in the mud. On one occasion an entire school full of children was affected in this way, with no human influence at all. As the revival spread, and included Dublin as well as the six northern counties, both Protestant and Catholic alike were affected and there was a dramatic thawing of relations between them. Before long a whiskey distillery in Belfast had to be auctioned, and pubs were forced to close for lack of custom. In October 1859, the Maze racecourse only attracted 500 people instead of the expected 10,000. Judges throughout Ulster had no cases to try, there were frequently no prisoners in police custody and not one crime reported.6 But who has ever heard of James McQuilkin?
Journalist Deborah Meroff tells of the remarkable missionary couple Pam and Dave Lovett who went on to set up the very first NGO in war-torn Tajikistan in the 1980s called the Central Asia Development Agency. Pam, in particular, had left a nice life behind in Wisconsin where she had been a medal-winning horse rider. This perhaps is a hero story in reverse: auspicious beginnings sacrificed for a life of dire hardship in a war zone but with colossal impact. Pam and Dave saved the lives of countless people desperate for food and medicine.7 By the time of the war against the Taliban in the wake of 9/11, their organization was ready to help the fleeing Afghans who were arriving on the Tajik border.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is also a hero that turns the Hero’s Journey motif on its head at this point. In 1939 he was enjoying a dream job at Union Theological Seminary in New York, having escaped Nazi Germany. Soon, however, there was a growing conviction that he must return to Germany and suffer with his people, a decision, as we will see later, that would cost him his life.
What I want to tell you is that your ordinariness, like the ordinariness of big screen heroes in the opening scenes of a movie, is temporary, but so too might your nice life be. And your transformation into something extraordinary may or may not result in you achieving renown. The only thing that is guaranteed about being a real life hero on a real life hero’s journey is that your life will become more and more infused with an ever-clarifying sense of purpose. By the time you get to the middle of your adventure energy might be in short supply, courage might totter, companions might prove unreliable, even the final goal might become blurred in the haze of battle, but there is one thing you will never say. You will never complain that your life has no meaning.
Discussion
1. Have you an untapped potential, and are the routines of your comfortable life presenting you with no opportunity of exploring it?
2. What might God have already said to you about this?
1. Davis, “Abraham Lincoln: Savior of a Nation,” 14.
2. Bendroth, “What Wilt Thou Have Me To Do?” 336.
3.
