It’s an up and down thing, this life. Times of great happiness are often followed by times of deep sadness. And things we count on don’t always pan out the way we thought they would.
Certainly true for Peter. Or Spider-Man, rather. He’s in the middle of battling Doctor Octopus in the bank, and suddenly his webbing fails him. Later, he finds out that Mary Jane is engaged to young Astronaut Jameson and, during a therapeutic swing through the city, the webbing fails him again. He plummets to the earth like a rock, slamming first into the edge of a dumpster, then facedown in a puddle. Ick.
He pulls off his mask to reveal possibly the worst case of bed-head ever, and tries to spew some more webbing. No dice. “Why’s this happening to me?” he wonders aloud. Curious, he wanders over to a nearby wall and begins his standard ascent. Halfway up, his powers fail him again, and he begins to slide down the wall. Ah, but then his powers kick back in, but only for a moment, and, like a car sputtering as it runs out of gas, Peter eventually succumbs to his predicament, landing with a thud on the alley floor, his tank on empty.
Good thing his super-strength hasn’t failed him, or those falls would’ve been a lot worse, huh?
Oh, yeah … his spider-bite-enhanced vision is messing up too, to the point where even the words “Spidey and Ock Rob Bank” emblazoned in thousand-point font on the front page of the Daily Bugle become blurry.
So what’s a superhero to do when the very things that make him super begin to go away? Visit the doctor, duh. But not just any doctor—Peter decides to see a physician who practices wearing the standard white lab coat over a tie-dyed t-shirt. Sweet.
The doc (not Ock) looks him over and proclaims, “It’s all in your mind.” He asks if Peter’s been having bad dreams or anything, so Peter leaps on the opportunity to get a full-blooded physician’s opinion on the whole superpower-loss thing.
“I have a dream,” Peter tentatively says, “where I’m Spider-Man.” And then he unloads on the poor doc, telling him how all his superpowers have gone out, how he climbs walls—in his dream—and then falls. Stuff like that. In fact, it isn’t even his dream; it’s his friend’s dream. Yeah, that’s right. His friend’s.
The doctor puts aside the tongue depressor and takes a seat next to Peter on the examination table. Time for a little psychoanalysis. “Why does your friend climb these walls?” he asks. “Who is he?”
The diagnosis for us, the viewers: Peter is conflicted. He doesn’t know who he is. He’s trying to be Spider-Man and Peter Parker at the same time, and it’s messing with his superhero mojo.
“Maybe you’re not supposed to be Spider-Man climbing those walls,” the doc tells him. “You always have a choice, Peter.”
What’s a superhero to do? Peter thinks about it, this choice. He can’t let go of his love for Mary Jane enough to be Spider-Man. He’s tired of the duality of his nature. He wants his life back, and he makes the decision: He is Spider-Man no more. And he demonstrates by chucking his Spidey outfit into a back alley garbage can.
As a conflicted individual, Peter can find no stability. Sometimes his Spider-Man-ness shows up while he’s Peter; more dangerously, sometimes his Peter Parker-ness shows up while he’s Spider-Man (leading to a lack of webbing at crucial apexes of city-wide swing sessions).
Sometimes we feel unaware of who we are, maybe when life presents us with a difficult choice that we cannot even begin to make. Occasionally, life hammers us over the head so hard that we feel like we lose our ability to cope—whatever superpowers we utilize to make it through the day are gone. One minute, we’re soaring through the air, effortlessly—and the next, whatever we were soaring on has been yanked out from under us and we are now rapidly heading downward for a date with a dumpster.
What can we do in such situations? What can we do when life smacks us across the face with trials galore? We can turn to the advice we find in James 1:2-8:
Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.
When life hits you over the head with trouble—and believe me, it will—you have a couple of options. You can fret and worry and get all in a huff about it. Or you can take it to God, ask Him for wisdom, listen and then do what He says. We can have confidence, according to this passage in James, that when we ask God for help in the midst of our trials, He’ll give it to us.
But if we ask God half-heartedly, then we get into a whole doubt thing, and doubt things only make us unstable. Doubting makes us double-minded, always unsure that we’re doing the right thing, wondering if we should have made the other choice, if the other wasn’t really the right one. So we switch to that other choice, thinking that it must be the right choice, but then it doesn’t feel right, and now the first choice sounds like it might’ve been the right choice all along.
Back and forth, back and forth, like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. Being double-minded is exhausting and painful, as Peter Parker finds out firsthand.
But once he rises up in the fullness of his destiny, once he again determines to live up to his Uncle Ben’s credo, “with great power comes great responsibility,” Peter is no longer unstable. Instead, he becomes a hero once again.
It can be the same in our own lives. Instead of being double-minded, let’s go back to the root of what we know—let’s go back to the Bible. Go back to God. Go back.
Let us all be double-minded no more.