Pastor

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Footprints

It’s Oscar season and Grace and I have challenged ourselves to see all the movies nominated for Best Picture this year before the night of the Academy Awards show. It will be all the more fun to watch the program that way. We had already seen “The Help” with the Women4Women group back in August. I put “Midnight in Paris,” “Tree of Life” and “Moneyball” (and “Rango” which is up for best animated flick) on hold at the library. We saw “Hugo” and “The Descendants” last week on Bargain Tuesday at the Farmingdale Multiplex and “The Artist” at the UA Farmingdale using the Fandango gift card Grace got for Christmas. We’re hoping to see “War Horse” on Friday or next Bargain Tuesday. Which leaves “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” for sometime shortly after that. So far we’ve seen four out of the nine films nominated and are looking forward to seeing the rest.

Each movie we’ve seen has been unique and beautiful in its own way. “The Help” was a story of friendship transcending race and courage in the midst of prejudice in the 1960s South. “The Descendants” was a slice of life story about a family grieving over a mother who had been in a boating accident and was in a coma, but was being taken off life support and not expected to live. “Hugo” was a gorgeously depicted children’s tale of a young boy and an old man mourning different losses, but finding hope and friendship together. “The Artist” was a charming, black and white, silent film that told the tale of a silent-film actor on his way out, a starlet in the talkies on her way up and the ways their lives intersected.

So far, it is difficult to know which one I’d choose as Best Picture. They’re all so different! Yet when I look beyond the plot and theme, costumes, sets and cinematography, I see a recurring theme: that of brokenness and redemption. It seems our human nature really needs to know that beyond the trials and tribulations we undergo, it really will be all right in the end. (In an amusing trailer for “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” that Grace and I have seen several times in our movie-going lately, a British retiree who has traveled to India is complaining that she’s not getting what was advertised on the brochure. The young man behind the front desk replies, “We have a saying in India: ‘It will all be all right in the end.’ If it’s not all right, it’s not the end yet.”)

This is the undergirding theme in our Christian story. It not only will be all right in the end, it already has been all right in the end. We are both broken and redeemed. Our brokenness, in fact, is not the end but the beginning. The tool through which God can and does work in our lives to bring about hope and beauty. The apostle Paul reminds us in Romans 8:37-19, “(W)e are more than conquerors through him who loved us, for I am convinced that neither death, nor life, no angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

No matter where we are on our life’s journeys, no matter what we are going through now or have been through in the past or will go through in the future, God is with us. God is holding us close and loving us and comforting us. We do not go it alone, but rather are “inscribed on the palms of God’s hands.” (Isaiah 49:16) No matter where you currently are in your life, you can be assured that even though there is brokenness, there is also redemption. It has been ordained by the loving God of the universe and if seeing an Oscar-nominated (or any other) movie reminds you of that, it’s all to the good!

- Rev. Rebecca Segers

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