Mrs. Dude and I have a Christmas Eve tradition of going out to a late lunch/early dinner, then to a movie. It’s usually whichever Disney film is currently in the theaters. Today was no exception. The film we saw was Bolt.
The film itself is very good; a definite step up quality-wise from Disney’s other animated films in recent years. It’s not in the same league as WALL·E or the other Pixar movies, but it’s well worth seeing. Try to catch it in a theater showing the 3D version.
Without giving away the plot, one of the film’s main threads is what happens to someone who isn’t told the truth about who and/or what they are. It’s rather like the adage about a person’s perception being their reality, only amplified as in this case there’s no available contrary evidence. You can’t accuse someone of willfully closing their eyes to how life genuinely is when they are deliberately kept uninformed about it.
We live in a world prone to not telling the truth. We don’t tell it to each other, we don’t tell it about each other, and we don’t tell ourselves the truth about ourselves. An illustration of this I’ve mentioned before comes from an interview I once heard with Pete Townshend, guitarist and songwriter for the Who. His comment was that in relationships the woman wants to be told she’s loved and the man wants to be told he is who he thinks he is. Never mind the truth. These are the words we want to hear.
Those of us who believe fight this mindset every day, both when it comes from others and especially when it comes from within. Far too often we see too much of one side and not enough, if any at all, of the other when it comes to how we view ourselves. We either see ourselves as such worthy children of God we give ourselves a free pass on sin because the good we do negates the bad, or we see ourselves as such wretched sinners we lock ourselves away from any notion of being an emissary of Christ’s love because we’re too pathetic to be of any use to Him or anyone else. Obviously these are the extremes. That said, these are the ballparks in which so many of us dwell.
The truth about ourselves is that we are at once both of the above and yet neither. While there is no free pass on misbehavior, there is also the constant, consistent presence of Jesus’ love in our lives and the work of the Spirit in our hearts and minds. Christ not only knows us as we are, He knew us in the eternity before now. He declared us, as we are, worthy of spending the eternity after now with Him, dying in our place and then rising from the dead so this could be so. We honor His sacrifice by imitating Him, living in love and while acknowledging our shortcomings not allowing ourselves to excuse ourselves from always working to do things correctly.
Including telling each other and ourselves the truth.
More on this as it relates to politics in the next post.
