The Gospel Everywhere
An invitation to pause and look
Growing up, my family watched movies together. We’d be sitting close to each other on the couch, with our popcorn and drinks, and my dad would pause whatever was on the screen and interrupt with a question. “Do you see the sacrifice this character just made?” he would ask. My little sister and I would roll our eyes and respond, “That character gave up their life for the other one.”
As children, we were only able to see this frequent question as an inconvenience. Now we understand it as a beautiful way to engage with the world. The repetition of pausing to notice a character’s sacrifice, the unconditional love another character wanted, or the wholeness of personhood that every character sought was a valuable lesson. As we grew, we would anticipate our father’s contemplative question and call out the answer. My perspective had shifted, and I realized why my dad had been asking us to pause. The themes and characters of the gospel are all around us. I began to realize that the story and themes of the gospel were in everything.
Deep sacrificial love resides in so many stories, and not just C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. In Disney’s Frozen, for example, Anna sacrifices her life for that of her sister, Elsa, and her act of love brings about resurrection just like it does in the story of the cross. In The Princess Bride, Buttercup and Wesley are in love on the farm, but he goes off to sea, where he is taken captive and killed by the Dread Pirate Roberts. But later he reveals himself to Buttercup through the iconic hill rolling scene. This resurrection births hope in the story.
But while the goodness of love and life are common, characters often face the darkness within themselves or sin they have to overcome in order to flourish. Many must recognize and battle their own wickedness before they successfully defeat the bad guy. All of these narratives are woven into the culture around us. And while it is not always recognized, they appear so often because God placed a desire for his narrative on our hearts.
That’s the beauty of the God we serve. He has given us his story. And each human heart intrinsically knows the story because the Storyteller knows them. The practice of pausing is still one I think about daily. It shifts the way I take in the world around me.
All this is not to say that every movie will preach the gospel, but that the gospel is within us all and is sometimes displayed in the most unexpected ways. It is encouraging to me, and I pray also to you, that the Lord is speaking to us. He can capture our attention in new ways, and he is not difficult to find. All we have to do is pause and look.
Esther Decker lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She loves Jesus, thrifting, sustainability, and good food. @Esther.deck