Evan Almighty’s wife goes through some personal doubts and runs off to a restaurant, where Morgan Freeman as God shows up as a server. He starts listing off things that people pray for, like courage and patience. He then asks the big question: which is better, to be made courageous or to be given opportunities to show courage? Should we be automatically patient robots or should we learn to love through patience? (And seeing how people and God have been patient with us.)
Grandpa Bob described it as two friends. One guy is canoing through a winding valley river. He is about to approach rapids around the bend, but he can’t see around the twisty corner. He had gone camping with a friend. The friend is at a ranger’s station at the top of one of the mountains with a cellphone. To the guy in the canoe, the future is around the winding river corner. To the friend on the mountain, the entire perspective of the river is in view. That is his present time. The mountaintop friend can call his canoing buddy who’s about to hit serious rapids. It’s up to the canoing guy, who’s oblivious to the nature of his river route, whether or not he listens to his friend. Free will comes in when we have to choose to answer and listen to the call. It’s interesting that in Evan Almighty he says that he hears from God and everyone gives this big gasp and then a murmuring wave of comments happens.
The lesson of following the call (or not listening) is demonstrated in Evan Almighty many times by boards hitting him in the head while he’s trying to build the ark. The issue with free will is that you can’t control people. That’s tough for humans.
Someone shared recently that she can’t lift people’s burdens and it feels like failure to her. She then compared it to The Return of the King (okay, so it was my wife’s mom…very cool family!) when Frodo is struggling up Mount Doom with Sam. When Frodo is near death, Sam yells out,”I can’t carry your burden, but I can carry you.”
I love the Return of the King movie and book (hey, I should name a kid after a character!) because The Ring totally looks like sin. It’s partly in Frodo’s heart but it also has a will of its own. People kept asking Tolkien if the ring represented the atomic bomb and how it’s tough to bear and control. Tolkien responded that the ring was the desires behind wanting to control the bomb, that the ring was much bigger than one single event.
Some critics suggested that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory and protest of atomic power and the dangers inherent in nuclear warfare. Tolkien emphatically denied this, saying that the story (which predated the nuclear age) was not about atomic power, but power exerted for domination. In his view nuclear physics could be used for domination, but it should not be used at all, and he further emphasized that the story was really about Death and Immortality. But he was stunned and outraged when he learned of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He called the scientists who developed the bomb lunatic physicists and raged that it was idiocy to “consent to do such work for war-purposes, calmly plotting the destruction of the world!” (Carpenter 2000b, p. 116).
In the same way that we can help carry burdens but we can’t fully take them without being hurt ourselves, it’s like the guys who helped their paralyzed friend get to Jesus.
18Some men came carrying a paralytic on a mat and tried to take him into the house to lay him before Jesus. 19When they could not find a way to do this because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and lowered him on his mat through the tiles into the middle of the crowd, right in front of Jesus.
20When Jesus saw their faith, he said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.”21The Pharisees and the teachers of the law began thinking to themselves, “Who is this fellow who speaks blasphemy? Who can forgive sins but God alone?”
We can’t control the people and take power for ourselves. The call is not to fix people but to disciple them.
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