August Rush

H2 is home this weekend for a little well-deserved R&R - her amazing husband is keeping Tornado and Hurricane all by himself...for most dads, a few hours is one thing, but three days with two 2-year-olds is something altogether heroic.

On H2's recommendation, all us girls (E included) went to see August Rush at the cheap theatre. I think it was one of the most profound movies I have seen in a very long time, and the spiritual parallels overwhelmed me. I don't know if the movie was meant to even have spiritual overtones, but it sure spoke to me. It's about an 11-year-old boy in an orphanage who, having been there since birth, has a deep sense that he will one day be reunited with his parents, and that they want this as badly as he does. Nobody else shares this conviction, and he is taunted by the other boys for the "music" he hears in his soul, drawing him to set out on his own, following the music to his destiny. He runs away, makes it to New York city, and, even though utterly lost, finds himself there. We learn that he is more than a strange, sensitive child with an odd sense of being longed for by the very parents who obviously deserted him...he is a musical prodigy...a modern day Mozart. Without spoiling the whole story line, here are just three of the at least ten spiritual parallels that kept me awake late into the night:

1) Evan's closest companion, even before he was able to identify it as such was the "music" he heard everywhere - wind through a field of grain, traffic noise, voices talking...it was all music to him, and he was his happiest when he took all the cacophony around him and heard a symphony in his head, making beauty of all the random sounds. My closest companion is my God - and when I listen, even in the random noise of the crazy world around me, He is there. All I have to do is listen, and there He is, interpreting chaos, bringing beauty, everpresent. Even when I feel alone, listening to the music reminds me He is there, making sense of it all.

2) Evan was driven by the music to believe something that those around him could not understand, to pursue a hopeless dream, to keep looking for something he could not see. This is the same way that God often operates - calling us to higher heights and deeper depths, places we can't see up front, but we follow anyway, because the music is compelling, and we know we must go.

3) Evan was on a journey, and while he was driven to continue, he was patient in the going, somehow knowing that the destination would be reached at the right time, and everything that happened inbetween was a part of the final symphony. Sometimes we become myopic, unable to see anything but the end result. But in God's economy, where even the hard times of life are redeemed for good, the journey really is as important as the destination. The lessons learned along the way, the people we meet, even the pain failures...it's all part of the larger whole.