father knows best

c.c. and i went on an honest-to-goodness date this past saturday night - dinner AND a movie. woo hoo! this doesn’t happen quite as often now that we’ve entered parenthood.

as we were sitting waiting for the previews to start, we ran through our favorite movies that we’ve seen at the theater in 2007.

here’s our list:

1. August Rush
2. wait….that’s the only one we saw this year…

anyway, “august rush” was a well made movie. the story was told in a very compelling way. the main characters developed well. they did a good job incorporating music into the story. and they also avoided a personal pet peeve of mine. they taught the actors how to fake it convincingly on their musical instruments - close enough that it wasn’t distracting.

c.c. and i both had a pretty emotional reaction to the film. it hit close to home with our daughter having been an abandoned child.

on one hand, it was a nice diamond in the rough story…the kid who beat all the odds. sadly, the reason that it’s such a fantastic story is that it’s so fantastic. it just doesn’t happen that way in the real world, and there are roughly 143 million kids in the world that can attest to that.

there was one line in particular in the film that still has me thinking….

august (the orphaned boy) finds his way to a catholic church where he spends some time at the shelter there and strikes up friendships with a young girl named hope and the reverend jay. when he goes missing again, hope is expressing her worry about august to reverend jay, who says to hope, “i prayed for him. did you?” she says that yes, she did pray.

then reverend jay says something to the effect of, “don’t you think that his Father (looking up) will do what’s best for him?”

wow. a double edged sword.

if yes, then what about all the other kids who don’t stumble upon an extraordinary musical gift that they can use to be reunited with their birthparents? seriously, throughout the entire movie i could not stop thinking about all the kids in the world that don’t have homes. everything went through that filter.

more personally….i believe that God planned for darby to be our daughter. we stumbled almost blindly into this plan. there’s no way we could ever take credit for it. but at the same time, it presents a problem for me. what about all the other kids that are not adopted? surely their Father will do what’s best for them as well.

it really boils down to the age-old question - if God is so good, then why all the evil in the world?

i don’t have rock solid, completely satisfactory answers, but i guess that’s what faith is all about. i do believe that God is working a plan of redemption in the world, but that it’s an ongoing project with gains and losses along the way. his project depends on people. we are waking up to this, but we’ve got a long way to go.

it pains me to know that there are kids who grow into adulthood without knowing what a family’s love is all about. i HAVE to believe that this not only is not part of God’s plan, but that it breaks his heart too.