Of Little Miss Sunshine and Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Recently my wife and I joined Netflix, initially just to get animated features for the boys, but we've since gone to trading off one for the boys and one for us. The last two movies for us grown ups have been Little Miss Sunshine and Bonhoeffer Agent of Grace. I like both of these movies and would recommend them for mature audiences. On Wednesday nights we have been studying Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship and after watching Little Miss Sunshine last night I got to thinking:

• What message would Bonhoeffer have for the Hoovers?

But what the question really turned into for me was:

• What do the Hoovers have for me?

Now it's not that their family was anything to aspire too I'm not going to become a heroin addict, create a 9 step program, become a Proust scholar or take a vow of silence. Yet at the end of the movie I somehow felt that they had found something worth having. I had felt the same way at the end of the Bonhoeffer movie as well but the endings couldn't have been more different. Bonhoeffer ended with him naked standing on the Nazi gallows where he was hung only months before the end of WW II and Little Miss Sunshine ended with them push starting the old VW bus one last time before crashing through a fence and driving off down the interstate.

I think I was hit by the fact that both sets of characters finally found a way to act and live for something beyond their own selfish desires and in living for something else they finally found a little bit more of what they were looking for. Both are journeys of self discovers obviously taken along different paths. The calling to live for the dream of a 7 year old to enter a beauty pageant and to live a life of discipleship to Christ are two very different calls.

So I think my answer to the Hoovers would go something like this:

Living for somebody else is honorable; it's only when start living for somebody else that we truly find out who we really are. But the person we live for must be chosen carefully because there is only one who person who we can live for who will not let us down and whom living for will truly result in find ourselves and that person is Jesus Christ.

Like the crap that the Hoovers went through to get from New Mexico to California there is a cost in following Jesus but it is in following him that our homesick hearts find a place in this world we call home.
I think I'll close this murky glimpse outside the box with the following quote from The Cost of Discipleship concerning the Grace of Jesus Christ:

Blessed are they who, in the knowledge of such grace, can live in the world without losing themselves in it. In following Christ their heavenly home has become so certain that they are truly free for life in this world.

God bless all you freedom seekers climbing out of the box. If you see me on the way out offer me a hand.