Learning from the Movies

In the film Bruce Almighty, Bruce watches his wife's prayer and realises just how badly he's treated her. So he says a prayer of his own:

"I want her to meet someone who will see her always as I do now, through your eyes"

I pray every day that i might view the world through God's eyes. That I might love his children with his heart. We can only truly heal the broken and serve the hurting if we are thinking solely about them and have stopped focusing on ourselves. If we are looking through God's eyes instead of passing our own judgement.

In another movie classic, Shallow Hal, Hal, a (as the title suggests) shallow, chauvinistic, pig, is put under a spell so that he sees women not for how they look on the outside but the appearance of their hearts. Hal falls in love with Rosemary not for how she looks (although this might be his initial conscious reasoning) but for her personality. So deeply in love that he ignores any suggestion of flaw, the broken chairs, the mountains of food, the huge underwear.

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When you really love someone, the way Hal loves Rosemary, the way God loves us, you love them despite their flaws. God sent Jesus to love us and save us whilst we were still sinners. God asks us not to judge his children but to love them. When Hal finally sees the real Rosemary he goes back to his human ways and judges her on her appearance. Later he realises how wrong that was, he finds her again and is reminded of how beautiful she is.

People should be beautiful to us not because of how they look or sound or act but because God loves them. Because Jesus is in them. Because Jesus told us that whenever we love the needy we are loving him.

At the end of Bruce Almighty Bruce asks God, "What do you want me to do?" God replies, "I want you to pray son."

God wants us to bring our lives to him because when we pray and dwell in his presence we become like him, we live like him, we see like him, Prayer is about having a relationship with God, about changing our lives, changing the people we meet's lives, prayer is about changing the world.

Let's pray together to see the world through God's eyes. To see people as Hal did, because of their inner beauty not their outer appearance.

To live with love.