Aimee and I went on a daytime date on Sunday to see Avengers: Endgame. Again. I cried. Again. That’s not what this blog is about. We got home and my daughters wanted to know if we liked it, and why we wanted to see it a second time. I tried to explain it to them, but really, until they’ve watched all 21 of the movies leading up to it, they’ll never understand. It’s leading to a growing concern that I have about my children and all of the movies they must see in their lifetimes.
There are too many. All the Marvel movies (23 and counting), all the Star Wars Movies, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, all the Harry Potter movies, the first three Die Hard movies, The Shining, Breakfast Club, Aliens, The Matrix, Goonies, Labyrinth, The Godfather, Gremlins, Stand By Me, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Independence Day (not the new one), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Back to the Future, Jaws, Rocky, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Young Frankenstein, Men in Tights, Blazing Saddles, Princes Bride.
I’m just getting started, and I’m sure that Aimee has a list of movies she wants to share with our kids someday too. A lot of them probably started out as Nicholas Sparks novels. There’s only so many Friday movie nights between now and who knows when...and you probably noticed that my kids will need to be mostly grown to see a lot of these movies. My list already has about 86 movies in it and I wasn’t even thinking that hard. Oh...El Mariachi, Desperado, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Terminator, Star Trek, Titanic (I guess), every Batman movie (except George Clooney), Castaway, The Alamo, Snatch, The Game, Three Amigos, The Fifth Element, The Waterboy and a ton of other Adam Sandler movies, James Bond...holy cow…Every Christmas Movie. I did the math. There’s only 167 weekends between my youngest’s 13th birthday and my oldest’s graduation from high school...there’s too much to pass on and in all likelihood, they’ll never see most of these--especially while Disney and everyone else crank out new ones faster than we can watch them, and do I have to make them read all the books first?
Also, there’s so much more of greater significance to be passed on, and sometimes the hard part is sharing something like, say...faith with the same kind of passion and conviction that I share my love of movies. Blogger Becky Eldredge says, “With passing on the understanding of God to my children, I am asked to attempt to put words to something that matters deeply to me, an understanding that has evolved and deepened over time. It is hard for me to describe what I know within.” And yet, we must find, rehearse, and share the stories of how God has been at work in our lives, or about how we’ve experienced the power of resurrection, so that one day our kids will claim God’s story for themselves.
And even though I’ll have to wait to share a lot of these movies with my kids, I remind myself to create space to share and tell the story of my life with God with the same enthusiasm and passion I have for movies.
