Ivan (my husband) and I just finished watching Rise of the Guardians, the highly recommended animated film introduced to us by Pastor Seth Dahl that same weekend he came to speak to us about the effects of good covering on soil…and I am very, very, glad to report that I agree 100% with Pastor Seth on the significance of this film and how it speaks into the condition of our society and our experience of the world today, and what is needed for hope, healing, courage and love to rise up where there has simply been too much darkness, hurt, fear, and loneliness.

We were actually gifted the movie a few weeks ago from a good friend, only to lend it out twice the first week, and then finding it difficult to make time to sit down and watch it ourselves.

And then even tonight, we ALMOST could not watch it because we couldn’t remember where we last put it down after numerous occasions of picking it up to possibly watch, only to have something else come up or finding one or both of ourselves just too tired at the end of the day.

Funny now that I think about it, because as we were searching and searching, I started feeling all those negative thoughts and insecurities that like to try and rise up and convince me of the “hopelessness” of my own life and self (even as I know that I know that I know now without a doubt that I am not hopeless nor has any circumstance in my life ever turned out hopeless!).  Those negative thoughts and insecurities are just so familiar, that when they start creeping up, they can get in and start to take over pretty fast…

For example, “of course, when we finally have time to watch the movie, that’s when it disappears,” and “what did I expect as I haven’t been doing the best job at housekeeping these past couple of weeks, how can anyone keep track of anything in all the piles of clutter starting to add up in all the different rooms of our house,” and “how am I going to face my friend and have to explain to her that we lost it?”…  Silly things, I know, but these were the thoughts bombarding my life for a whole five to ten minutes or so.

And then the thought occurred, why not just ask the girls.  Because even though I can remember looking at the case with them a couple days ago because they were asking me about who all the different characters on the cover picture were, I just couldn’t remember where we were or what exactly we were doing, because so much has happened in my own world since then… And sure enough, my daughters both literally thought about it for a few seconds, and then a light bulb went on in my recently turned 4-year-old Olivia’s brain, and she’s like, “I know!  Let me go check…” in an excited voice. So she jumps up and runs to my bedroom like she’s off to go Easter egg hunting, and goes straight to my husband’s side table drawer looking for it.  It isn’t there so she says, “hm, that’s strange, I know it was here,” and because I know that she knows what she remembers, I am no longer worried and can confidently tell her thanks because now I will know how to find it (so the girls scramble back off to bed, not bothered one bit that their ‘remembering’ didn’t produce immediate results). So I just decide to start searching from around the side table and then under the bed, and I find it under the bed around the corner, within 5 seconds —  mission accomplished, just like that! =)

I feel like this experience, and the film, are reminding me and somehow articulating how God is teaching me about the amazing power in my children—and in all children—when in their “childlikeness” they are happy and having fun (like the effects of Jack Frost’s ‘powers’ in the film), to bring instant life and peace and joy to me whenever I remember to make and allow for time to relate to and actively pursue relationship with them.

There is something here about what childlikeness—which is what we need to be able to enter the kingdom of heaven “like little children” (Matthew 18:3)—looks like, and how it is the secret to combatting, defeating and transforming the darkness, depression, fear and loneliness in our lives and in the world today…which I will continue to think about and hopefully write more on shortly.