Willard Movie Quotes

We pay a lot of money to get a tank with a few tropical fish in it and never tire of looking at their brilliant iridescence and marvelous forms and movements. But God has seas full of them, which he constantly enjoys. (I can hardly take in these beautiful little creatures one at a time.) We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. This is what we must think of when we hear theologians and philosophers speak of him as a perfect being. This is his life.

Andrew Willard Jones writes, Within the metanarrative of progress that underwrites liberalism, Christians are cast as the losing side and, I am afraid, there is no amount of maneuvering that can change that. In fact, our role in the drama is precisely this maneuvering. We are cast to fight a rearguard action: we steadily lose ground, but nonetheless put up a stubborn resistance. In the liberal march to freedom, we are the ever-retreating but completely necessary tyrants, the enemies of human rights against whom the freedom fighters heroically contend, the defenders of dogma against whom the courageous scientists struggle, the stuffy prudes against whom the free-spirited youth must battle. We have all seen multiple versions of this movie—in fact, this is the plot of nearly all our cultural productions. If this is indeed our role in the cultural narrative, new tactics will not save us. Devising new ways to “turn back the clock” or new arguments within the dominant discourse of freedom and rights, of religion and the State, is simply to continue to play the part of the loser in a liberal script acted out on a set constructed of modern concepts. To view ourselves as the retreating good guys is simply our role.

When Jesus died for his people, he knew me by name in the particularity of this day. Christ didn’t redeem my life theoretically or abstractly—the life I dreamed of living or the life I think I ideally should be living. He knew I’d be in today as it is, in my home where it stands, in my relationships with their specific beauty and brokenness, in my particular sins and struggles. God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today. In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard reminds us that where “transformation is actually carried out is in our real life, where we dwell with God and our neighbors. . . . First, we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God’s kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.”4 The new life into which we are baptized is lived out in days, hours, and minutes. God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today. Alfred Hitchcock said movies are “life with the dull bits cut out.”5 Car chases and first kisses, interesting plot lines and good conversations. We don’t want to watch our lead character going on a walk, stuck in traffic, or brushing his teeth—at least not for long, and not without a good soundtrack. We tend to want a Christian life with the dull bits cut out. Yet God made us to spend our days in rest, work, and play, taking care of our bodies, our families, our neighborhoods, our homes. What if all these boring parts matter to God? What if days passed in ways that feel small and insignificant to us are weighty with meaning and part of the abundant life that God has for us?