A walk to remember

I was watching the movie last night called "A walk to remember." It is a movie about a Pastor's daughter who has leukemia and how she lives the remainder of the days she has left. It is definitely a tear jerker movie, because she falls in love with a high school boy who is bad on the outside.

He is one of the boys who is most popular but a bit of a trouble maker. He and His friends make fun of her all the time because she is quite simple and dresses modestly or old fashioned in most of her peers eye. But there is something different about her. There is a purity, love and quality of the spirit in her that draws this troubled young man to her.

At first he doesn't understand what he is attracted to. But Jamie ( the young girl) looks past the outer person he is, and is able to see the potential he has to be a good man and achieve his dreams. His friends flatter his flesh all the time and make him out to be "big and bad." Jamie sees something else. She sees his tenderness beneath the image. She sees the love he is capable of giving. She sees the potential to be what he desires to be. Even when he cuts her down and laughs at her, she tells him that he is good.

One point in the movie, he really hurts her by not acknowledging her friendship in front of his friends. He then comes to the house as if all is ok, and she tells him, " I thought there was something really special about you, I must have been wrong." Those words stun him and cause him to rethink things about himself. He always saw himself as a failure or one who is always in trouble. He thought he had to be big and bad to be loved or noticed, but now he begins to realize all he has to be is what he was made to be.

Jamie saw this in him and brought this quality out of him because of her faith in God. It is really a good movie, accept for a few choice words.The point of this today is we often see ourselves just like the young man. We have allowed the world to determine what we are and how we are to live. Often peer pressure has caused us to see differently and think wrongly about what we really are.

If our call is to go make disciples of the nations, then let us be ambassadors of the Hope their is in Christ. Christianity is more than being saved from hell. Redemption is more than forgiving our sins which would have been enough, but it is God restoring us back to a place where we can live the potential and purpose He created us for. In this purpose we become salt to the earth, a lamp not hidden under a bushel, or a city set upon a hill.

As I watched the movie, I was able to see how our God longs for us to see ourselves above our faults, sin, mistakes and failures. He wants us to see us the way He created us to be, full of potential and purpose. He longs to tells us this himself, but interesting enough in the movie used a dying girl who could be bitter about her sickness to awaken the hope in this young man.
May the Lord encourage you this day, not to see yourself as what you were. What you were made by your natural enviroment, but to the real you, who was made in the image of God. Your real purpose to be the apple of His eye and His preculiar treasure.