Former American Press staff writer Sunny Brown Farley writes "Naked Faith," a look at faith in its natural form: lived out in the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.

Up

Posted August 30, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Filed Under Faith & Religion | Leave a Comment

Up is a movie about an adventure and an old man.

This man, and the wife he adored, dreamed of traveling Lost Land in South America from the time they were kids. They saved for it, they kept a scrapbook for it with a map and pictures, but they never actually went.

Meanwhile they lived a full life and the wife died at an old age.

The widower tries to come to terms with his new phase in life and becomes resolved to finally set out for Lost Land. He does so by tying countless helium balloons to his house and lifting up off the face of the earth. What he doesn’t realize though, is that he has a stowaway on board his floating house – a boy scout who had come to see him in effort to get a badge for helping the elderly.

The interesting thing to me about this movie is that this man has made up his mind that he must do this certain thing. He must go to Lost Land. He can focus on nothing else – the needs of others, his own personal well-being, nothing. He has a plan and he is dead set on making it happen.

Not only that, he brings all of his stuff with him. In order to enact this plan of his, he takes along everything he owns and let me tell ya, when everything you own is tied to balloons, it is hard to stay off the ground.

In light of this film, I thought about a few theological questions:

How often have we set our minds on doing or accomplishing something that is born of our own will? What have we missed or sacrificed along the way?

How often have we tried to lug a bunch of stuff with us in our faith journey? Has that stuff weighed us down? What is really important for us to take along?

Luke 9, Jesus sends out his disciples to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to heal people and to cast out demons and he directs them in verse 3 to “Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra tunic.” I can imagine it was scary for the disciples to let go of all the stuff they thought they needed for their journey.

Likewise, it is hard for us to let go of determining what our journey is and how it will go.

Later in Luke 9, Jesus tells the disciples to feed the 5,000. Their solutions to this problem are:

1. It can’t be done. We don’t have enough food.

2. Buy enough food, which they couldn’t afford to do.

Things go much better for the disciples after they listen to Jesus and follow his instructions on how to achieve what he has asked them to do.

God, guide and direct our journeys. Show us where to go, what to do and what to take with us.

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