Resonation With Reconciliation

That may sound weird, but I'm pretty sure there's a huge part of our heart that resonates with the concept, the value, the principle, the picture ... of reconciliation, that beautiful thing that takes place when two hearts return to one another.

So, here's what happened ... we had our friends, Spencer and Jana, over to hang out, eat spaghetti, watch a movie, and eat brownies and ice cream - classic Saturday night. We were discussing which movie to watch ... the potentials were: Elizabethtown, First Knight, Hitch, Knight's Tale ... all good options, but then a movie was starting on TV ... Just Like Heaven. (Reese Witherspoon and that guy from 13 Going on Thirty ... not that I've seen 13 Going on Thirty, but I heard he was in it ... anyway) We decided to just watch that.

Well, like any good movie it had us wrapped up pretty good about halfway through as we were starting to really wonder whether the two main characters were gonna get together. And it really had us wrapped up right at the end when one of them decides to do something crazy in the name of love. But sure enough, at the least opportune time a basic commercial break turns into a 10 minute break due to tornado warning updates from the weather guy ...

We were considerably less than happy about this (I know, very insensitive) and the four of us sat there, waiting, wondering ... what was happening in the movie (which at this point had gone from fiction to reality in our story driven minds), how much longer is this guy gonna be, will they pause the movie or will it continue and we miss the most crucial part of the whole thing? I could just picture the weather guy saying "we now return you to your originally scheduled program" ... only to have the screen change to a picture of our lovers kissing in the sunset and us having no idea how the conflict was resolved! And it was killing us!

Just when we thought we couldn't take it anymore, the movie comes back on ... and our worst fears were realized ... no, the tornado wasn't headed our way ... the story had gone on without us, we got dumped back in having missed the most crucial aspect of any narrative - the conflict resolution! We quickly turned the channel while expressing our true brokenness over not knowing how things got worked out ... not to fear, we live in the age of the internet ... within minutes we've pulled the movie up on Youtube and are finding where we left off ... sweet relief ... as you may suspect, the story ended with the kiss of two lovers ... together again ... ahh, sweet reconciliation ... the heartbeat of human longing.

What in the name of narrative was going on in our hearts that made us so set on finishing the story, knowing what happened, and HOW?! What were our hearts communicating to us about how we're wired? Why were we so irritated with the poor meteorologist who was keeping us from the narrative our hearts had connected to and needed to return to? Ok, I get it, tornado warnings are important, lives are at stake ... but in our hearts something else big was at stake ... reconciliation ... and not just reconciliation, the means of reconciliation. We're hard wired for story, relationship, and purpose ... and in a broken world, reconciliation is a key part of any of those. Our hearts demand several things ... to be part of a story, to know that it works out in the end, AND to know HOW and WHY it works out in the end! Why wasn't it enough to just see them kissing at the end and be happy knowing they got together? We had to know how, and this isn't just some culturally conditioned movie madness ... the desires we experienced open a little window to our hearts ... and to our design.

I believe every human heart understands that we live in a broken world, and they long to know that it's going to work out, but as much as they want reconciliation, they also want to know how it can be. As Christians, we value Genesis 3 because it lets us know why the world is broken, we value the Revelation because it lets us know that it's going to work out for good in the end, God wins. BUT ... Revelation wouldn't be near as satisfying without ... the Gospels ... the MEANS of reconciliation. We long to know it's going to be ok, but we also long to know how it is possible that it's going to be ok ... and for Christians, there's only one answer ... the cross ... our means of reconciliation.

May my heart beat as passionately for a deeper understanding of the beauty of the cross as is did to finish the movie tonight.