passengers.

You know what one of my biggest struggles is? Fear in uncertain circumstances. Fear of the future. Fear that this pain of __________, this struggle with ___________, this waiting for ___________, will last forever. That __________ won't work out the way I want it to.

It's a control issue.

I think I know what I want and try to masterfully plan my own way, and when my expectations are shattered, I throw a bit of a tantrum and sometimes (in the past, more consistently) crumple into a heap of bitterness and anger and a woe-is-me attitude. 

["The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps." (Proverbs 16:9) ....I am slowly learning to genuinely rest in that.]

Have you seen Passengers? With Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence? I watched it with some friends the other night, and, ya know, didn't exactly expect to come away with a deeper understanding of certain spiritual truths. But. It happened.

[Just to give you fair warning, if you want to see this movie and haven't yet, I'm about to ruin the ending for you. So you might want to skip down a few paragraphs. Okay. Don't say I didn't warn you.]

The movie starts when the spaceship (a luxury-cruise-ship-type thing...kind of exactly like in Wall-E) with 5,000 "hibernating" passengers headed for a new life on another planet gets hit by a meteor, waking up one passenger (Jim) 90 years too soon. He doesn't know how or why; he only knows his hibernation pod malfunctioned (which all the automated systems on the ship tell him is an impossibility) and he is alone. He lives a year this way, with only a bar-tending robot for company. He is on the brink of suicide when he stumbles upon the sleeping Aurora. He then starts learning about her through information and interviews in the ship's records, and (you guessed it) he falls in love with her. He battles against his selfishness for a while, but eventually his desire for companionship wins out and he wakes her up. And of course, he doesn't tell her he did it.

Aurora is at first frustrated with the fact that her plans to write a story that's never been told (of a pioneer expedition to another planet) have been thwarted. But she eventually succumbs to Jim's shy charm and falls for him. They are whimsically happy for a while, until the aforementioned bar-tending robot spills the beans. 

As you can imagine, she is livid. And that's an understatement....she kicks, screams, and even tries to kill him with a crowbar before presumably vowing to never again acknowledge his existence. 

And so they would have continued if another hibernation pod hadn't malfunctioned. This time, the awakened passenger is a crew member who is able to access other areas of the ship, where they discover that Jim woke up two years earlier because a meteor had blown a hole in the ship and was still doing significant damage. If they didn't do something, all 5,000 passengers would be lost. 

To make a long story short, Jim and Aurora are able to save the day, but Jim could never have done it alone: Expelling the meteor took two people (just watch the movie, it's too complicated to explain). So, even though waking Aurora up was terribly selfish, they would have all died if he hadn't. And if Jim's pod hadn't malfunctioned in the beginning, again, the ship would have been completely destroyed by the meteor decades before it reached its destination. 

In the end, Jim and Aurora are finally able to be content with their circumstances. True, it wasn't at all what they had planned...living out the rest of their days on a spaceship and dying of old age before reaching the place they had planned to build their perspective futures. 

In the final scene, you hear the words Aurora has recorded for posterity, "A friend once said, 'You can't get so hung up on where you'd rather be that you forget to make the most of where you are.' We got lost along the way, but we found each other. And we made a life...a beautiful life. Together."

[As a side note, the fact that Jim was on the verge of killing himself when he felt suffocated by solitude but the couple thrived when they worked together to save the ship, then reconciled and committed to building a life together makes me think of  1. Adam and Eve: "It is not good for man to be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him." (Genesis 2:18) 2. "Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!" (Ecclesiastes 4:9-10)]

So in the end, they learn to live contently in the fullness of something Aurora had said earlier in the film: “We all have dreams. We plan our futures like we’re the captains of our fate, but we’re passengers. We go where fate takes us. This isn’t the life we planned, but it’s ours."

Of course, I'm being so presumptuous as to replace "fate" with "God," the only one who is actually in control. Control is an illusion. I am not promised my next breath. I cannot control the shockingly devastating crises that inevitably occasionally hit. As much as I'd love to have my future all planned out, I am ultimately not in control of that either. 

I recently heard a message about the story of Ruth called "On Purpose." The speaker lost her husband in a car accident when she was only 22 years old and pregnant with their first child. She shared her story as it relates to Ruth and Naomi's. Her point was that we don't know the whole story; we can't always see what God is doing. Ruth and Naomi thought they would be destitute widows forever. Even when the "happily ever after" rolled around, they still didn't know how their pain-and-suffering-filled story would lead to the birth of King David and, ultimately, Jesus Christ! If famine hadn't driven them out of Bethlehem, Naomi's sons would have never married Moabite women. If their husbands hadn't died, Ruth and Naomi wouldn't have come back to Bethlehem and Ruth wouldn't have been scavenging in Boaz's field. But God chose to redeem Ruth's pain and include her (a gentile/foreigner!) in the lineage of his own Son!

As for my friend (the speaker at this event), her pain was redeemed as well; she remarried a man who is now a pastor, and they have three sons who would not exist were it not for the tragedy of losing her first husband. (Of course, that doesn't mean the pain isn't still profound and the scars aren't deep.)

But don't you see? God is doing something in your pain and uncertainty! (Oh that I had the time and space to tell you what he's been doing in mine....let's get coffee sometime :)) 

My point is we need a perspective shift. We could go on biting our nails about tomorrow and pouting over unrealized possibilities, or we could lay it all down. There is such freedom in submission and surrender (I'm not there yet, but my Good, Good Father continues to break me of my clinched-fisted control issues). 

It's such a pithy saying but...."We don't know what the future holds, but we know Who holds the future."

I once did a painting series of blindfolded dancers called "Not by Sight" during a time in my life when everything seemed uncertain. Even though I could not see the next step, I felt like God was leading me, dancing with me. He's never dropped me yet.

"For we live by faith, not by sight." (2 Corinthians 5:7)

"Be joyful always, pray continually, give thanks in ALL circumstances." (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)