I Am Here

This is a tad delayed, I'll admit, but this is my post on the Tree of Life. 

I loved this movie. It kept me enthralled and absorbed the entire time. I didn't find myself nodding off once. The whole movie was incredibly powerful to me. 

At the beginning there was one question that really hit me hard. It was right before the slew of images of the cosmos, the mother, Mrs. O'Brien, asked, "What do we mean to you?" She asks this question to God after constantly asking, "Where were you?" 

Tree of Life is a challenge of life. It asks how live? What is it to live? Does it give answers? Well that's up for you to decide. It gives answers to these questions in the smallest ways, in the seemingly littlest of details. 

Jack says at one part: " Look--the glory all around us, trees, birds. I dishonored it all and didn't notice the glory." 

And it's true; there's glory around us everywhere, and eventually we become so accustomed to it we forget that the mere fact that it's glorious. Tree of Life showed everything from galaxies and planets to the bloodstream and white blood cells eating debris in the blood. 

I think the feeling of being absolutely tiny and reminded of how many things I've forgotten to love and recognize for two and a half hours was priceless. And then, to know that a God who created all the glory--gigantic and small and forgettable--on this earth and the many earths in the universes around us cares enough to be in a stupid little life like mine--I can't put it to words, it's unfathomable. I think I could watch this movie ten times over and still feel my heart in my throat at knowing that there's actually someone out there who genuinely cares and loves and wants to be in a life like mine, enough that He put all glory everywhere, just for all of us little beings. 

The question "What do we mean to you? Where are you?" I felt like every turn, those questions were answered: "I am here. You mean all of this to me." 

The scene with the dinosaurs? That was brilliant, to take something so meaningless to us as a society today and portray a huge act of grace to a hopeless little dinosaur said a lot to me. And to the space pictures: who doesn't love some good universe images? But it makes me wonder, why did God make so much beautiful space? I mean, we can't even see all of it: we assume so much of it! In fact, there's so much of it and it's so far out of our reach that sometimes we forget about it except for the wallpapers on our computer. We forget how truly glorious and incredible space really is. 

And while God played a part in this movie I'm going to agree with the others who said that this wasn't a religious movie, because it wasn't at all. But it really did challenge the viewer to think just what made all of what was seen in this movie, and how could something that made all that also create the love and forgiveness and powerful human emotions we experience? 

There is A LOT more I could say about this movie, but I think this is good for now. Just watch it okay? It's fun to see how people react to it.