And the Oscar goes to...

I have always been a fan of Hollywood kind of stuff. I have loved watching awards shows since I was a kid and have always imagined what it would be like to be seated in that giant room; slick hair and fancy clothes, laughing casually at all the jokes and nonchalantly mingling with the stars. So with a scaled down feeling of Christmas morning, we sat down to watch the beloved Oscars. I pretended to know about all the movies and even rambled off a 3 minute discourse about the origins of opera, except our Guatemalan teenager had actually asked how OPRAH got her start. But as the show went on I began to feel differently about it all. Far from feeling excited, I noticed I was starting to feel a little sad. Some of the cast from The Greatest Showman sang "This Is Me" and it was hard not to get emotionally stirred as the performers emphatically raised their hands and sung with all their hearts to the beat of their own drum. Yet, I started seeing clearly through the smoke and realized that every day I am bombarded with this very message: this is me. That I just need to accept who I am and can find freedom in being the real me.

I am sure that this singer is laying in her bed with a pillow soaked with tears of satisfaction and contentment. She just sang at the Oscars! But "this is me" without Jesus is always a sad place to be. I wanted to jump to my feet and join the anthem of acceptance of the human condition, but I remember that I have been there before and it has never led to tears of freedom. And I imagined God looking down on that sparkly auditorium, longing for nothing more than to be close to these people and to adopt them as His sons and daughters. These people really don't know Jesus and it broke my heart tonight.


So, I shift hard into strategic planning mode and think that if only I could get to that stage and tell them about the one true hope that lies not in human rights, shiny trophies and stage time, but in a king who humbly took off His crown to save my life forever. To save me from myself. But I am pretty sure that the answer is not for some Christian actor or director to one day climb the stairs to that iconic stage armed with a 45 second platform to tell the word what God has done, although that might be neat to see. I am reminded that the way that these people would actually come to hear of Jesus, be intrigued by His love and come to know Him as a real person is if those of us who profess to follow Jesus actually lived like Jesus did. The message that would truly transcend and outweigh any Oscar speech or news broadcast, blog post or soap box, would be for God's children to love each other in incredibly sacrificial and unselfish ways. It is God's chosen and sacred language to convey His message of grace to the world. It's through us. The world will know that we follow Jesus if we radically love each other. I laid down to sleep and sensed that the sadness I felt that night paled in comparison to the feelings God has for us. He longs to bring all these people into His family. He will not leave us orphans and that is very good news. But the platform He has given us as followers and believers of this gospel is to love one another in such a way that the whole world wants to know what's going on behind the scenes. And when they ask, we can confidently walk up to the stage with a microphone in hand and point to the one who is the true source of life. And His name is Jesus.



Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash