Thursday, August 9, 2012

Blue Like Jazz-Confession

A couple years ago, I read the book Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. I loved it.  I was challenged, stretched, and I grew spiritually through this book. Fast forward several years and the movie is out on DVD. I could hardly wait to get my hands on this movie as I heard it was at Red Box now. Last night, we planned a date night around watching Blue Like Jazz after dinner and swimming. I drove all over town trying to find it-only one Red Box had it in stock. The good news is I had this scene while I drove:

 I picked up snacks for each of us, because movies are more fun with snacks. Our choices: Ryan-Red Vines Kai-rawhide Me- Carmel-filled dove. Mmmmm.I personally think I win.

I honestly could not remember a lot of the scenes in the movie in the book, except the confession. At the end of the movie, there is a powerful scene of Donald Miller confessing. SPOILER ALERT (Skip this part of my post if you are going to watch it!). He had spent his entire first year of college running as hard as he could from God, only to realize he could not escape. He is elected the "pope" which is basically the head of the party-ers at his university, but when he sets up the confession booth for the party people to confess their crazy-doing, he says to each person that he needs to confess first. He confesses to them that he has not accurately represented Christ and asks for their forgiveness. This is powerful, people. It was hard to see him rebel, but almost even harder to see him confess, knowing how hard that would be on one's pride. The movie ends with this and you cannot help but to think about how you represent Christ. Am I representing him well at work? Around my friends? In my marriage? 

I confess that I can not say that I truly have represented Him. Fear of what people will think gets in the way. Why am I not sold out for Christ? My whole purpose here is to proclaim his goodness and bring others to Him so why isn't that my only and sole mission? Why do I care too much about what people would think? I confess that I have failed and I want to make this better. I need to care more about the nails that were in Jesus' hands and feet and less about how people will view me. My purpose should be proclaiming Christ's fame and everything else is secondary.

Thank you, dove.
To not letting fear in the way of representing Christ fully,
Tera

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