Remembering The Blind Side?

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Remembering The Blind Side?

Considering Michael Oher is now wearing a Super Bowl Ring and his biography is a a part of Lifeway bookstore’s catalogue I thought it was time to revisit the most visited post at Dare to Look in 2012.

I’m not sure why this one received over 1300 visits in less than 10 hours but it apparently struck a chord. In case you missed it, here it is again.

 

Did Lifeway Get the Blind Side?

Since 2010, Florida pastor Rodney Baker has been on a crusade to remove an “offensive film” from Lifeway Christian bookstores and as of last month he succeeded. You might ask, what manner of ungodliness did this chain of Christian bookstores operated by the Southern Baptist Convention promote? The answer will probably perplex many of you.

The pastor of Hopeful Baptist Church in Lake City, Florida submitted a resolution to the Southern Baptist Convention, demanding that Lifeway pull The Blind Side. Grossing over $34 million in its opening weekend, that film was nominated for Best Motion Picture at the Oscars and won Sandra Bullock an Oscar for Best Actress.

Weeks before the denomination’s annual convention, LifeWay decided to pull “The Blind Side” from its shelves. A Lifeway spokesman stated that this decision was done to make the resolution unnecessary. In fairness to the trustees of LifeWay, the timing could not have been worse. The SBC’s convention was to meet in New Orleans and the body was about to see its first African-American president, New Orleans’s pastor Fred Luter, elected. Understandably, controversy was not something anyone wanted.

Not surprisingly reactions to LifeWay’s decision have been mixed.

 

The Detractors

Some like New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas best known for his biographies on William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer mused about the negative image to the world at large such a decision would offer:

I’m kind of upset. A great movie was pulled from the shelves of a Christian bookstore chain,” he said on the July 5 program. “Look, I’m as concerned about cultural messages as anyone. I’m a father. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this – and the wrong way definitely includes the permanent state of umbrage that many Christians seem to exhibit. They seem to have confused being salt and light with being curmudgeons.

Others such as Rachel Held Evans took the action as occasion to bemoan the steps authors must take to be considered by Christian publishing houses.

Christian bookstores have a chokehold on the Christian publishing industry. And this chokehold not only affects the inventory you find on Christian bookstore shelves, but which books are contracted by publishers, what content gets edited in the writing and editing process, and the degree of freedom authors feel they have to speak on their own blogs and platforms. As a result, the entire Christian industry has been sanitized, while its best artists look elsewhere for publication.

The Defenders

Marty King, communications director for LifeWay, was quick to say that the staff had “carefully and prayerfully” reviewed all of it products and applied standards approved by the chain’s trustees. To illustrate their decision-making process he brought up LifeWay’s inclusion of the movie Amazing Grace:

We carry movies like “Amazing Grace”… [which] includes scenes with language some would deem inappropriate for their children’s ears and actions not suitable for everyone’s viewing. But the film is about man’s struggle to understand God’s justice and find redemption.

The Distractions of Legalism

So why did Pastor Baker target The Blind Side and not Amazing Grace? It’s not for me to judge motives so I’ll leave that to him to explain. The irony of this whole situation is that a lesser-known film, To Save a Life, not only remains on Lifeway’s shelves but receives heavy promotion. Not only can you purchase the DVD at the chain but there’s also a book and a group activity kit aimed at teens to boot.

So what’s the irony? To Save a Life is not nearly as well made as The Blind Side and the acting was certainly not Oscar worthy. In fact, about the only thing the two films share is a PG-13 rating. Words that The Blind Side uses sparingly come in generous portions in To Save a Life.

LifeWay has every right to sell whatever it wants to sell and not sell what it doesn’t want to sell. This is America last time I checked. I understand the constraints such an enterprise faces in trying to please everybody. But I also see illustrated here the seminal problem with legalism. Legalism is more about trying to be the Holy Spirit than pleasing God.

We look for ways to banish one non-profane movie while justifying the presence of another. We pass resolutions about all the easy things to fight while avoiding the weightier eternal matters. How else can you explain LifeWay booting The Blind Sidewhile selling Joel Osteen books like hotcakes? That’s the same Joel Osteen who told agnostic Larry King before a national audience that he couldn’t say how one gets to heaven. Last time I checked – no resolutions about that one.

A movie is made that describes in realistic yet tasteful terms how an inner city castaway is embraced and loved by suburban evangelicals. For once the Christian characters in such a film don’t end up being pedophiles or serial killers, Hollywood recognizes the quality of the film, and a few words disqualify it!

Remembering The Blind Side?The Bottom Line

By way of disclaimer I’ve been affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention since birth. My father was a pastor of Southern Baptist churches and I received my education at a Southern Baptist college. I was present along with 43,000 other messengers in St Louis in 1987 when we chose to stem the tide of Neo-orthodoxy and teachings that denied the authority of Scripture in our schools and institutions.

So with that out of the way I just want to ask one thing of my fellow believers and Baptists. The question is not profound nor is it nice. And, unfortunately, people will be bothered by how I word this question more than Joel Osteen’s theology.

And that question is … “What the hell are we thinking about?”

 

C.S. Lewis and the ‘Stuff’ We Say

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lewis 011 C.S. Lewis and the Stuff We SayIn C.S. Lewis’s last interview, he was asked what he would tell a young writer about developing a style. His response was worthy of the last public words of the man who gave the world the simple yet profound Mere Christianity and the magical Chronicles of Narnia.

Lewis’ formula was this:

  1. Know exactly what you want to say.
  2. Be sure you say exactly that.

The man known to those closest to him simply as Jack went on to expand on that by saying:

“The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.”

Seven years earlier, in the summer before I was born, Lewis penned a now famous reply to an American school girl seeking advice on writing. That advice along with other snippets of wisdom appeared in Letters to Children in 1956. Would that every adult wanting to communicate with other adults heed this advice:

  • Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
  • Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
  • Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
  • In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please, will you do my job for me.”
  • Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

When I took on freelance writing in a serious way I chose, Simply Communicate as my moniker and the tagline, “You create – we simply communicate.” In the four years or so since then I have written about everything from an in-depth consideration of the Genesis account of creation to articles on how to create Search Engine Optimized content for the web to news articles about everything that tends to make my blood boil. Oh, and did I mention I’m still plugging away at convincing some deluded acquisition’s editor that I know how to tell a story?

This writing journey and life as a whole has proven Lewis’ formula should be strictly heeded. Most breakdowns in communication come from two sources:

  1. Not knowing what I really want to say.
  2. Even when I do know what I want to say failing to say exactly that.

One of the values in writing stuff down is being able to look at the stuff coming out of my mouth a little more objectively. Did someone claiming to be a writer just use a word as weak as “stuff” to describe his words? Sure, I could have chosen something far more eloquent to attempt to convince you of my literary prowess. But to do so would have been about as genuine as most of what you hear coming out of Washington and sadly too many pulpits.

If you aren’t taking time to think though what you are saying to others the odds are, what they are hearing is just stuff. Can you think of a time when you got yourself in a bind with a person you cared about because you spoke before really having anything to say? How about knowing you didn’t know what you wanted to say but plunging on ahead and saying something anyway?

Tell me … how did that work out for you?

 

 

 

Edwarda O’Bara was No Fairytale

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image5 Edwarda OBara was No FairytaleMy teenage years were tumultuous to say the least. Between 1967 and 1969 I stood by the graves of my grandfather, two brothers, and my father. As a 12 year old I entered seventh grade fatherless and to some extent motherless as my mom grieved for the man and a life she would never know again.

And the world wasn’t in much better shape. Vietnam was at its height and my generation had already pronounced those who parented us a total failure. My peaceful Mayberry world now rocked to the strains of Grand Funk Railroad and Jimmy Hendrix. And the lockers of Pineville Jr. High School were vibrating from head shots to opposing races in the midst of forced integration.

Why couldn’t my life have been quieter, less dramatic, more settled? Perhaps a life like that of Edwarda O’Bara, the girl in the picture. She never was forced to move three times in one school year. Nor did she have to worry when the Russians might dispatch intercontinental missiles our way. And, as the years progressed, she didn’t have to watch in disappointment as Richard Nixon resigned. Edwarda didn’t even have to watch in horror as the twin towers fell on 9/11 and I wondered what would happen to my youngest son just enlisted in the Army.

Writers are prone to look for a story in everything so what’s the story here? How did some girl named Edwarda luck up and miss out on all that drama? Was there some kind of twist in time, some rip in the space-time continuum in 1970 that allowed her to avoid all the craziness in the years of my life that began just before the decade of the 70’s?

Not a speculative kind of person? Then perhaps this girl’s story is a mystery. Maybe she disappeared under veiled circumstances and rumors still abound as to what became of her. Or maybe her story is a romance. Perhaps she was in an accident while on a high school trip to Europe. In a fugue of amnesia she wandered off alone into the heart of Paris and eventually came under the care of a wealthy wine magnate who fell in love with her. By the time she regained her memory she had no desire to return to America and lived her life in seclusion with the man of her dreams ever since.

Or perhaps there isn’t a story to find in the life of Edwarda O’Bara. Perhaps her life IS the story. Perhaps the fact that in 1970, a 16 year old Florida girl with dreams of one day becoming a pediatric physician slipped into a coma from which she would never return tells a far grander tale than any work of fiction.

And what story could possibly be more interesting or gripping than some Robert Ludlum or Vince Flynn thriller? How about this:

In the early hours of January 3, 1970, Edwarda O’Bara woke up shaking and in great pain because the oral form of insulin she had been taking wasn’t reaching her blood stream. She was rushed to a hospital and as she lay in her bed, she turned to her mother, Kaye O’Bara, and pleaded with her to stay near. “Promise me you won’t leave me,” she begged.

And for 42 years a mother and the rest of her family kept that promise. During those years, first her father and just five years ago her mother, gave their all for their daughter and died leaving the promise to others to take up. And then this week, the Miami woman who some called the Sleeping Snow White, the world’s longest coma patient, died at the age of 59.

There are stories all around us. At first glance they may seem mundane and unworthy of attention. But in truth, fiction is a much more boring than real life. Fiction has a plot. If you read mysteries or romance much you began to see the formula most follow. They’re still fun to read but not nearly as surprising or profound as we often give them credit.

But life is far more complex, less predictable, and less formulaic. One day a smiling girl just setting out in life has her picture taken. It is a picture of hope and promise. And then out of nowhere everything changes.

And here I am with a wife of 37 years, two fine adult sons, and three grandchildren. Here I am so glad I lived through every one of those wonderful, awful, exciting, boring, promising, disappointing years with my eyes wide open. So how about you, what’s your story?

Garbage Makes the Best Story Material of All

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compost Garbage Makes the Best Story Material of AllNATALIE GOLDBERG in her fine book for writers, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, reminds us of a truth that applies to far more than writing. Put simply, she reminds us that the garbage of our life makes some of the best story material of all.

Admittedly, one should be alert to Goldberg’s Zen leanings. Her frequent quotes of Buddhist sages and Zen masters leave no doubt where she looks for ultimate meaning. With that said, her following observation is one from which we could all gain:

We collect experiences, and from the decomposition of thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves. Coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil blooms our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil.

Her point is that the best stories are not those born out of some writing conference class or book but rather out of life. And life isn’t neat or instant. Even if you haven’t experienced great tragedy or failure in your life there is still plenty of refuse: broken promises, unrealized dreams, and inner failings.

Paul Billheimer said it best in the title of his excellent devotional book – Don’t Waste Your Sorrows. Coming from a different spiritual perspective but to the same conclusion, Billheimer seeks to remind us that nothing in one’s life is worthless. The scraps of life can become the makings of rich compost. And it is that compost that makes for the richest story material.

The Apostle Paul put it this way:

We do not become discouraged (utterly spiritless, exhausted, and wearied out through fear). Though our outer man is [progressively] decaying and wasting away, yet our inner self is being [progressively] renewed day after day. For our light, momentary affliction (this slight distress of the passing hour) is ever more and more abundantly preparing and producing and achieving for us an everlasting weight of glory [beyond all measure, excessively surpassing all comparisons and all calculations, a vast and transcendent glory and blessedness never to cease!], Since we consider and look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are visible are temporal (brief and fleeting), but the things that are invisible are deathless and everlasting. 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (Amplified)

No matter how hard I try to avoid it, I keep seeing bits and pieces of myself in the characters of my stories. Be it fiction or non-fiction, the compost of my life keeps providing the best possible writing material. My joys, fears, successes, failures, hopes, and disappointments are all there in the characters, ideas, plots, and themes of what I write.

So what do you do with that compost pile of fragments of past experiences? Remember that every chance encounter, every failed relationship, every good and bad thing in your life need not go to waste. Given to the Master Gardner that refuse can become the stuff of which He writes a story of redemption, and hope, and purpose.

We may not all be writers but we all have a story. What is yours being written with?

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