More Thoughts on Faith, God and Prayer

Jeff Lampl
Monday, February 29, 2016

 More Thoughts on Faith, God and Prayer

Allow me just one more post prompted by . .  .

the movie, The Grey.  Again, its rated R and deservedly so, but as I mentioned in my last post on the movie, I found for me it raised and even addressed profound questions about God, faith and prayer.   The biggest question to ask after watching the film is, “Is this how it is?”   Is this how life actually is?  Do each of us gear ourselves up to face pain, trials and even hopelessness and in the end do so one last time (as the film’s poem and theme says, “once more into the fray”) only to for it all to be for naught?

As a believer in God and as a believer that there is nothing, nothing at all, on planet earth (including every movie ever made) that doesn’t somehow point us to the existence and intervention of God into life on earth, it occurred to me that the film’s poem tells us something important and profound.  

“one more time into the fray”.   This is what people of faith do.  They don’t quit.  They know that nothing, absolutely done in faith is ever wasted.  I’m certain others see the scene I’m referring to fatalistic, perhaps even the author.  Not I.

“Live and die on the same day, Live and die on the same day”.   More fatalism?  Maybe.  But that’s not what I see.  I see one as impossible without the other.  As depicted starkly in the movie, the fatalist lives by fighting death of self until death inevitably wins.  The Christian chooses to die to self and others as his means of really living.  The fatalist lives by the law of the wild, “eat or be eaten”.   The Christian lives by the law of Christ “eat and be eaten . . .If I am consumed in the process of bringing life to others, that is choosing the life that is truly life”

Frankly as I watched the film, I saw more “life that is truly life” (1 Timothy 6:19) in the unbearable conditions of white-knuckled near death survival than I have seen walking the isles of Forever 21 (don’t ask).

"Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat dies, it is never any more than a grain of wheat.

But if it dies, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over.”

John 12:24

“Lord, regardless of how difficult tomorrow will be, I will go once more into the fray,   regardless of the cost to me . . .  be it even the worst, believing that of despair, hopeless and even death, you bring life.  Therefore I will once again enter the fray.   Amen”