In "Wide Awake" (one of Shymalan's first movies), the protagonist, a fifth grader named Joshua, loses his grandfather. Losing his beloved grandfather sends him on a "mission" to find God. (This movie is corny, but I get choked up every time that I see it. Last nite, I had to fight back the tears since Debbie and Mathis were watching with me.) (BTW, "Wide Awake" is also, and importantly, full of humor with Rosie O'Donnel as a nun, and Denis Leary as Josh's father.)
Like us, Joshua seeks advice from religious figures. In his case, since he attends a Catholic school, he seeks guidance from a nun, a priest, and a Cardinal--all to no avail. He also seeks God through Judaism and Islam. Again, no luck.
His best friend, Daredevil Dave, sees that Josh is despondent in his failure to find God. Daredevil Dave: "This whole mission business is getting out of hand. You're wigging man. People are talking. In all this time, in all that you've done, have you one sign, any sign, that there's a god?" "No." To Daredevil Dave that means: "either there ain't no God, or He doesn't care that you're looking for him. Either way, I'd stop."
Joshua thinks about discontinuing his mission--it's been a failure. Then, he reminisces about his life with his grandfather and his unqualified love for him. Josh asks God for a sign. One day in class "crazy Robert Brickman" takes the picture of the Pope off the wall and begins showing it to the kids in the class. One student says in a hushed tone: "Robert's touching the Pope." Robert not only touches the Pope but takes him out into the rain and sits on the top of the jungle gym, holding the Pope as high as he can. Everyone else thinks it's just another crazy antic by Robert, but Joshua thinks it's a sign.
The movie then moves forward to Josh sitting on a bench outside the nun's office. He's thinking: "something strange is about to happen." Indeed it does, but like the Gospel, what happened next isn't what Josh was looking for. As he sits on the bench, he hears a commotion in the nun's office. Freddie: "I'm not going to go. I can't leave." Josh learns that Freddie, the bully who put him in a school locker and put cherry jello in his shoes, is going to have to leave the school given his parents' financial straits. Josh thinks: "This should be the happiest day of my life, but it isn't." Josh is able to empathize with Freddie's pain and offers his hand in friendship to Freddie when he leaves school with his parents, for the last time.
Then there's Frank, the class "fat kid" who no one likes. Obviously, Frank desperately wants to be liked, which makes him all the more unlikeable. Throughout the movie, to put Frank off, Joshua promises Frank that he will play with him "tomorrow," but tomorrow never comes because, well, "today" is always "today." When they go on a museum field trip, Frank tries to go through the turnstile with Josh, and they get stuck for 20 minutes--20 minutes of embarrassment in front of "300 people who stopped by to watch." Josh: "I hate field trips." After they are extricated, Josh sees Frank sitting alone on a bench and overhears a classmate: "that fat turd, he's going to weigh 5000 pounds when he grows up." Instead of joining in with his classmate's ridicule of Frank, Joshua thinks: "I better complete my mission soon. I think I'm really losing it." Josh then goes and sits down next to Frank who has been crying and is still sniffling. "Frank, you know what?" "What?" "Yesterday is yesterday and today is tomorrow. Do you want to go and make fun of those ugly statues?" Frank's face brightens, he breaks a grin, and they go off together in camaraderie to endure the field trip to the museum.
Finally, Josh discovers his best friend, Daredevil Dave, passed out in the aftermath of a seizure. (Earlier in the movie, Josh tells us that Dave is the bravest kid he knows. "If Dave says it can't be done, it can't be done." So, to see weakness in Dave is particularly troubling.) Thanks to Josh, Dave is taken to the hospital where he is found to have a broken arm from thrashing his arm against the confines of the closet where they play Galactic Battlecruiser. Visiting him, Josh says that his mission to find God is over--that it was a failure--how can there be a God when his courageous friend has epilepsy? Surprising, Dave (who before has told Josh that his mission is a waste of time) says: "Josh, you need to stick to your mission. It was a miracle that you found me when you did."
In one of the last scenes, each fifth grader reads their essay about what fifth grade meant to them. Here's Josh's:
"Before this year, bullies were just bullies, for no reason.
weirdos were just weird; and
daredevils weren't afraid of anything.
Before this year, people I loved lived forever.
I spent this year looking for something,
and wound up seeing everything around me.
It's like I was asleep before and finally woke up.
You know what, I'm wide awake now."
This corny, but profound, movie beautifully illustrates a sermon that Bill Boyd preached at Covenant Presbyterian on the relationship between Mary and Elizabeth, after John leaps in Elizabeth's womb over Mary's pregnancy. God came in lowliness to a poor unwed girl who wasn't expecting to be pregnant. Indeed, it was shameful for her to be pregnant, even a stoning offense. He came to a barren older woman who also wasn't expecting to be pregnant, yet for Elizabeth it was a cause for anything but shame. Elizabeth was the wife of a priest, and she had experienced shame for decades due to her barrenness. Given her decades of shame, Elizabeth was able to empathize with Mary--to encourage her in her time of difficulty and shame. Bill explains that: 1)we find God in lowliness, in shame; and 2)when we find God there, we then have empathy for others and can exhibit God's love towards them.
So, it was with Josh. His loss of his beloved grandfather sent him on a mission to find God--to settle and quiet the pain. And Josh found God. He found God in Freddie, the bully; in Frank, the pesky, uncool, needy "fat kid;" and in Daredevil Dave who had epilepsy. Joshua found a God who is acquainted with our sorrows and is most powerfully found there. He is a God unlike any other. A God who is not first present in our triumphs, but in our defeats; not first present in our joys; but in our sorrows; not first present in our good works; but in our sin. He is a God unlike any other. He has a heart for the unlovely, the rejected, and even the victimizers, which then gives us a heart for them.
When we find God in an animal feed trough, follow him through an arduous life where He had no place to lay His head, and then lose Him to crucifixion, then and only then can we love our family, ourselves, and sometimes even our enemies.
Thanks be to our God!
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