Hope Deferred
This week marks the school semester's eve. As befitting of such a week, I went and saw James Cameron's Avatar movie in 3D at IMAX in the spirit of freedom that this week holds. What a film it was! One of the best movies I have seen in a long while. However, the focus of this post is not on the movie directly but rather on the thoughts and feelings of people after seeing such an epic film. I recently read an article delving into people's reactions after seeing the film and what was found was that a decent number of people were experiencing depression brought on by the portrayal of an alien utopia undefiled by its inhabitants. Apparently, many people walked away from Avatar longing for that utopia to exist rather than face work the next day or deal with another family crisis. Is it really the undefiled, mysterious environment that people longed for or something else? Perhaps the draw existed in the simplistic nature of the Na'vi people or Pandora... Or perhaps fans longed to be the hero or part of the winning team in the movie... What wrong did Cameron do in making this film? Nothing as far as I can see because as a film, the director strives to draw people into the film and make it feel as though the viewer is actually a part of the movie in some sense, and Avatar does just that. But at the end of it all, stuck when the movie ends, people find themselves struggling to give purpose to what they saw because on some level it connected with them. It gave them hope for something...but what?
Hope deferred from the gospel of Christ causes the heart to be anxious. Purpose is assigned elsewhere and thereby divorced of hope. Purpose and hope in the gospel must be found together or else a crisis is at hand.