Split Screen

Do you ever feel like your life could be a movie?  Not necessarily an epic, Academy Award winning kind, but maybe it is just what plays inside your head on a non-stop loop.  You see yourself —perhaps doing he same thing, over and over again.  Maybe you are searching for something or someone.  Maybe you are chasing after kids, a job, a spouse.  Maybe you’re just tying to be understood.

I feel like this a lot.

Sometimes I’m a little bit Scarlet O’Hara, clutching the earth of Tara, bound and determined to keep life, and those who depend on me, together.  On the other screen, I’m Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away — on some deserted island, a broken watch with a photograph, a deflated ball for a friend.  

Our movies have soundtracks, too.  From “I Got You Babe,” to Barney songs on repeat, to “I Fall to Pieces,” by Patsy Cline… and all the good heart-thumping ditties in between.  As the curtain rises and falls on our seasons, we are drawn in by music to accompany our spirits. 

It’s interesting to me, how scenes change us.  As if life is going along fine, and then a rogue director comes in and yells “Cut!”  Suddenly, the cast of characters changes, protagonists and villains change places, settings and backdrops and conflicts are swapped out for new ones.  And all the while, you’re trying to keep up and still play your part.  

Our movies, our lives, are a mix of love stories, rooting for the underdog, triumph and tragedy, wrecking and reconciling. We are always searching for an ending that will tie up all the loose ends and bring a meaningful conclusion for those we care about.

We have to be careful who is directing our movies.  

I believe that our lives are intended to be lived with a purpose.  Sometimes, we don’t feel like we have one.  We look at ourselves compared to others, and feel like we are floundering, directionless, striving to make our ends meet and keep our ducks in a row.  We don’t consider ourselves worthy of being anyone’s role model.

As someone with a rich family heritage of women, I look back on their life stories and no doubt can see how they might have felt the same way.  And yet, their influence was so profound, so embedded within my own life, that it is remarkable.  These women were rich in faith, in spirit, in grace, in doing what was right despite odds and difficulties that they managed to overcome. They left their mark.  They paid it forward.  They defined their seasons by keeping their heads high and their hearts open.  

And so it is with us.  

Sometimes we are handed a bad script.  We have to play out scenes and circumstances that we would rather have edited out.  Sometimes the plots twist and turn us in ways we cannot anticipate or imagine.  Sometimes, things happen behind the scenes that we don’t see until we rewind and notice all the clues — and then it’s too late. 

What I know about God, is that He knows the whole story.  We all have our roles to play, and we can be assured that there will be times of joy and sorrow, life and death, adventure and calamity.  We are going to have characters walk into and out of of our lives unexpectedly and on cue.  We will have mishaps and drama, comedy and romance, birthdays and funerals… And all the while, we’ll wonder what it all means. 

Our faith keeps the film rolling.  Our faith binds us together and keeps us putting on our makeup and dressing for the next scene and the next.  We’ll have our close-ups, those moments that are etched in our memories for life, and others when the camera pulls back and spans all that we have been through, and we’ll just know that He was directing it. 

We have to trust God enough to know that one scene, one season, one character or circumstance that comes to break us, is only setting us up for what is coming.  

We may not feel like stars.  We may question our roles, our purpose, how it is all going to turn out.  But when we live with faith as our cinematography, we can know that our movies will end well.  

I know what it feels like to be spliced together — to look at life as if you are living it on a split screen, in-between one saga and another.  But trust me… It will get better.  It will make sense.  It will mean something.  You mean something. 

You are a heroine, even when you don’t consider yourself one.  

God does.  He sees you.  He’s watching what you are going through and how you are doing it. He knows that you are doing the best you can.  He wants you to trust Him with the whole story.

It’s all going to be okay.

Keep your head high and your heart open.  Get yourself some popcorn and enjoy the show.

The next scene is coming, and it’s going to be good.