Evotional.com - Mark Batterson

I absolutely love hanging out with someone who is passionate about something! I just hung out with an NCCer who is considering a "long jump" into the movie industry.

I walked away energized by their thought-full approach to pursuing their passions. In one respect, he is trying to get in the "side door." It's tough to get in the "front door" when you have no "background" in the industry. But that's how Nehemiah must have felt. He didn't exactly take the "traditional route" into wall building! There was no education and no experience. But in God's grand scheme, sometimes you have to be a cupbearer in Babylon to become a wall builder in Jerusalem. They seem totally unrelated, but God is in the business of using past experiences to prepare us to for future opportunities.

I love the way this NCCer described the convergence that seems to be happening in his life. It's one of the best analogies I've ever heard. He said it feels like a rubic's cube that is about to be solved. I have never actually solved a rubic's cube :) So I wouldn't know what that feels like. But I love the analogy anyways!

By the way, I love the vision of this NCCer. He wants to produce epic parables. He made an interesting observation about the way Jesus communicated. None of his parables are overtly religious. They are like "yeast" that rises in the mind. That was part of Jesus' genius! By the way, Jesus was a storyteller. Isn't that what movie makers are? But they use props and stunts and special effects and actors to tell their stories.

Part of the reason this meeting impacted me so much is that I put my faith in Christ after watching a movie called The Hiding Place. My conversion experience is the result of someone deciding that Corrie Ten Boom's life was worth turning into a movie! So I'm grateful for a screen writer and producer and director and actors who helped lead me to Christ.

We need Christians with sanctified imaginations who can produce films that capture the human drama and supernatural storyline. I think the Bible is the most dramatic book ever written. There must be a thousand movie scripts that have blockbuster potential. Unfortunately, I have rarely seen a movie do the Bible justice. I'll often be reading my Bible and I'll think to myself, "Someone needs to make this into a movie." I know that movies based on Scripture are an awfully small genre. And I'm not talking about "interpretive movies" per se. I guess what I'm saying is this: we need more movies and movie makers who creatively communicate divine themes--truth and beauty and grace and love and power and justice--in overt and covert ways!