Film Friday When caveman Grug and his Crood family find a walled paradise, the home of the Bettermans, they think they have discovered the tomorrow they have been looking for, life will be perfect now. Jim dandy. They have food aplenty, water on tap, now wild animals to fight and their own private bedrooms. They no longer need to sleep in a heap to keep warm and safe. But this colourful paradise soon starts to show cracks, for one thing the neat and tidy Bettermans are not sure they want to share what they have with this raucous bunch. Especially not the tempting yet forbidden bananas, which are not on the menu for some reason.
The promise of paradise on earth always seems so good at first… that’s before the wheels start to come off. We are always hunting for a better way, we have eternity in our hearts and dream of better things. We head for the moon and set our sights on Mars. We shoot for the stars and are painfully aware that earth is reduced to limping these days. If only we can find a better system, a better way.
When the Israelites arrived at the border of the promised land, they went in to check out the supplies of milk and honey. They sure found them, along with grapes the size of giants’ heads, the problem was they also found the giants too. The promised land was not trouble free. In this life it never will be. (And sadly there are times when our conflicting views of paradise can cause us to draw aggressive lines in the sand against one another.) We may chase our vision, doing our best to reconstruct Eden, but it will always be a flawed horizon, which is not to be pessimistic, just realistic about the scarred and fractured nature of humanity. The landscape of our hearts is pitted with potholes and strewn with life’s litter. It’s this landscape which needs attention really, the internal promised land. The skyline of our hearts and minds and wills, this is the place where hope and freedom and vision begin. A guy we now know as St Paul once wrote about being satisfied with whatever the landscape, because his sights were set on a life with the Son from Nazareth in its centre. Not easy at all, restlessness is in our bones, but perhaps we can have moments of that peace in God from time to time as we wait on a better life forever in him.
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