Almost . . . something

I love the movie Almost Famous.

Yes, I know that these guys use words I try not to even think as every part of speech imaginable, but I love that movie. Me and Cameron Crowe. . . we just got a thing.

Last Sunday afternoon, I didn’t have anything to do, so since I hadn’t watched the movie in awhile, I thought I’d check in on William Miller, Penny Lane, and Stillwater. So I curled up on the couch and watched the movie unfold.

And after I watched it, I decided to do a little research and find out about the making of the movie. That’s when I found out that one of my favorite moments in the movie, when Penny and William are talking about going to Morocco and Williams says, “Ask me again,” really wasn’t scripted. Apparently, it was Patrick Fugit breaking character to ask Kate Hudson to ask the question again.

But I love that moment. Because there’s something about it that feels real, that resounds with truth.  He loves her; he knows she has no idea; he means his answer and he needs to hear it twice to believe it and remember how it felt. It’s one of those moments that Claire (from Crowe’s movie Elizabethtown) would have taken a mental picture of.

Those are all reasons that I love that moment. And, apparently, it was a mistake.

That’s funny, because sometimes the things in life that turn out being the best for me seemed like mistakes at the time. When I went to college five hours away from home and anyone I knew, it didn’t take me long into my first semester to believe I’d made a huge mistake. But college was a place where God worked in my life and my heart and made me understand what it really means to live by faith in every moment. When I didn’t get a job I wanted as I was getting ready to graduate from divinity school, I thought the world had it out for me and Christians were no better than anyone else. But I got a job in my current department and realized sometimes what I think is best just isn’t.

I was disappointed by something this week—something I really had no business hoping for, but had even though I told myself I wasn’t. These days, I’m really tired of being disappointed when my ideas and plans fall through. I’m tired of getting hurt, tired of all my failed planning, tired, as Andrew Peterson says, of this “falling down and getting up again.”

But there’s something I know is true: it may feel like a mistake now (and it might have been), but sometimes the things that seem so, so wrong are the stepping stones to something better, bigger, sweeter than you could have ever imagined on your own. Because there’s beauty in the broken, and God sometimes uses the “mistakes” to speak to real truth.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. . .