Lars and the Real God

Lars and the Real God

            On the recommendation of many Christian reviewers, I decided to watch the movie Lars and the Real Girl.  While it failed to capture my deepest affection, I found that the movie will always be a part of my conscious spiritual life.  Most reviewers praised the movie’s portrayal of unconditional love.  For me the movie will always represent modern Western Christianity’s portrayal of God.

            The heart of modern Western Christianity is the gospel in its simplest form: Jesus died for our sins so that we can go to heaven.  What greater news is there than that?  PAUSE.  Then what?  That’s it, basically.  He may come back before you die and take you right to heaven.  Wouldn’t that be great?

            And you, by the way, need to tell others about this, go to church, and love your neighbor.  PAUSE.  Anything else I need to know?  Oh, yes, one other thing.  God is sovereign.  He does what He wants.  It will be for the good, but you will never know what might happen.  So expect anything.  Just remember: it will all work out in the end.

            So what does all this have to do with Lars and the Real Girl.  For those of you who may not be familiar with this movie.  Lars was a nice man who was socially deficient in some ways.  So he purchased a life sized doll, the expensive kind.  And this doll became his companion.  He would talk with it, dress it, take it with him, movie theatres, church, dinner parties, wherever he went. 

            The doll, obviously, never talked.  Didn’t matter.  Because in Lars’ mind, it (I mean she) did. And those who knew Lars well saw progress in his social relationships.  A psychologist might suggest that Lars’ talking to (with) the doll objectified his thinking and gave him a perspective on his life that he didn’t have otherwise.  One day the doll got sick and soon died.  She was given a proper burial and all, and Lars was able to move on and actually begin a relationship with a real girl.

            How is this a picture of Christianity?  For many of us, the doll could be God.  We talk to it (Him), we have conversations, but our expectations of the relationship are so low, that if we were talking to an invisible doll, we wouldn’t know the difference.  Because God’s will can be all over the map, we seldom if ever really know if God answered our prayers.  We pray for so many things, and the results may or may not correspond to our prayers, so we have no way of really knowing that our prayers made any difference at all.  We believe they do, but if God does what He wants anyway, would He have done something differently if we didn’t pray?  We are hesitant to say yes, because that would mean that we might be responsible for not praying for situations where there were seemingly unfavorable outcomes.  But then it gets confusing.