stranger than fiction

Mark has reviewed it. Betsy has too. So let me be the third to tell you...go and see this movie. It is superb; one of the best I've seen in a long time. It is wonderfully written and incredibly well acted. Seriously, go see it.

IMDB (Internet Movie Database) does not yet have quotes for this film and IMSDB (Internet Movie Script Database) doesn't have the script. It just came out this weekend, so I'm not that surprised. But I do want to share with you a couple of my favorite quotes from the movie. So bear with me as they might not be word for word.

Quote number one:

Harold - "Who would choose pancakes over getting to live?"

Professor Hilbert - "Well that depends on the life being lived, and of course the quality of the pancakes."

Quote number two:

Narrator - "Often in life, the significant moments and mundane moments are, to us, indistinguishable."

I love that second quote. Without giving too much away, that is kind of the underlying theme of the movie. It reminded me a little of something that I read recently in N.T. Wright's Simply Christian:

"Think about it. The moment of birth; the moment of death; the joy of love; the discovery of vocation; the onset of life-threatening illness; the overwhelming pain and anger that sometimes sweep us off our feet. At such times the multiple complexities of our human-ness gather together and form one simple great exclamation mark, or (as it may be) one simple great question mark - a shout of joy or a cry of pain, a burst of laughter or a bursting into tears. Suddenly the rich harmony of our genetic package seems to sing in unison, and say, for good or ill, THIS is it."

"Little did he know..." was an important phrase in the life of Harold Crick. The narrator choosing those exact words was a turning point in the movie (I promise I'm not giving anything away). Most moments in our lives seem to us to be trivial or insignificant...so much so that we often overlook them or at least quickly forget them. A simple kiss from your spouse, a friend's laugh, a really good movie. But 'little do we know' that in the big picture, in the actual reality of life...those little moments are working together to bring harmony to the symphony of God's Kingdom. Those little moments are actually big moments. They are significant and they are sacred. They are the make-up of our lives.

So what do you do with this knowledge? Well, cherish those moments. And live a life so full and so abundant that you would always choose it over even the best of pancakes.