We’ve been discussing the movie The Natural in the last several newsletters. If you haven’t already read my piece on this movie from an unpublished manuscript, you can download it with the link below. I hope you will find the time to read it. I believe you will be surprised by just how clearly God’s story is in this story -- although if you have been listening to what the Lord has put on my heart, you’ve heard His Story is always “all around and deep within.”

If there is only one thing from this movie we could focus on, one thing we could emphasize that conveys just who God is and the nature of our dilemma – it would be just how much Iris, Roy Hobbs’ childhood girlfriend, is like God. And this movie is so compelling because it tells the whole story, all four chapters of our story.

Once upon a time, Adam and Eve were created by God and placed in the Garden of Eden. God was there with them, in bodily form; and they knew and experienced Him in His purest essence, just how much He loved them and that His perfect love was the very reason for everything. Most importantly, they trusted Him and were His spiritual children.

And then, somehow . . . everything went wrong. We will never understand it, understand how they were both created for perfect love with God and with each other, and possessed it, yet somehow began to yearn for something “more.” It was a delusion, the same delusion that had come to possess Lucifer and caused him to be thrown from heaven. But yet to them, this delusion seemed . . . real.

God intended for all the things He gave us in this material life to be blessings, to make life fuller and richer, but these blessings were never meant to replace the real thing --Him. And yet, ever since that fateful day when Eve bit one of the apples from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we have all struggled to know God, to remember Him, and to not place everything in this material life in the very front of the line, and Him in the very back, if we allow Him in the line at all.

In the Old Testament God makes it clear His love for His children is not just a parental love, as incredible as that is; but a deep, intimate, romantic love. And so, when we turned away from Him, that is just the way He experienced it -- as a betrayal, a romantic betrayal. Every bit of disappointment, hurt and crushing sadness you have ever experienced when a lover betrayed you – you only felt because God made your heart the way He did, just like His.

Even though He is perfect, something very hard for us to fathom, He still feels the whole range of feelings we do. His perfection does not exclude His being disappointed and hurt that He is not “enough” for us. Somehow, He feels all of this, just like we do; but never loses his grounding, and remains true to Himself, to perfect love, to goodness and truth and everything redemptive. He always puts Himself on hold and wants what would be the very best for us. That is the definition of love, true sacrificial love.

And one day I might find a better representation of His essence in a character in a movie, but to date, the very best one I have ever found is Iris in the movie The Natural.

After Roy hits a homerun when she stood for him in the stands, she leaves a note for him in the locker room. The note says she was there at the ballgame, and asks him to meet her at a sundries. It has been sixteen years, without one word from him. Sixteen years, since he walked away from the love of his life with no explanation. She only discovered where he was because his new found fame as a baseball star had made it into newspapers.

Roy had broken his promise to her, but she had never broken her promise to him. Sound familiar? Remind you of God and Israel? Remind you of God and any of the prophets in the Ole Testament, or saints in the New? Remind you of God . . . and yourself?

“I will never fail nor forsake you,” He says, clearly implying -- “even when you fail and forsake Me, over and over and over again.”

Next time, we will begin to explore how to find our way back home.

Sam