The Happiest Homecoming on Earth

So Disneyland is pretty much the coolest place on earth. I've never actually been to Disney World, so I can't make any he distinction for sure, but beings as it's the original, I'm going with Disneyland being the coolest.

This post should have gone up earlier this week, but I accidentally closed my browser without saving it, and then I didn't feel like retyping everything again until now. Suffice it to say that I had an amazing time in the happiest place on earth and watching my younger sister's choir sing in California Adventure, which was the point of the trip. Other cool stuff we did included going on a plethora of rides and seeing a couple cool shows including the Wonder of Color water show and ElecTRONica, the laser show/street party that happens in California Adventure's Hollywood section after dark on the weekends. The coolest part of that being that they set up Flynn's Arcade from the first TRON and me and my parents spent a good half hour paying a quarter to play the seventies arcade games that they'd grown up on.

I wish I'd taken more video, cause the Tron stuff was really awesome. They set up the whole area to look like the Grid from the new movie, and I bought a totally sweet dress that is sort of Tron, but also totally wearable as a normal dress. The Wonder of Color thing was also really amazing, but the pictures I took don't do it justice. The shot fountains of water (kind of like the fountain at the Belagio if you've ever seen pictures of that) and projected light and video onto them. it was absolutely the coolest water display I've ever seen. And of course all of it was Disneyfied, which in my book makes it all the more amazing.

The other cool thing that happened while we were down there had absolutely nothing to do with Disneyland, but lifewise it's by far the most important. I was taping Britt's choir for my parents, and before they got started one of the other mom's that had come down to watch asked if she could buy a copy of the tape. Immediately I started thinking about how to make the video awesome once I'd gotten home and had some editing software to play with it and make it look and sound better than my poor little camera can manage on it's own. This probably doesn't sound that significant to most of you, because most of you don't know that the last two weeks have been a really big time of discernment for me, and that much of that discernment has been focused on my love of film.

At a staff planning day two days before I left for Disneyland, David, our pastor, read us the tongues of fire passage from Acts, and asked us this question: How do you walk in the Spirit?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I honestly can't wrap my mind around that question. I don't know what it means. So it's really hard to answer. The part about the passage that struck me more, was that the people were amazed to hear the gospel in their own languages, in a way that they could understand. So I changed the question and asked myself something that was easier for me to grasp: What languages do I speak through the Spirit? My first and second answers? Film and Fiction.

I've always loved movies and books, exploring other worlds on pages or screens, and above all, I've loved the art of storytelling. So as I talked through the above thought process with my mentor at church the day, she latched onto the idea of film and kept talking about it, even when I wanted to move on to something else. We talked about how moving to California to study more would probably eventually need to happen (though not right away) and that the community around and through which film and theatre happen are most likely going to be found in place that aren't here.

The crazy thing is that Fuller Seminary (which I got accept to this week) has a program that you can emphasize in with an MDiv in theology and Arts, which has a lot of film and literature and art courses that sound amazing, including one taught at Sundance. I sort of thought about picking up the brochure for the arts school part of Fuller when I was at their leadership conference a couple weeks ago, but assured myself that youth studies is where I wanted to be. I'm still going for my Youth certificate in the fall, because I still believe that youth and kids have A LOT to do with my call, but the more I think about gifts and talents, the more I want to give this film thing a try. And oddly enough, Disneyland was probably the biggest thing in making me ok with potentially having to move to Pasedena to finish a degree if I do end up going that route. Pasedena is close enough to Disneyland to warrant getting an annual pass, and I think I would have a blast working there while I was in school too.

It's weird to me how sometimes God uses things that seem so far from the path we think we need to be on to show us where we're actually supposed to be going. And who knows, next week I could decide that I was totally wrong about what God was telling me. But wouldn't it be something if Disneyland really did become a place I think of as almost home. A place where I could go to take a break, see my friends, and recharge when Grad school gets hard and learning Greek seems impossible. A place where I get inspired to make movies that will change the world for the better and reveal God's glory to people who are waiting to hear the gospel in their own language. Talk about the Happiest homecoming on earth.