UP

I finally saw UP with my family. Loved it! The five-minute or so recap of Carl and Ellie's life at the beginning of the movie to set up the film's premise has got to be one of the most endearing, heartbreaking, and treasured things you may ever see on screen. As I've reflected upon it today, it's a story about adventure to be sure, but mostly about loss: A widower and his wife, the couple and their house, and a son and his absent father. The adventure part of UP exists and emerges precisely at the intersection of Carl's and Russell's particular emptiness and the search to fill it, or in this case, fulfill it. As is the nature of adventure, not is always as it seems, and there are plenty of lessons to be gleaned and kicked around along the way, this film is no exception:

- You always take a bit of home with you wherever you go.
- Sometimes an adventure necessitates leaving the unnecessary behind.
- And the boring stuff is the stuff you remember most.

I've thought about the first as it relates to healing; that our experience of home growing up always stays with us, no matter what, no matter how old, offering a mixture both wonderful and painful. I've realized that with all the healing I have sought and been graciously given as an adult, there is still much of my youth that remains at the core, some now as nostalgia, but much as melancholy over what could have been.

I've reflected on the second over the last many years, of course, as it relates to Jesus. His call for us to lay down our lives, pick up our cross, and follow him is the stuff of divine adventure. But inherent in that call is to leave what may be treasured but unnecessary behind. I am regularly haunted by all the stuff I deem important wondering how much of it has kept me tethered to the ground, instead of up and exploring life in the kingdom. What is the unnecessary I must unload so I am free to pursue what is truly necessary? That's a holy journey.

And I've reminisced quite a bit about my own growing up, having shared that what I recall most fondly as a kid are indeed the mundane things - going to the hardware store with my dad, listening to Vin Scully on the radio as we cleaned out the garage, shooting hoop with my mom on the driveway. For this reason, I've told parents not to be surprised if it turns out that the times we were least conscious of our "parenting", end up being the moments that most shape our children. Somehow, it is the most boring, everyday, mundane things we remember most. Not because, I think, the moment was so important necessarily, but that we felt important in that moment. I don't ever recall what was said in those activities with my mom and dad, all I remember is that they shared that moment with me.

Having seen UP today on the heels of watching Benjamin Button for the first time last night, I am struck that what aches at our hearts is the loss of time, how we wish at some level things could stay the same and never change. I often think about my children in this way. But more than that, it's the loss of relationship that is allowed to pass as a reality and function of time: a spouse, a house, a father, a dream. Some people, some things, can never be replaced. And time does not stand still. But what UP does teaches us is that we can learn to enjoy new relationships, on new adventures, creating new memories, while never forgetting, or leaving far behind, what gave our memories, and losses, so much meaning to our lives in the first place.