Prompted by something Sarah Hey wrote over at Stand Firm, last night my wife and I watched Field of Dreams again (yeah, I know; I’m only 22 years late in posting this). Neither one of us had seen it in a while and we both cried like babies. This morning I reflected on why the movie evoked so many tears in us, although here I cannot speak for my wife, but only myself. I did not have the kind of contentious relationship with my dad that Costner’s character had with his. In fact, I had just the opposite relationship with my dad and am thankful that God blessed me with such a wonderful father, so that wasn’t the reason for my tears.

Then it hit me. At least for me, the story at its core is about redemption and restoration. Think about it. We see dead baseball players return and they are young and healthy again (restoration). They have been given a second chance (redemption) to do what they love doing. Several times, they ask Costner’s character if they were in heaven because of this. Then we see the poignant scene between Costner’s character and his estranged father. The father is young and handsome (restoration) and there is a new hope, a new beginning (redemption). The pain that estrangement and separation have caused in Costner’s character, and in his dad, has been eased because of it.

As I reflected on all this, it seems to me that we humans find stories like these so compelling and so poignant because they remind us what we were created to be. They remind us how desperately wrong human sin has made God’s good world, and how desperately we yearn for our own redemption and restoration. It reminded me of how much I miss my folks. I have none of the regrets Costner’s character had (although I do have my regrets); I just miss my folks and the rest of my family whom I have lost temporarily to death.

And as I watch my own body grow old and deteriorate through aging, I am reminded that I miss my youth, or at least part of it. I had a great childhood and loved growing up in a small town. I miss being young and the innocence I once had. I miss the nation I grew up in, or at least parts of it, because I see the forces of godlessness, rampant individualism, and secularism killing us today. As Jones’ character muses in the movie, the field of dreams reminds people of a purer, more innocent day and time, and they very much want to be part of that. I can relate and I think most people can too. Here again, I think this reflects a deep-seated desire in us to be all the Creator created us to be, and all that we have lost because we chose to do things our way and not God’s.

All this made me thankful that I have the hope of Christ and God’s promise of a New Creation, a new field of dreams if you like. There will be a radically new Creation, one without sin, brokenness in all of its forms, or death; but there will also be continuity. I do not know what this will look like, I only know it will be. I look forward to having a new resurrection body and being reunited with my loved ones, all of us living directly in the presence of God. I am thankful God loves his ugly creatures so much that he did what was necessary for us to live with him forever. I am glad that in Christ there is real healing, redemption, and restoration. If I did not have that hope, the sadness and sorrow over all that I have lost—and will continue to lose—in the course of my life would be unbearable, simply unbearable. That, I think, is why Field of Dreams is so poignant and emotionally powerful. It hints at what God has in store for those who accept his gracious invitation to have life and have it abundantly.

O that we would stop looking in all the wrong places for redemption and restoration! O that this broken and hurting world of God’s would turn back to him and be healed.

What do you think?

It would be foolish to believe that a man who has faith in you, O God, but who does not know the track of the Great Bear constellation, is worse off than the man who measures the sky and counts the stars and weighs the elements but neglects you who give to all things their size, their number, and their weight.

—Augustine, Confessions 5.4.7

Augustine does a good job here of challenging the false dichotomy that some attempt to create between faith and science. He also reminds us which is the end and which is one of the means. Do you know the difference?

“But I do not know how to awake and rise!” I will tell you. Get up, and do something the Master tells you; so make yourself his disciple at once. Instead of asking yourself  whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because he said, Do it, or once abstained because he said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe in him, if you do not anything he tells you.

But you can begin at once to be a disciple of the Living One—by obeying him in the first thing you can think of in which you are not obeying him. We must learn to obey him in everything, and so must begin somewhere. Let it be at once, and in the very next thing that lies at the door of our conscience! Oh fools and slow of heart, if you think of nothing but Christ, and do not set yourselves to do his words! You but build your houses on the sand.

—George MacDonald, Creation in Christ

Yesterday I preached a sermon on being a sign of Christ. MacDonald cuts to the chase here on an essential ingredient in being Christ’s signs. It is never easy but we can count on Christ’s help as we live to be his sign. Whose sign are you?

The perfection of [God’s] relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defects, all our evils. That [person] is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to [God], “You are my refuge, because you are my home.”

George MacDonald, Creation in Christ

As soon as even service is done for the honor and not for the service sake, the doer is that moment outside the kingdom. But when we receive the child in the name of Christ, the very childhood that we receive to our arms is humanity.

—George MacDonald, Creation in Christ