Intro to "Reel" Cool Readings

Part of moving to a new town involves the quest to find a group of quality best friends...at least that's what my wife tells me, it's on her radar a lot more than mine I guess haha.  No really, I understand it's very important.  Along with this search, or just being in a place where you don't know many people in general, comes the onslaught of asking and answering the many typical small talk, get to know you type questions.  One of these Katy and I have frequently gotten, both in Memphis and Allen, is "So, what do you guys like to do for fun together?" 

We just don't have a great, exciting answer to that one yet.  Katy likes to go with "Well, we are both kind of like chameleons.  We enjoy or would enjoy doing pretty much whatever, but aren't really hardcore about anything."  The old classic jack of all trades, master of none type deal. 

I'll sometimes go with the answer Katy used, or will give the more honest and accurate response of "We love going to the movies."  Is that bad?  Does it make us sound boring?  O well, it is what it is.

As you can probably tell from either knowing me or reading the title and posts from this blog, I really do enjoy movies.  And probably my favorite thing to do while viewing them is to look for some kind of truth or theme that is jointly shared by both the film and the Bible.  Whether it's a specific scene that illustrates well a certain gospel concept, a storyline that is very much redemptive, a character that looks all too familiar to an individual from Scripture; the list of potential parallels is endless. 

I know I'm not alone in enjoying this practice of finding similarities.  Many communicators make it a habit to color their messages with snapshots from movies, along with other sources like music, classic literature, poetry, etc.  Well I'm not exactly what you'd call an avid reader (although the classification of myself in that regard may bump up a notch or two with Seminary kicking off this Wednesday ugh...anybody got any tips on how to speed read?), so I normally just stick with flicks.

I love the take Dr. Cole Huffman, Sr. Pastor of First Evan in Memphis, has on this.  Although he rarely uses movies to illustrate points in his sermons (he's more the avid reader type, brilliant), the following post from his blog does a wonderful job addressing the idea of even using movies in such a way.  Especially ones that not everyone across the board would deem acceptable to view.  Click on the following link to view it, great read!  http://colehuffman.blogspot.com/2011_03_01_archive.html

Sort of like I did in my first post, every now and then I'm going to relate something from a particular movie with a Scriptural proposition.  These types of posts will always be preceded by the following heading: "Reel" Cool Readings... then the movie. 



Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I do writing them!