The Time Traveler's Wife

I just watched The Time Traveler's Wife. I didn't really know anything about it, I just picked it out on a whim from the most awesome invention ever Redbox earlier today. I really liked it! Besides being entertaining and a tear-jerker, it got me thinking. See, in this movie, Eric Bana's character, Henry, has a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel randomly. He has no control of where he ends up or how long it takes for him to travel back. Sometimes this is beneficial, like when he returns from the future with winning lottery numbers, but more often than not it's frustrating, particularly for his wife. Things get far more serious when he travels far enough into the future to learn that he dies when his daughter is 5 years old.

Obviously, this is quite a burden for his wife, played by Rachel McAdams, and also for his daughter, whose future self returns on her 5th birthday to let her know that this is the year her father will die. Being a divinity school geek, this made me think about God. I personally would not want to know when I am going to die--much less would I want to know when a loved one will die. Of course I know that we're all mortal, but there would be something very different about knowing the details of the end of our lives before we got there. And then I realized--just as God knew us in our mothers' wombs, he knows when we will die. "In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed" (Psalm 139:16). Sure, God gets to hang out with us in heaven, but God has compassion for us and is moved by our suffering. It's as if in the movie Henry had been told when his daughter would die and had to wait for it to happen; except this is God, whose love is infinitely greater than even the most devoted parent's, and it happens for God billions and billions of times over.

OK, so some of this line of thought is a little inane, but still. I'm writing it down because it made me think about just how much God loves each of us, how much he hates for us to suffer. The love and pain written across Rachel McAdams' face, even if they weren't just the stylings of an actress, are only a pale shadow of God's love for us. And Rachel McAdams still made me cry! How much more should I be moved by the realization of the depth of God's true, pure, unconditional love?

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And also, the girls who play Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams' daughter Alba, Hailey and Tatum McCann, are precious: