Pierced to the Heart

It is in our hearts that we become who we need to be. It’s where Jesus pointed us: Through the Law, past our external actions, and back to Jeremiah, where it says the new covenant is about God writing His laws on our hearts. Paul said that it is by the Spirit — through the heart — that we will learn to live God’s ways. As humans, the heart is where film and other art forms have their most important impact in our lives. With , we consciously give film a place as one channel for God to write on our hearts. To better know what Jesus came to teach us, we integrate film with other means of growth, aiming to learn to live the “life to the full” that Jesus came to give. Heart principles include:

• Love defines who we need to be. All human good derives from the foundation of loving God with all we are and loving others in the same way that we love ourselves. If we are becoming who we need to be, it is because we are learning how every little thing is (or is not) an act of love.
• It’s the heart that matters. It’s good to talk about doing the right things, and of course it’s even better to do the right things. But in any given area of our lives, we are not who we need to be until we truly love doing the right things — and not simply because God says so, but because we ourselves love them.
• Hearts change best through transformative experience. Our hearts change when an experience drives home the emotional impact of something that’s true. Even when we seem to change merely upon having a thing told to us, it’s because our imaginations drive home its emotional impact. Yet our hearts are not fully trustworthy, so also we need a mind for the Word of God. But neither are our minds fully trustworthy, so we need the two working together symbiotically — we love God with our hearts and our minds, trusting that God is also working to change our hearts in ways that we may not know.
• “Clean and clear” films aim for the head, not the heart. Christians often desire films that are clean in content and clear in gospel message. But clean and clear films may simply lay on us a moral obligation, speaking primarily to our heads, rather than taking us through transformative experience, which speaks to our hearts.
• Film takes us where we can’t go. We can’t — and if we’re smart we don’t want to — go everywhere that we’d need to go and go through everything that we’d need to go through to change in all the ways we need to grow. If we let it, film can vicariously take us to new places and through experiences that can enrich our lives and change us — even transform us.
• The biggest impact may come from characters we don’t like. We may enjoy seeing ourselves in likeable characters in a film, but we’ll learn more if we examine the ugly characters in the film. It’s not whether we are like them, but how much we are like them. A little bit? A lot?

It’s a matter of truly seeking a clear picture of the true states of our hearts.