One of my favorite Christmas movies is “It’s a Wonderful Life”. I watch it every year. I’ve gotten my daughter Brooklyn into watching it with me now. I cry my eyeballs out every time I watch it, and I’ll tell you why.
It’s a Wonderful Life is a 1946 American Christmas supernatural drama film produced and directed by Frank Capra. It is based on the short story and booklet “The Greatest Gift” self-published by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1943, which itself is loosely based on the 1843 Charles Dickens novella A Christmas Carol.[4] The film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man who has given up his personal dreams in order to help others in his community.
The thing I simply love about this film is that it’s a story of an extraordinary man, with the capacity and intelligence for extraordinary things, who gives all his life efforts to helping other people, and that’s what really shines through in a moment of crisis for him.
George Bailey shows this sacrificial, humble spirit from a young age.
His brother almost dies when he falls through thin ice. George risks his life to save his brother and partially loses hearing in one of his ears.
George works for the pharmacist Mr. Gower, who has just lost his son to influenza and is drunk and hysterical. Mr. Gower accidentally puts poison in pills that are supposed to go to a young sick kid. George catches the mistake and alerts Mr. Gower to it, preventing him from forwarding the pills to the kid and sending the kid to an early demise.
Instead of going on his honeymoon with his wife, George gives up all his vacation cash to save his father’s struggling business during the depression, and he and his wife Mary end up having their honeymoon in an old beat up house, taken care of, served, and even serenaded by friends in the town. This same house becomes their home.
And when George is threatened to lose everything, after losing a wad of money that was actually deceitfully found and stolen by the evil, greedy Mr. Potter. He gets drunk and teeters on the edge of suicide on Christmas Eve. This brings about the intervention of his guardian angel, Clarence Odbody. Clarence shows George all the lives he touched and what the world would be like if he had not existed.
George then comes back to the real world as he knows it, and finds that the whole town has pooled their resources together to pay his debts and help him keep his business. The great quote at the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life” is, “Remember, no man is a failure who has friends.”. This line is spoken by the angel Clarence to George Bailey.
This is always the moment when I’m crying while watching this movie. Seeing George Bailey be celebrated by all the people whose lives he’s impacted is a beautiful thing to see. George didn’t do all of this good to get noticed, he just did it out of an overflow. He’s getting rewarded finally for all the obscure things he’s done. There’s something heavenly about this moment in the film.
And just think of this story in light of Oswald Chambers’ words. We have a tendency to look for wonder in our experience, and we mistake heroic actions for real heroes. It’s one thing to go through a crisis grandly, yet quite another to go through every day glorifying God when there is no witness, no lime-light, and no one paying even the remotest attention to us. If we are not looking for halos, we at least want something that will make people say, “What a wonderful man of prayer he is!” or, “What a great woman of devotion she is!” But, if you are properly devoted to the Lord Jesus, you have reached the lofty height where no one would ever notice you personally. All that is noticed is the power of God coming through you all the time.
What truly makes life wonderful?
We don’t need Joel Osteens, Steve Furticks, Kanye Wests, Tupac Shakurs, Kurt Cobains, Donald Trumps, Joe Bidens, and John Lennons. We need more George Baileys. We need more people willing to lay down their lives in love for God and others! We need those people who will be radically generous, radically forgiving, radically kind, radically merciful, radically sacrificial, radically holy, radically bold, and more! That’s what the world really needs although it doesn’t know it!
