Last Thursday night was sort of our last hurrah in Vermont. LightHusband met up with his sister, her children, their parents and LightBoy at a baseball game. LightGirl and I went to dinner and a movie. LightGirl has no patience for baseball games at the best of times, and this was not the best of times. Just thinking about it made her miss hockey and her team and skating and made her a little bit weepy and scared about her knee injury.
We were running late, so we dove into Pizza Hut for dinner. We made an impassioned plea to our waitress that we needed to catch a movie … could our dinner be hurried at all. Certainly, she smiled at us.  But the pace of the restaurant changed not a whit. LightGirl’s pasta and marinara sauce seemed to have been made from homegrown tomatoes … on the vine … grown while we waited as time elastic stretched to eternity. We tried to enjoy conversation and did at first, but the movie time loomed larger and larger on our horizon. Dinner came and LightGirl bargained with me that the movie had already started, we shouldn’t bother those already there by walking in late. My version was someone always comes in late … it would just be us this time. We hadn’t missed that much … maybe just the previews. Off we went to the theatre.
We walked into a mysteriously empty lobby and I said, “Two for Evan Almighty, please.” The girl looked at me and then looked over her shoulder to the boy behind her and said, “I don’t know … can we still do that?” Which took me aback for a moment. The young man looked at me (I was looking very puzzled at the exchange) and said (into his walkie-talkie), “Is it too late to start Evan Almighty in 5?” and I realized … we were the only people there for that movie!!! We had the theater to ourselves. Yes, we were late, but we were the only ones. What a treat. They ran it for us anyway. Just us two in the whole theater … all by ourselves. What fun.
Evan Almighty is a real treat itself. I was a little askance about it after it’s predecessor, Bruce Almighty. But this movie is gentle and fun and for those of us who believe in living our lives a bit differently so that we can express the love of the Creator to all of creation, it has a wonderful message. Morgan Freeman is once again outstanding as God. LightGirl remarked that if God is really like “that guy in the movie. I could talk to him. I haven’t had much to say to God for a while now. But I could talk to that guy. Do you think God is like that guy?” I told her that I thought God certainly had a lot of those characteristics … that if she wanted to imagine that God was like that guy, there wasn’t anything wrong with it. I think I liked the movie so much because the theme that ran all throughout it was that God loves His people and invites them to participate in His mission with Him. What a great way to spend an afternoon or evening … being reminded of that wonderous truth.
