We made it! Thanks for allowing me a few minutes on this, the first Monday of 2025, to get our relational conversation rebooted for a new year of opportunity. I don’t know if you feel it, but it seems that there’s an air of optimistic possibility wafting around our national neighborhood. Covid is now an increasingly-distant national nightmare memory; a few years of tepid economic factors are giving way to projections of possibility that, if realized, could materialize beneficially. How does all of that factor into your return-to-action this week?
During the year-end days of seasonal sabbatical, did you do any Netflixing to get into the mood for the merry? What’s on your list of “over-and-over” titles that keep you coming back?
Before reassigned to the vaults where they’re confined until next year’s Christmas build-up, let me assume that you might have revisited a couple of our culture’s cinematic icons, both based on books that made their way from libraries into theaters, long before super heroes and special effects conquered Hollywood.
Just after World War II’s end, It’s a Wonderful Life premiered to an American public ready for some relief from the impact of four years of global warfare. It was based on a short story – The Greatest Gift – self-published by Philip Van Doren Stern in 1943.
You’ve seen it often: Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed tell the story of George Bailey’s battle against evil Henry Potter and his own sense of second-class status, measured against his brother who had returned from Europe as a war-hero. George’s demons are neutralized by Clarence, the angel who was Heaven’s last-round draft choice sent to orchestrate divine perspective for a man overwhelmed with circumstances that were both daunting and debilitating. The wisdom legacy left for George by his father – shared in a flashback scene – is one of the keepers: “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.”
It’s no spoiler alert: the outcomes are deeply satisfying as Potter loses, George and Mary win… and Clarence gets his wings. The American Film Institute calls it #1 on the list of Most Inspirational Films ever made.
The tendency continues today: sequels – or, inspired-bys – are regularly offered at the box-office in an attempt to premier new stories in the lanes already defined by earlier blockbusters. Frank Capra used It’s a Wonderful Life to reintroduce the challenging influence first extended in 1843 by Charles Dickens in his novella, A Christmas Carol. A century later, the story became a British movie of the same name, with Alastair Sim playing the lead. The film was immediately marketed in America, retitled Scrooge. Though black-and-white – with meager special effects required to bring the Ghosts of Christmas past/present/future into the picture – it still warrants the attention it receives.
Scrooge would have had a shot at a cabinet position in America 2025, but his unquestioned business gains had limited efficacy in stamping his life a success as the Ghosts gave him the overview of what he had become. As he observed, through his objective review of life: “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”
Our culture allows a two-minute warning time-out every year; the notion of “New Year’s Resolutions” presumes that breakthroughs are always warranted but require intentional reset. Here’s my question on this first Monday of ’25: if you were George Bailey or Ebeneezer Scrooge, what counsel would you give yourself about your approach to this next/new year that lies before you?
You don’t need Clarence or the Ghosts of Christmas to challenge you; you’ve got me! What will you do with this new year that could make the rest of your life the best of your life?
Bob Shank
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