Every Christmas season I watch Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” on television. It’s not that I plan it or anything; it just happens to come on some night when I happen to be watching TV. Usually, one of the networks will air the movie on the 23rd of December; sometimes even Christmas Eve. This year “It’s A Wonderful Life” came early, in the first week of the month.
I really love that movie. I guess I’ve known about it most of my life. It’s been on television every year as long as I’ve been alive. But I never really sat down to watch it, start to finish, until about eight years ago. Old black and white 1947 era sentimental movies aren’t exactly “young people” fare, so I guess I had to grow a few gray hairs before I could appreciate it.
A lot of folks probably think a sixty-year old feel-good movie is a little too schmaltzy for the days we’re living in now. I think just the opposite. I think the movie’s sentimentality is a testament to something we’ve lost over the last six decades. I’m not much of a nostalgia buff and I don’t believe the “good old days” were necessarily as good as we imagine. We tend to romanticize the hardships and exaggerate the good times. But we did lose something I wish we hadn’t. Somewhere in our progress and advancement as a society we’ve lost our innocence and naiveté as a people. I do miss that.
“It’s A Wonderful Life” is a remembrance of that innocence. For those who need a quick refresher, the movie is about a guy named George Bailey. George is a small town guy with big plans. He wants to see the world and make something of himself out there in it. The problem is that his plans always seem to be frustrated by the needs of those around him. On the eve of his departure for university, the gateway to his “bigger” life, George’s father dies suddenly, leaving George to put his plans on hold and stay in sleepy little Bedford Falls to tend the family’s savings and loan business.
Back in 1947 the Savings and Loan was where folks borrowed the money to build or buy their own homes; a new practice for the working class at the time. For a working family, owning your own home meant escaping the serfdom of a landlord; usually the same man or institution that owned everything else in the town. Taking ownership of your home was symbolic of taking ownership of your life. You no longer considered yourself under the lordship of the landlord.
The landlord in Bedford Falls was Mr. Potter. He was a mean old man; mean and rich. Potter owned the town … except for the Savings and Loan and the homes of those to whom George gave loans. Owning the town was personal to Potter and Bailey’s Savings and Loan grated him. George and his business were all that stood between Potter and domination of the town.
George knew that. So he put his plans on hold for a few years and stayed in Bedford Falls. A few years became a few years more … and then a few years more. George always stood in the gap; keeping the doors of the Savings and Loan open and the townspeople out of Potter’s grasp. It seemed that every time they moved ahead some emergency would push them behind. The day George could leave town for a bigger life seemed to always be just beyond his reach.
Well, this Christmas another emergency was cast upon the Savings and Loan. Only, this one was bigger than the rest. George was floored; this was just too big to overcome and it promised to sink the business.
Here he was, years of his plans being put on hold, years of his life wasted in this little town, years of his family living on a shoestring while his friends saw the world, built great businesses and great wealth. George had been stuck, foregoing his dreams to give his life to the people of this one-horse town.
Now the Savings and Loan was sure to come to ruin. It would close its doors forever and Potter would have his way. The townspeople would be pulled back into the poverty and servitude that came with Potter’s world. George’s family, who had sacrificed and skimped right along with him through the years, would suffer the same fate.
There was nowhere to turn, no answer in sight. George had failed the business, failed the town and failed his family. Thoughts of suicide entered his mind. His life insurance policy was the last thing he had of any value; at least his wife and children would be clothed and fed for awhile. It would be better for everyone, he reasoned, if he had never been born.
But this was Christmas and Christmas is full of miracles. That night George met his angel; kind of a failure himself, as angels go. His angel explained that the people around him wouldn’t really be better off if he had never been born. In fact, without George’s influence, the angel proves to him, Bedford Falls would be a nightmare - a hell on earth.
After his epiphany George knows that however insurmountable the circumstance he has a purpose in this town. He returns home to find most of the town gathered in his living room and spilling out into the yard. They’ve gotten news of the trouble at the Savings and Loan and now they’ve joined to rescue the man and the institution that had rescued each of them in the past.
Of course, the movie has a very happy ending. Potter is foiled and George’s friends declare him the “richest man in town.”
After so many years of watching the movie and so many changes in the world that have reshaped how we regard our lives and our fellow man, you’d think this sentimental old story would be worn out in the telling. Not so. It gets better with age. Watch it this year … and next. Watch it each year for the next ten Christmases. You’ll see what I mean.
George Bailey is you and me. He’s everyone who has ever put his own plans on hold for a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, or a lifetime, because the needs of another cried out a little louder. He’s everyone that’s ever been in a predicament bigger than himself and can’t imagine a way out. He’s everyone that has ever despaired of victory and believed for a moment that his life and work have come to nothing. He’s everyone that ever believed the world would be better off without him.
And he’s everyone that grace has ever looked down upon, miraculously plucked from an insurmountable circumstance and set gently down on the other side. George is everyone who has discovered that true riches don’t come in the form of houses and cars and that the prestige that flows from men’s hearts is sweeter by far than the prestige that comes from their envy.
This Christmas, I pray, George is you and me. Surrounded by those he loves and who love him; seeing his purpose and success in this life reflected in their faces. It is a wonderful life.
*****
I’ll leave you with a little story I received this week from a friend. Jenny Lou Jones is the bride of a man I worked with in the old days. Back in 1995 Jenny Lou survived leukemia and a bone marrow transplant. Today she lives her purpose through writing devotionals like the one below and counseling those who face the same insurmountable circumstances she did then. Jenny Lou can be reached at jlou7@comcast.net.
Lingering
When I was young, I went to Girl Scout camp for many years. The beginning of the week seemed to go slowly. The counselors made us hike up the small, craggy mountains in Oklahoma. They showed us how to watch out for rattlesnake nests and how to dodge when we saw a tarantula. We ate in the mess hall for breakfast and lunch and then cooked something like American Chopped Suey or Hobos over a fire for dinner.
In Oklahoma, the tents were on stilts (I think this had to do with rattlesnakes and tarantulas). The year I was a counselor, we had to gather all the girls in the middle of the night and head down into a hole in the ground because a tornado was coming. There was always some kind of peril at camp; if it wasn’t nature attacking us then it was the “call of nature” and having to use the outdoor latrines. Somehow, sometime during the week, the seats of the latrine got “Vaselined” and then the culprit put plastic wrap under the seat. No one ‘fessed up’ to these antics.
With these memories, you’d think I’d be glad to forget about camp and bugs and chigger bites, but camp is where I met other girls from around our state, where I learned camp songs that I eventually sang to my kids as lullabies, and the fact that I know without a doubt that I’d rather stay in a motel than camp any day.
Even though I was always a bit homesick at the first of the week, by the end, I never wanted to leave the outdoors and my friends. The last night of the camp, we’d sit around the campfire and sing; we always ended with a song called, “Linger”. It went:
Mmm…mmm. I want to linger
Mmm…mmm, a little longer
Mmm…mmm, a little longer here with you
Mmm…mmm, it’s such a special night
Mmm…mmm, to be with you tonight
Mmm…mmm, to be with friends who are so true?
By the end of the song, little elementary girls were weeping over the thought of having to go home to the ordinary.
As I was daydreaming the other day, it made me think that’s probably what all the secondary characters of the Nativity thought when they came to the stable for Christ’s birth.
The baby, the King of Kings, the Deliverer, the Messiah was born “Away in a Manger” during a routine “Silent Night” in “Little Town of Bethlehem” when “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” as “Angels We Have Heard on High” sang “Gloria”. And then I think they probably sang the little Girl Scout song about how they’d like to linger in the presence of the Savior who came as a baby. I’m sure they didn’t want to go back to the ordinary after what they had witnessed.
As we approach these next few days until Christmas, take time to linger with the Christmas Child who became a man and gives us Eternal Life.
Mmm…I want to linger.
Mmm…A little longer.
Mmm…A little longer here with you.
Have a beautiful “lingering” Christmas with those you love,
Jenny Lou Jones
Mama Chick
