Trailer Time: The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

This trailer hit my radar for two reasons:

1. Emma Watson is in it and I am very curious about her post-Hermione career.
2. The Salutatorian at graduation this year said that everyone should read the book.
   
   
   
   

I can't say I'm that impressed with the trailer. It looks like your typical story about alienation in high school and how you feel like an outcast. I think most of us has felt that way some time during our teen years. I am curious to see if this movie has anything original to say about it. The last 30 seconds of the trailer, with the music and montage, was a bit stirring, so I am open-minded.

There is a line I would like to reflect upon. The main character tells a seemingly love-lorn Emma Watson, “We accept the love we think we deserve.” I think this is sadly true of many of us. But that cannot be true of the Christian.

Christians know that we will never be good enough for the love of God. We can never earn the gift of salvation. I will never deserve what Christ did for me at Calvary. But I must accept it because it is the deepest truth of the universe: “For God so loved the world that He gave his only Son.”

I also think this think is an impediment to our views of marriage. I remember speaking to one of my classes this year and I described how my wife places me before herself and that I do my best to do the same. The girls in this class said that to be completely centered on the other was impossible. When I cited my marriage, they said “That's, like, one in a million.” And that made me sad, because I thought about how many of them will settle for a love they think they deserve. I will never be good enough to be a husband to my wife. I don't think I'm alone in thinking this about my wife. I think that's why men genuflect to their women when they propose. It is the same pose we take when we enter a church and bend the knee to the tabernacle. By doing so, I acknowledge that I am not worthy of Christ's love, but I beg on my knee that He share his life with me. Men who really love their women acknowledge that they are not worth of lady's love, but beg on the knee that she share her life with him.

We Christians don't accept the love we think we deserve. We accept the love we will never deserve.