I recently watched a movie on DVD I found interesting. It is called “The Vow” and stars Rachael McAdams and Channing Tatum. Inspired by true events, it is about a woman who gets in a horrible car accident with her husband and suffers a severe brain injury. Tragically, when she is brought out of a medically induced coma and regains consciousness, she discovers that she does not remember who her husband is, or any part of the life she lived in the past five years. Thus, in an attempt to jog her memory, her doctor advises her to go about her daily routine. Therefore, she is to live the life she lived with her husband who is now a man she doesn’t know. But there’s a glitch.
Prior to the accident, she was a carefree artist who married a musician and wrote her wedding vows on a menu. The woman she was just prior to the accident loved being tickled, gorging herself with chocolates, and living in the city. She was also a woman who owned her own sculpting studio, dressed unconventionally and was madly in love with her husband. In short, she was a woman who loved to color outside of the lines of life.
However, after the accident, she only remembers being the woman she was once upon a time. And remarkably, that woman was very different from the woman she came to be. The woman she once was was a rich, sweater wearing, mojito drinking, sorority girl from the suburbs who was fulfilling her daddy’s dream and going to law school and was engaged to a guy who was the polar opposite of the man she ended up marrying. In short, the woman she once was was a woman who always colored inside the lines of life and those lines were lines that someone else drew.
Since this old self was the only woman she remembered being, she ignores the advice of her doctor and eventually falls back into her old, comfortable life and believes she is lucky to be given a “free do over in life.” However, she learns events about her past that ultimately served as the impetus to her dramatic change the first time around, and slowly begins making the same decisions again. She moves out of her parent’s well do to estate, moves back to the city, quits law school again and begins attending the same art school she attended the first time around. While the character in the movie never does regain her memories, nor does the woman upon whom the story is based, in the end, she grows back into the woman she no longer remembers.
As I watched this moving story unfold, I couldn’t help but think how beautifully it exemplifies God’s sovereignty. God knows who He wants each one of us to be and He orchestrates the circumstances and events in our lives to help shape us into that person so that we can fulfill His purpose. Even though this woman no longer remembered who she grew to be, she nevertheless once again grew into the same woman the second time around. Why? It is because God’s will cannot be thwarted. God knows who He wants us to be, and nothing can stop that from happening, not even a severe brain injury.
Psalm 139:13-16 says, “For you created my innermost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb, I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made…all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” Make no mistake. God is fully sovereign. In truth, there is no such thing as luck, chance or coincidence because everything that happens to us happens because God allows it to happen and ordains it to happen. For some, this is a hard pill to swallow. However, for others, for those of us who have faith in the sovereign God of the universe, knowing this truth calms our anxious souls. When tragedy happens, we can rest in the truth that God already knows the outcome. We also know God promises us in Jeremiah 29:11 that “He knows the plans He has for” us and that they are “plans to prosper” us and “not to harm” us and that they are “plans to give” us “a hope and a future.”
If you want to learn about God’s sovereignty in an unconventional way, watch the movie, “The Vow.” It is great food for thought. I have one warning though. There is one scene with brief nudity as well as some foul language so take care when watching. Keep the little one’s eyes away!