Tinkerbell

Isabelle and I had the opportunity to preview the new Tinkerbell movie for free the weekend before the video came out. I love free stuff but I don't always love sitting through kids movies. While this movie wasn't the best I had ever seen it kept moving and wasn't too long. The reason I am writing about it is because the lessons I saw in the movie have stuck with me.

When I was little it seems like every movie or TV show had a moral lesson. Something I was supposed to learn from it. As I have raised my children I see fewer and fewer lessons in what they are watching and more and more just pure entertainment. Not that I mind a little entertainment every once in a while but it is refreshing to see a lesson in a movie, especially one that really applies to my daughters stage of life.

In the movie Tinker Bell is chosen to make the fall scepter, a big honor, and her best buddy is there to help her all the way. She is clipping along but is getting increasingly frustrated by the help she is getting and makes up an errand to get rid of him. He returns just as she has finished the scepter, she is immediately irritated by him, the thing he returns with rolls away and breaks the scepter. After he leaves she is fuming and accidentally breaks the rare and important crystal that is supposed to go inside the scepter. She blames her friend who is not even in the room. She tells nobody what has happened and sets off on an adventure to find another crystal and as problems arise from this adventure there is always someone else to blame. In the end when all hope seems lost she sits alone and finally takes responsibility for everything that has gone wrong and realizes she was so busy trying to do everything herself that she missed the opportunity to get help from people who cared about her.

At our house blaming others, usually me, for everything that goes wrong is a big theme in Isabelle's life. She has been known to come out of her room at night to announce to me, "YOU forgot my blanket!" If I am making her walk rather than carry her and she decides to drag her feet and trip that is my fault. If she drops something she wants to give me it is my fault. But not just me, if she colors outside the lines that would be a bad marker. bad paint, bad toy, bad food, bad bed. Everything else is constantly doing her wrong. How great is my life to have a movie like tinker bell to help me illustrate the point that maybe everything isn't someone else's fault and maybe if you would accept a little help and responsibility things wouldn't go so wrong all the time.

Now in all fairness I MIGHT occasionally have a problem with this issue as well. I might want to blame my husband, my children or my mom for things that go wrong in my life. It is SO much easier than taking responsibility. Who wants to acknowledge that they messed up? That they didn't communicate properly and that is why the other person didn't measure up. That my mistake started a chain reaction. It is always so easy to see where the other person went wrong and so much harder to see how we were part of that poor end result. So much easier to be mad at someone else than mad at ourselves.

But I have found that when I admit my mistakes and am willing to look honestly at a situation seeing my role in a problem, I really feel better about it and often can see the resolution to the problem much quicker than when I focus on blaming others. And in learning to see my own faults and forgive myself I am becoming much more forgiving of others faults. We are a sinful people living in a fallen world. We make wrong choices, make mistakes and hurt those we love. But if Christ can forgive me when it really never was his fault, then certainly I can see to forgive others when tomorrow I will probably make the same mistake.

Amazing, I found the lesson of Christ's forgiveness in a Disney movie. Life is good.