I was on a flight recently where I watched the movie “Midnight in Paris”. The basic idea is that the main character is unhappy with his current situation and dreams about a time in the past that seems more like a golden age. People were more interesting, amazing things were happening, it was basically more perfect. Through some mysterious method, he ends up in the 1930s, in the very magical time he had been wishing for, and he is hanging out with all the amazing people he was only dreaming about earlier that day.
When he gets to this better time, he meets someone who is dissatisfied with her current situation, and dreams of different golden age, of an earlier time. Spoiler alert: the main character realizes that he needs to start looking at the present as a golden age and live a different way.
As the people on my team are all too familiar with, I can tend to look back to my years at Kensington Community Church as my own Golden Years. Even on our team at Willow, it is really easy to look back to the past and think about all the amazing productions we have been a part of and think back to a more magical time.
Looking back is interesting to me because I am pretty sure things are never as amazing as I remember. And if I fast forward into the future I would guess that people will talk about the era that I live as the best and most perfect time to be involved in production in the local church.
Seeing this movie and thinking about how much golden era thinking I do, and those around me do, amazingly, just like the main character in the movie, I started to realize that now is the Golden Era. Now is the chance to create something that will affect people now and in the future. Now is the opportunity to stop wishing for something from another era, and to create a whole new era, now.
Regardless of what era you are living in, it never seems quite like we are living in amazing times. But what if we started to act like our era was the most incredible time? What if we lived life, right now, like we believed the current era was special? Golden years are great to look back on, but looking back doesn’t do any good unless we let them inform us what our present can look like and what the possibilities of the future could be.
