Echoes

I am watching the movie “Contact” with Jodie Foster. She’s in the movie, not in my living room. We have it on DVD. I am not a sci-fi nut, but I love a good movie that presents a predictable story in an unpredictable fashion. This is a great alien movie that has little if anything to do with aliens. Anyway… the beginning opens with various radio broadcasts floating off into space. An intelligent race hears them and sends a message back. Of course, if that same race listened to a lot of what’s on the radio now, they would change the dial or keep looking for intelligence in some other galaxy and give us a wide berth. Anyway …

What started me thinking was that what if our thoughts, our fears, our innermost demons were represented as these waves of invisibly loosed, untouchable, digital flotsam that we fling out of our souls like the radio waves in the movie? Like shrapnel from an immense explosion, our unspoken tremors, our harbored fears escape our minds when we engage them; they affect the way we watch movies or drive a car, or talk on the phone. Whether we voice them or not, they exist like the uncontrolled filaments of cotton candy that escape the stick at the county fair – they fly out and adopt themselves to whatever happens by.

I ask this because I go through moments, sometimes long moments, of hearing these punishingly unique echoes in my life. In the movie, these waves are heard by this advanced alien race and contact is made – hence the movie title. For me, the contact is not made out there, but it is made in here, in my heart, in my mind. I’ll have a thought, a reflection on myself and realize that it is not new. I’m not talking about day-ja-vu, or anything that pedestrian; I’m talking about the returning echoes of our self. Our thought-life.

Like the movie, my thoughts come back to me, as echoes of was once before, but like the movie, they are different. They are changed, amplified in ways, purified. A God, a Creator so immense that although His ears heard and His heart was impacted, He was not changed for a moment, has heard them. He was neither surprised nor ignorant. He is in fact so lovingly touched, so longingly loving of me that He returns these thoughts; He echoes them back in a way that not only lets me recognize their author, their subject and their genesis, but also their captor. He captures those thoughts, those innermost expressions and He loves me all the more. He holds me when I weep and He laughs when I smile. He is my God and I am exuberantly thankful to be His people.