What I Learned From: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

I know, I know. This is a strange topic for me to bring up on my blog. I don’t normally talk about music and movies on my blog, but after seeing Dawn of the Planet of the Apes on a last minute date night in the theaters with my husband, I just had to put my jumbled thoughts about the movie down somewhere.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a drama and a science-fiction movie. It is the sequel to the first movie: Rise of the Planet of the Apes. If you have not seen this movie, but are planning to, you might want to wait to read the rest of this post, as there will be a few spoiler alerts. If you don’t plan on seeing it because it’s not your type of movie, then feel free to read on!

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What’s interesting about the movie, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is that there is one reoccurring emotion: fear. Fear drives the entire plot line. The apes are afraid of the humans, the humans are afraid of the apes. Because of fear, instead of becoming friends they become enemies. The entire movie is based on the fact that if everyone had learned to control their fears or better yet, face their fears and learned to love, they all would have had a completely different life.

Like the characters in the movie, I see so much fear in the lives of people today. It seems to drive us to do the things we do just like it did the characters in the movie. In today’s world there are so many fears:

• Fear of vaccinating.
• Fear of cancer.
• Fear of sickness.
• Fear of MSG, GMOs, parabens, toxins, hormone disrupters, pesticides, sulfates, nitrates, and more.
• Fear of politicians.
• Fear of our kids.
• Fear of not being good enough.
• Fear of the inevitable.
• Fear of the future.

There are so many more things that people fear and I know that I would never have enough time to list them all. Me? I fear for the future. I feel if we continue to let these fears control us, control who we are as people, as parents, and adults then we will never know what we could have had. We will never see the fear-free life that God has for us.

My good friend Aprille from Beautiful in His Time wrote this yesterday:

MSG, GMO, parabens, toxins, hormone disrupters, pesticides, sulfates, nitrates… Yes, we live in a toxic world. Dangers abound. Kids can die in car accidents or in hot cars. Kids can drown in pools.

Yes, we need to be educated and know about these things and try to make healthy decisions for our families, but we also have LIVES to live. Stress kills too. And if you spend all your time and money and resources trying to eliminate every possible danger that exists for you and your family…

Well, I can’t and won’t speak for you. But for me? I’m so over driving myself crazy trying. I’m so tired of every other post in my Facebook feed being about this, that, or the other thing that’s going to kill me or my children. I really wish that moms would just take a deep breath and stop being so hyped out about it all.

Christ came that we might have abundant life in a broken world. We are all dying a slow, painful death in this world. Some, faster than others. But if we spend all of our emotional resources, money, time, and energy on fearing the inevitable, I don’t see how that’s an abundant life.

Aprille said it well. We can’t spend our life fearing every little thing out there. We can make the best descions that we can, we can pray about them, and we can rest assured that God will take care of the rest.

Do you know what the opposite of fear is? Love. 1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.”

Perfect love.

I used to wonder what that meant. Is it the kind of love between a husband and a wife? Is it the type of love we saw in the movie Frozen that exists between two sisters and derives of a selfless act?

Although these types of love are wonderful, they are not perfect. Only God’s love is perfect. And because His love is perfect we can rest assured that He will take away all our fears, that His plan is perfect, and that while evil exists in our sinful world, God’s love is still stronger than it all.

Can I ask you to think for a minute? What drives you? Is it fear? Are all your decisions based out of fear of something? Don’t wait until it’s too late like the characters in the movie. Choose love. God’s love. It’s the only way to survive in the world we live in today.