Disney’s Tomorrowland opens today. If you’d like to read about it, check out my review. But in this space, let me just say this is the most optimistic rumination on the future that I’ve seen in a long, long time. Seems we don’t do optimism very well these days.
I saw Tomorrowland hot on the heels of writing our review of Mad Max: Fury Road, where the remnants of a shattered world are on the verge of, well, further shattering. Before that, I stuck on my dystopian reviewer hat for The Divergent Series: Insurgent, about a ragtag band of apocalyptic survivors fighting in a hollowed-out Chicago. Late last year, I reviewed such chipper sci-fi stories as Interstellar and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1. Before the year is out, we’ll be treated to Terminator Genisys and Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials and the final, cataclysmic Mockingjay movie and—
Well, let’s just say that, at the movies, the sun doesn’t always come out tomorrow.
Hey, all in a day’s work. And truth be told, I kinda like dystopian fiction. I think Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity, has a bit of dystopian tint to it.
Oh, we all know that our story ends happily enough. But read Revelation or Daniel or even Left Behind, and you’ll know that the future of this ol’ earth of ours won’t be as smooth as raspberry yogurt. Bad stuff is going to happen, and the Scriptures go into some serious, squirm-worthy detail about it. The language we use in even our secular dystopian stories—apocalypse, Armageddon, the Four Horsemen, the Seven Seals—is ripped straight from the Bible. Tomorrowland’s soaring towers are nice and all. But examine its veiled promise of a bright future built on technology, and we have a right to be skeptical of that model’s long-term prospects.
We believe in a spiritual form of the law of entropy: What God stitched together is in the process of coming undone, thanks to sin, and only God can repair the damage.
Those outside Christianity can sometimes mistake that dystopian thread in our faith as pessimism, or even fatalism. Some imagine we don’t care much about tomorrow because we think we know how tomorrow ends.
But Christianity is a faith full of glorious paradox, and that’s no more obvious than when you look at the countless Christians around the globe who clearly do care about tomorrow, and who are doing their best to make the world a better place. Christian doctors take vacations to work in terribly poor countries—without receiving a single penny. Christian youth workers work at 90-hour weeks to help the young, sometimes lost kids in their care. Christian philanthropists dump their fortunes into ministries designed to light the way to a brighter future.
The list goes on: teachers, counselors, missionaries, auto techs, waitresses … Christians in all walks of life figure out how to be God’s instrument for a better tomorrow—for our neighbors and co-workers, for our friends and family. Those of us with children don’t think of dystopian futures when we see our sons and daughters. We think of Thanksgiving dinners and backyard barbecues and grandchildren. We think of laughter and love and promise. We have hope.
Sure, the world is broken. We broke it. But each of us, in our own way, can serve as God’s hands and feet to fix it a little—to help other people see that, despite its flaws, this world of ours, this life of ours, is a divine creation full of light and wonder.
My daughter is getting married tomorrow. I’ll walk her down the aisle tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll give her away to another man who loves her just as much as I do. They’ll exchange vows, open presents and maybe smear some cake on each other’s faces. And when that’s done, they’ll get in their car and drive away west—toward the setting sun.
They’ll honeymoon in Disneyland, appropriately enough. They’ll start their own tomorrow in Tomorrowland.
Tomorrow will be a new beginning for them. For me. For you, too. Tomorrow is a fresh start for us all, full of promise and adventure. Tomorrow we can set aside our past sins and disappointments. We are God’s creation, and tomorrow we have a chance to step a little closer into being what God always wanted us to be.
We know a bit of what the future holds. We know it won’t always be pretty. And yet tomorrow—God’s tomorrow—will forever be glorious.
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