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Who Made These Rules Anyway?

"Man is so great that his greatness appears even in knowing himself to be miserable. A tree has no sense of its misery. It is true that to know we are miserable is to be miserable; but to know we are miserable is also to be great. Thus all the miseries of man prove his grandeur; they are the miseries of a dignified personage, the miseries of a dethroned monarch...What can this incessant craving, and this impotence of attainment mean, unless there was once a happiness belonging to man, of which only the faintest traces remain, in that void which he attempts to fill with everything within his reach?"
-Pascal

Many of you have seen the trailer for Sam Mendes' most recent drama "Revolutionary Road." Maybe it caught your attention because for the first time since Titanic you saw Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio gazing dreamily into each other's eyes.

Or maybe, if you're like me, it was the haunting Nina Simone song playing intermittently in the background as before your eyes a couple quickly transforms from passionate and inspired to distant and ambivalent when they find themselves trading their rich and cultural city life for what many of us consider to be the desirable and even inevitable "all American" suburban one.

It's a scenario that I believe far more of us than are even willing to admit can relate to.

In the trailer we hear various segments of extremely passionate and at times desperate dialogue between the two characters that goes something like this:

Kate Winslet: "Look at us! We're just like everyone else! We've bought into the same ridiculous delusion – this idea that you have to settle down, resign from life."

Leonardo DiCaprio: "I want to feel things, really feel them."

Kate Winslet: "We can't go on pretending that this is the life we wanted!"

Leonardo DiCaprio: "I support you don't I? I work ten hours a day at a job I can't stand!"

Kate Winslet: "You don't have to."

Leonardo DiCaprio: "But I have the backbone not to run away from my responsibilities."

Kate Winslet: "Who made these rules anyway?"

Leonard DiCaprio: "We can be happy here. I can make you happy. We're going to be okay."

When my husband and I heard this conversation between two young married people we immediately wanted to see the film. This conversation is one that we have already had about two hundred times in our one and a half year marriage. And it isn't that we don't love each other, we do; or that we hate our jobs, we don't; or that we want (like Kate and Leo in the movie) to move to Paris in search of some far more gratifying, intriguing lifestyle, free from the monotony and demands of the complex but comfortable suburban life we've settled into.

Instead, it has to do with the fact that deep down inside no matter how many times we paint a room in our house to our liking, or buy that new sofa that we've been eyeballing at the mall, or that new pair of jeans at Lucky – no matter how many times we follow our desires to our next purchase there is still sometime missing inside.

There is always that still small voice inside of us that reminds us that we were made for more than this kind of existing.

For the most part we can ignore our own restlessness by filling our schedules with outings and parties and dinners and errands. But at the end of the day, when we are lying in bed, if only for a second, there is still a void inside that reminds us that this is not enough.

We were created to be part of something bigger than ourselves, something bigger than what we see.

I don't want to ruin the movie for anyone who hasn't seen it, but in the movie's plot somewhere between all of those conversations a couple's life unravels as witnessed by a series of disagreements, arguments, affairs, and in the end complete dissolution of two lives.

The line in the movie that has stayed with me more than any is when Kate Winslet's asks, "Who made these rules anyway?"

Because the reality is that many of us aren't happy living solely for our desires, and yet we have such a hard time addressing the question of when did our desires materialize into the barrier between the lives we live every day and the lives we dreamt about when we were young?

How did we ever come to believe that it was okay to work our lives away day after day, many of us doing things that we don't even enjoy, just to pay for all of the material things that we don't even need?

And even if we can get to a place where we can admit our own frustration we are hard pressed to find a way out, because somewhere we began to see this way of living as a responsibility rather than a choice.

"Revolutionary Road" is a flawlessly written, insightfully directed, and inspirationally acted movie.

But don't take my word for it.

Just look at the many nods it received in the recent Golden Globes Awards. From nominations for Best Motion Picture – Drama to Best Performance by an Actress and Best Performance by an Actor it clearly captured the attention of even the most knowledgeable movie critics.

But it's certainly not for you if you're looking for a laugh or a "feel good" movie.

After the film ended, as we were driving home, my husband looked over at me and said, "Isn't it strange to think that without God that is what our life would look like?"

He was right.

We would be just like them if we didn't live our lives every day with the comforting belief that we are made for a bigger purpose than to just fund our habits and pursue our own pleasures.

We would be disillusioned and frustrated, seeking any new stimulus to keep us from feeling that tinge of disappointment when we let ourselves be quiet.

Instead we live for God's purposes knowing that each day holds countless opportunities to make a difference in our world.

We can choose to live lives that glorify God by seeking to touch other's lives in ways that may have eternal consequences. We can know that every day as we do all of the things that are required of us as citizens of this world, God is weaving His great masterpiece out of our lives. In the end that and that alone is what makes our lives different.

Our story doesn't have to end in hopelessness; it doesn't have to end like "Revolutionary Road."

"From one man [God] made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.'"
-Acts 17:26-28