Signs

Circles within crop circles

SIGNS
Dir. M. Night Shylaman
Blinding Edge Pictures, 2002

Merril Hess swings the baseball bat at the alien for the third time. He strikes the invader with so much force that the bat breaks and the alien collapses into the sideboard where it knocks a glass of water over itself. Besides making Crop Circles, these particular aliens are lethally allergic to water and the intruder dies swiftly.

The spell woven over Merril is broken along with the bat. As a minor league baseball player he always swung his bat as hard as he could but with little skill. Frequently he missed the ball completely and so gained the record for getting out the most times under the 'three strikes and you're out' rule. But sometimes he hit the ball well. Once he hit it a mighty 507 feet, a league record. He uses the same bat to dispatch the alien. Swinging away works; there are no such things as coincidences, there are signs.

And the glass of water that finally proved the undoing of the extra-terrestrial? It was left there days earlier by Merril's niece, Bo, who refused to drink it out of fear of the imminent attack from space. Coincidence? No, a sign.

Out on the lawn Merril's brother Graham is reviving his son Morgan who has just been snatched from the alien's grasp. Morgan has proved immune to the poison gas that was meant to subdue him and so recovers quickly. This immunity has been conferred by an asthma attack which closed Morgan's airways at just the right time. Coincidence? No, a sign.

Sign of what? A sign that some kind of God exists somewhere, that he is powerful and that he is able to intervene in our lives for our good. Graham Hess resigned from Christian ministry after his wife was killed in an apparently random road accident. His faith shaken to the core, he finds himself deserted by the comfort he was once able to give to others. But after this series of signs he regains his faith and dresses in his clerical shirt once again while his children play happily outside.

Signs tells us to expect an almighty Santa Claus, able and willing to protect us from every trouble. When he fails we find ourselves desolate and without hope, and we rage at the God we blame for our condition, the God 'who has denied me justice' (Job 27.2). But the Bible does not offer us perfect justice now; instead it offers us grace. God speaks a message that doesn't answer all our questions. As we listen and respond we keep our perplexity - and we gain a relationship. The God of Signs vindicates himself as generous but distant; the God and Father of our Lord Jesus becomes our father and friend and master and king and saviour. A god who exists only to give blessing and comfort will always be open to doubt in a world where bad things happen. But the real God, the God who entered this world and called us to trust him, promises us nothing except goodness and mercy to follow us all the days of our earthly lives and that afterwards we will live with him for ever in a painless world.

Circles within crop circles

Simon and Celia Wheeler

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