Thoughts on Love and Friendship
Last night I watched the old version of Moulin Rouge, you know the one with José Ferrer. It is a beautiful film and I bet it would look great on an HDTV. I haven’t seen that movie in many years and I don’t think I’ve ever watched the entire movie. Much of the dialogue is hard to understand because of the heavy French accent, but what I got from the movie was rather intriguing. The main character, Toulouse-Lautrec, is an artist who suffers from extremely short stature due to broken legs that never healed correctly from childhood. He succumbs to the life of a lonely artist who knows that women do not find him attractive and he gives up on ever finding true love.
During the movie he is involved with two women. The first woman, Marie, is a street woman whom he rescues from being arrested and allows her to stay in his apartment for the night. She is harsh and cruel, but she appreciates his kindness and soon they are a couple, but not in the true sense. He lavishes her with clothes and gives her a lifestyle she has never known, but she does not love him. They often quarrel and eventually she runs away. He searches for her and tries to help her, but she rejects him because she is a wounded soul who had only known the harsh reality of life on the street and could not see past that to see that he loved her.
Years later he meets another woman. She appreciates him as an artist and enjoys his company, but because he has been rejected so much of his life by women, as well as by his own father, he does not recognize that she loves him. When she tries to give him the opportunity to express how he feels, his pain from the past gets in the way and he cannot see her love. By the time he realizes that she was in love with him all along, it is too late.
What a tragic story. So much of it reminds me of a book I read recently called The Shack. If I talk about the book I will share too much of it, so I won’t except to say that it’s all about tragedy, rejection and love — God’s love and how we reject him because of our pain.
All of us go through times in our life when we have been rejected in some way or another. We carry this hurt and it affects every aspect of our life, but we don’t see it. Sometimes people reach out to us because they want to be our friend or they love us and yet we cannot accept their friendship or their love because of our own pain. Wounds that are so deep they never heal. And yet, when we open ourselves up to receive friendship and love, it breaks through. But it takes risks. We risk being rejected, but if we don’t we will never be loved.
It’s like that with us and God. He loves us and accepts us just as we are. He loves us regardless of how we feel about him. Our life gets messed up and we blame God and so we never reach out to him. But the truth is, he is there through all of it if only we will reach out to him.