Life is full of those moments divinely articulated and sculpted by the unseen (and yet very visible) hand of God.  The Heart of Texas wasn’t a movie I went looking for, but in the God-perspective of life, it seems rather to be one that found me.  With several well-known supporters and reviewers, I wasn’t sure what I had to offer when the producer contacted me by email and asked me if I would be interested in a comp copy to review.  Sure, I thought, sounds interesting. 

It wasn’t at all what I expected.

As my husband, my brother and I sat down to watch the movie, I was anticipating something along the lines of Fireproof or Facing the Giants.  I wasn’t expecting the movie to be a documentary (which in retrospect seems to be a category too limiting), and I was even more unprepared for the gentle, yet truly confrontational message of the film.   Don’t get me wrong—I love the inspirational heart of movies like Fireproof and Facing the Giants as they’re projections of what we can be through Christ.

The Heart of Texas, however, isn’t a projection.  It’s is a declaration.

Serving alongside my husband in ministry for the past fifteen years, this film came to me in a place of deep disillusionment.  I had known painful and trying places in the past and had experienced the power of God’s forgiveness in so many areas of my life.  But the past three and a half years had held one ministry crisis after another, and I was beginning to feel as if the fallout of frustrations and hurts would never come to any resolution or healing.    I knew God’s call on our life had not changed, but I didn’t know how to move past some profound places of disappointment in others and in myself. 

In watching the living testimony of the Norwoods and Parkers, I was reminded that the purpose of the gospel is to bring restoration—in short, to take the broken and seemingly irreparable places of our lives and make them new.  Because the kingdom of God is about redemptive relationships—ours first with Christ and then with others—great power comes from our decision to love people despite how their actions have wittingly or unwittingly affected our lives.  While Grover Norwood may consider himself far from a theologian, his words about the inevitable hurts that come from others and the grace of God to forgive became a marked point of confrontation with the Word for my life.  Hurts will continue to come, but I do not have to be restrained by them–“When you stand praying, forgive . . . “ (Mark 11:25-26)–because what may seem impossible to me is to God a mountain waiting to be moved (Mark 11:23-24).

Forgiveness is nothing less than a willingness to lay down my hurts, expectations and rights for His greater purposes.  The Heart of Texas reminded me that freedom doesn’t come through my circumstances–it is a positioning of my heart before the sovereignty of God.  Forgiveness is the choice to live as Christ (Luke 23:34).  

“But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ.  More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death . . . “                                                                                                                                          –Philippians 3:7-10

While I know there is great power in a grass-roots voice, I don’t consider it an advertising strategy for the producer to have emailed me.  I consider it a perfectly timed reminder from the Lord.  It’s a movie you’ll understand, even if you’ve never been to Texas.

www.heartoftexasthemovie.com