Signs of God's Involvement

Rating: Null/10 (7 October 2002)

The movie `Signs' made me cling to the edge of my seat. But more importantly and more profoundly it made me realize what a precious and practical commodity faith is. That's what Mel Gibson's character, Graham Hess, learned, too.
Graham was a minister at a local church until he questioned his faith after his wife's tragic death in a hauntingly strange accident that brought him to her side for the last time as she clung to the final moments of life, pinned between a tree and a pick-up truck on a rural Pennsylvania road. Graham reasoned, wrongly, that there could not be a God if such a freakish coincidence could happen without Him noticing in time to intervene. From that time on, he believed that there was only coincidence, and that we are powerless against it, for there is no one to look after us. He determined that he would not `waste another moment of [his] life on prayer' from that time on.
His despair increased after crop circles, that later turned out to be navigational aids for an invading alien army, appeared in his cornfield. He, once again, wrongly believed that himself, his younger brother, and his children were helpless against their circumstances, as there was no one powerful enough, nor caring enough, to look after them.

He eventually came to realize, however, that nothing, nothing at all, is coincidence. He came to realize that everything (from his wife's prophetic last words to him, to his younger brother's propensity to swing hard at every ball that was pitched during his days as a minor leaguer, to his daughter's quirkiness about tap water, and even to his son's potentially deadly respiratory condition) is all tied together in a vast conspiracy of grace and salvation created by God. The movie title struck me as being more representative of the signs God uses to show us He is still in charge for our good, than it is about the signs the aliens made in grain fields around the world as navigational aids for the main body of the invasion that was to follow.
I read a review of the movie on Screen-it.com the other day, and either they missed this aspect of the movie, or they wanted us to see it for ourselves, but I saw it as plainly as I can see the Hand of God in everything-everything, that is, whenever I am willing to look for the truth through the chaos of what most would call circumstance. I give the movie `Signs' two thumbs up and a chorus of `Halleluiahs.'