Facing What Giants?

It’s not often that a movie leaves my wife and I feeling worse by the end. In fact, not since we watched Will Smith get devoured by zombies has a film left us feeling down. It’s even more strange when the movie in question is supposedly “created to encourage believers and evangelize non-believers.” But discouragement is exactly what we felt as the final credits rolled for Facing the Giants.

Produced on a shoe-string budget by Sherwood Baptist Church of Albany, GA, with a cast entirely of amateurs, few movies had generated so much buzz in the Christian grapevine. Much of the attention was due to the nature of the film’s making, and an overt gospel message bolstered the strategy of marketing to churches instead of movie theaters. Choosing to center the storyline on a quintessentially American institution – a high-school football team – almost guaranteed rapport with American church audiences.

A brief synopsis: Grant Taylor, head football coach at Shiloh Christian High School, is facing the prospect of losing his job after six straight losing seasons. He’s nearly broke, his car and house are falling apart, and he and his wife Brooke are unable to have children. After a local man who faithfully prays for all of the students gives the coach an inspiring “word from the Lord,” he decides to re-orient his football team and all of his life around trusting God. And one after another, the giants in his life begin to fall.

As Christian film professional Barbara Nicolosi cynically noted in a scathing review,“In short order after he utters the Evangelical commitment formula aloud, he wins back the esteem of his fellow townspeople, he turns around his terrible team so that they win the championship, somebody gives him a brand new shiny red truck, AND his infertile wife becomes pregnant!” Christianity Today was equally harsh, giving it only 1 out of 4 stars. With these reviews in mind, I approached this film with a degree of skepticism. I didn’t expect Facing the Giants to be much of a credit to the artistic contributions of evangelical Christianity.

In fact, the acting (although bad) was bearable, the football scenes are well done, there are some moments of genuine (although not memorable) humor, and a few scenes are truly inspiring – particularly a practice exercise in which a blindfolded player achieves more than he ever thought possible. Taken in context, the surprise gift of the new truck was both moving and believable, and not a “word of faith” sermon illustration . (In fact, something similar happened to us in Kuwait when a pastor gave us a car – BUT we only had it for 6 weeks, and it had 600,000 miles on it). The relationship between the small, soccer-playing placekicker and his wheelchair-bound father is touching, and that the father comes across as authentic is no small feat; as one literary critic notes, a “good man” is one of the hardest characters to portray believably. (Compare to the father in Sherwood’s Fireproof, who often sounds as if he is channeling some overly erudite minister or motivational speaker).

But Nicolosi’s point stands. While many of the individual moments may be the sort of things that Christians come to expect from a God who is at work in the world, the overall arc of the story suggests that merely putting Jesus first will result in “victory” in all areas of life. The characters often talk about trusting God “no matter what,” but they never actually have to – everybody gets what they want. In fact, most things in Grant and Brooke’s life improve immediately.

We all know what it’s like to pray those prayers of total surrender: “Lord, I accept your will regardless of how this turns out.” We often pray them half-heartedly, hoping that God will be impressed enough with our offer to follow Him even if he doesn’t give us what we most want, that He will give it to us anyway. The true test of faith comes when God calls our bluff.

That happened just this past week to a friend here in the Middle East. He had just moved from his parents’ house in South Carolina, and was struggling to adapt to a foreign place. His relationship with his long-time girlfriend, whom he was hoping to marry, was on the rocks. He prayed, putting everything in God’s hands, placing their relationship on the altar.

The next day she broke up with him. I wonder when someone is going to write that into the script of a “Christian movie?”

But we’ve seen substandard movies before. When we stepped off a flight after watching an ensemble cast collectively mangle a witty book that had been reduced to a bad script, we didn’t feel like sitting on the tarmac and moaning. In fact, after the Shiloh Eagles won the state championship, we wanted to cheer just like in any sports movie.

It was the last 5 minutes that killed us.

From the start, it was a foolish choice to relegate infertility – one of the biggest emotional struggles any couple can face – to a subplot in a movie about high school football. Nevertheless, here was a chance to show – in even the smallest way – how two people might choose to place their faith in God’s goodness and sovereignty even when the deepest desires of their hearts were continually frustrated. As an excellent book on the subject notes, “In the Bible, infertility is usually an affliction of the righteous” – and there is no Biblical promise that all Christians will be able to have children. To long and pray for children with no answer, while watching high schoolers get pregnant and welfare cases pop out babies like Pez dispensers, is to die a slow emotional death while being continually slapped in the face with the seeming senselessness of reality. The [assumedly] well-meaning but flippant comments of other Christians only serve as kicks in the one place it most hurts.

To then insinuate in a Christian movie that all one must do is “turn it over to the Lord,” and suddenly you will get pregnant, is little more than an insult to those who are suffering the chronic pain of infertility.

We know: in the past year we lost 2 children in the womb, and do not know if we can ever give birth. After 3 months of our first pregnancy, our prayers were “answered” with a trip to the emergency room with my wife screaming in pain. We have experienced much healing since then, but it has been less like the closure of a wound and more like a cripple learning to walk – every step has been hard-fought and won with perseverance and tears. Had we watched this movie earlier in the year, it is quite possible that it would not have returned to the owner in one piece.

We have now begun the process of adopting children from Ethiopia. On the night we popped in this DVD, hoping for a night of respite from our struggles, we were watching our efforts dissolve in front of our eyes and were one email away from having to give up completely. It was a huge test of faith as we faced a genuine giant – and Facing the Giants merely left us angry with its trivialization of our struggle.

We’ve seen some breakthroughs since then, reminders that the Lord is with us in this journey. And we’re well past letting ourselves get bent out of shape over a poorly made 94-minute movie. At least we finally saw for ourselves just what all the fuss was about. But we won’t be recommending this film to anyone.