Finding the Real South Bend Shovel Slayer
Finding the Real South Bend Shovel Slayer
What We Believe About Someone May Not Always Be True
I remember watching the Christmas classic Home Alone for the first time when I was about seventeen years old. If you haven’t seen this movie, it is about an extended family rushing to leave for a Christmas vacation, but through the rush of the early morning chaos, they accidentally leave eight-year-old Kevin at home.
Running through the early part of the movie was a rumor in which Kevin believed that a scary-looking, bearded, old man named Marley had murdered his family and half the neighborhood with a snow shovel and was storing them in garbage cans full of salt. Marley was known by those who heard the rumors as the “South Bend Shovel Slayer.”
And as you can imagine, while Kevin was trying to overcome his fear of being left at home alone, he had a couple of encounters with old man Marley that further terrified him, not least of which was their encounter at a church service on Christmas Eve.
Although petrified upon facing the old man, Kevin discovered from Marley that all of the rumors and mischaracterizations about him were untrue. Not only was he at the church that night to watch his granddaughter sing, but he was also secretly hoping to reconcile a broken relationship with his son. In one of the most revealing lines of the movie, Marley tells Kevin, “You don’t have to be afraid. There’s a lot of things going around about me, but none of it’s true.”
I’m not much for movie examples like this, but it could not be any more perfect in the way that it captures how many of us have heard about God as angry, violent, and temperamental. But as we begin to cut through the rumors and mischaracterizations, we find something very different. God, much like old man Marley, is telling us to not be afraid and to move beyond what we have heard to discover what is true.
Question
If God is kind, and God's essence is love, how can you move beyond what people have told you about God in the past to discover God's true heart toward you?
Peace,
Brandon
