12.17.2025
During my senior year in college, I discovered the library in Houston, Texas, had full-length 16 mm movies I could check out, and every few weeks I would bring back to campus a classic movie I’d heard of, but had never seen. Once, when the movie I wanted wasn’t available (Here Comes Mr. Jordan which I still haven’t seen), the library substituted something called It’s a Wonderful Life instead.
This was just a few years before that move became an annual mainstay on TV at Christmas, and I’d never heard of it. No one I talked to had heard of it.
So on a Friday night, I set up a projector to watch it in an empty classroom on campus and by the end of the movie, the room was full of sniffling college students.
It remains one of my all-time favorite movies and has become a must-view for me and millions of others each year at Christmas (I watched it again last Friday night). I’m assuming you’ve seen it, and if you haven’t you need to remedy that before the week is out. Go ahead. I’ll wait. But heed my warning: keep a box of tissues handy!
It’s a Wonderful Life tells the story of George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), a young man who has buried his personal dreams for the sake of his family and community. Thinking he’s a failure and facing jail over a missing $8,000 (which was taken and hidden by his arch-nemesis Ebenezer Scroo – I mean, Henry Potter), he considers taking his life on Christmas Eve. George’s guardian angel, Clarence Odbody, grants George’s wish to have never been born, showing him in the process how many lives he has touched without knowing it. Even with his unrealized dreams, Clarence tells him, “You see, George, you really had a wonderful life.”
George’s vision of life had he not been born is the stuff of nightmares, and the last 30 minutes of the movie feels at times more like a horror movie than a Christmas movie. But the darkness drives home the point that none of us ever realize how many lives we touch. Clarence tells George, “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”
A few years ago, several friends and I went to see it on the big screen at the Princess Theater in Decatur. One of our group, in his 70s, had never seen it before and didn’t like it because he didn’t realize it was so dark.
And he isn’t alone.
While scrolling on Amazon earlier in December, I saw something that made me laugh (and want to cry): an edited version of It's a Wonderful Life. I kid you not. It runs 107 minutes instead of the original’s 130 minutes - that’s 23 missing minutes.
The blurb for it reads, “This Abridged Edition is a shorter version of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas classic with a condensed ending but still contains all the sweetness and the Christmas wonder.”
This abridged abomination (I watched it so you don’t have to. You’re welcome) COMPLETELY SKIPS over George’s wish that he’d never been born. He asks Clarence the angel, “You don’t happen to have $8,000 bucks on you?” and then this version JUMPS to George happily running home, with no explanation – as if Clarence the angel paid off his missing money without teaching George the life-lesson.
If you don’t have the pain you don’t have a story! If there’s no darkness, how can you see the light?
Which is, of course, what Christmas is all about. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light,” the prophet sang in Isaiah 60. Each week in Advent we light candles that are signposts along the journey from Advent to Christmas. Each one of these candles symbolize a light where there once was darkness: Hope, Peace, Joy, Love.
Maybe someone should make a movie about what life would have been like had Christ never been born. It would be, as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, “always winter but never Christmas.” Had Jesus not come, there would be no hospitals, no orphanages, no hospice care. Women would be property and children would have no rights. Slavery would still be the norm. Education would be for the rich. And then there’s Christianity’s impact on art, culture, science, philosophy, ethics, business . . .
And, worst of all, we would be enslaved in our sins and cut off from the love of God. As we read in Ephesians 2, “You were dead through the trespasses and sins . . . following the ruler of the power of the air . . . disobedient . . . doing the will of flesh and senses . . . by nature children of wrath.” And then come two of the most powerful words in all of scripture: “But God.” Paul writes, “but God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”
Had Jesus not been born, there would have been no wonderful life! But he was born and that has made all the difference. What would the world be like if Christ had not come? Just go to the lands that have yet to be reached with the gospel, and you will see (sometimes even feel it). You don’t even have to go overseas. Look around and you’ll see it in the lives of families, neighbors, and strangers who do not yet know Christ.
Yes, it’s a wonderful life, but so few know of the abundant life available to us since Christ the Savior is born. Maybe that could be our mission this Advent: to be the Clarence Odbody in someone’s life and show them the way to life eternal.
Blessings,
Pastor Terry