Is Yours a Wonderful Life?
A loaded question, right? Wonderful means astonishing and filled with wonder.
Highs or lows, good days and not so good, fluctuating moods in between, on any given day, how can you and I possibly evaluate our own lives? I wonder.
What would life be like for other people if you had never been born?
This question shapes the story in Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life.
Viewers get to consider that question for themselves as they watch George Bailey learn just how wonderful his life really is.
Each year since I first saw the movie at age 20, I rethink the question for myself.
Since the movie’s release in 1946, the film has transformed into the message it carries.
Angel in the middle is a gift given to me on the day I graduated from seminary.
It’s a Wonderful Life premiered in theaters in December, a year after WWII ended. The timing brought with it great expectations for an Oscar the following spring, but disappointing reactions by audiences and critics resulted in the financial ruin of RKO Pictures. [1]
“The film itself became an orphan and passed from one corporate foster parent to another . . . They all ignored it.”
And maybe you too have ignored this film, thinking it’s not worth your time.
The movie didn’t start out destined to become a Christmas classic, or wind up on the American Film Institute’s top 100 Films of the 20th century. Yet every year since the early 1970s, this Frank Capra film has held a place among must-see holiday movies. After 9-11, the film’s title triggered more than 34 million Internet searches.
How did that happen?
Answer: The movie went into public domain, and television, as Bob Welch puts it, became “the angel” that “breathed life back into a movie that, like George Bailey, had lost a sense of self-worth.”
“The lesson, of course, is that, like movies, sometimes people take time to fully blossom, to reach their potential, to ‘find themselves.’ . . . How we begin in life isn’t necessarily how we must end. Sometimes it just takes time for a particular flower to bloom.”
Television Reaches Lives
An old black-and-white movie, shown any time day or night because it had lost its commercial value, became one of the most valuable life lessons for me.
In my case, I had come home from work mid-day, sick, and utterly depressed about circumstances in my life. The future I imagined for myself didn’t reach beyond the end of my own nose. I needed help.
I turned on the TV, stopped on a channel airing a movie I had never seen. I didn’t even know the film’s title until it was over.
A story already in progress (as everyone’s story is), I hadn’t missed much. I sat on the edge of my bed, just a few feet from the screen, and got lost in George Bailey’s story. His dreams, his aspirations, his frustration, and ultimately his crisis, I could identify with George.
And like George Bailey at the lowest point in his life, I prayed.
By the end of the movie, I felt undone. An ugly cry. Sobbing and drained, alone in my own crisis, I learned a lesson about timing. Perfect timing.
Now I had hope.
Bedford Falls and Small Town America
George Bailey (the role played by Jimmy Stewart), grew up in the small town he could not wait to leave. He had plans. Big plans for his life.
He didn’t want to run his father’s business, Bailey Building and Loan. He didn’t want to get married and settle in Bedford Falls. He didn’t want to give up college so his younger brother could go to college instead.
What did George Bailey want? He wanted to see the world. He wanted to build things. He even wanted to serve in the military during World War II, yet a 4F classification disqualified him from service.
George Bailey never got what he wanted.
It took a crisis for George Bailey to realize he got immeasurably more, above all he could ask or think. [2]
The movie begins in Bedford Falls with people who know George, praying for George because they have heard he’s in trouble.
Twinkling stars in the night sky and the voices of two angels, Franklin and Joseph, discuss George’s problems.
The answer to those prayers comes in the form of Clarence, “Angel Second Class”––designated because he hasn’t got his wings.
Joseph says of Clarence, “He’s got the I.Q. of a rabbit” while Franklin says, “Yes, but he got the faith of a child––simple.”
Clarence hopes that if he succeeds in helping George, he will earn his wings.
Before being sent to help George, Clarence is shown scenes of decisive and pivotal moments in George’s life that formed his character, leading up to the trouble he’s facing on Christmas Eve, 1945.
And George has a nemesis too, an enemy that wants George to fail.
When Clarence enters the picture, George is looking down into the icy water below the bridge where he stands, contemplating taking his life.
[3]
Bob Welch, explains in his Author’s Note, how the bank president in his city required employees to watch scenes from the movie because “The message of that film is the message we want our employees to come to work with every day: the idea that our actions make a difference in the community around us.”
Over time, Welch watched the movie many times and recorded lessons he gleaned, which resulted in his book, “52 LITTLE LESSONS from It’s a Wonderful Life.” Welch refers to the movie as “an hour-and-a-half long ‘teachable moment.’”
Further into the story of George Bailey’s life, Welch writes, “We’ve all been on that bridge of despair at some point in our lives. The answer isn’t looking down at the water below, but at the heavens above.”
What Clarence did for George was to let him see a Bedford Falls without George––life as if he had never been born. George needed to see how his absence changed the course of other people’s lives. Clarence hoped that George would see instead that a bridge over troubled waters doesn’t have to lead to despair.
Clarence shows George that if he hadn’t been born, “You weren’t there . . .” to make a difference, to save anyone or anything.
“Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around, he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”
An Awful Hole
The movie has taken on a life of its own. While there exists all sorts of reasons people give for disliking the movie or refusal to consider some of its lessons, the truth that your life and mine have inestimable value remains.
A reviewer in the New York Times wrote when the movie came out, “For all it characteristic humors, Mr. Capra’s Wonderful Life . . . is a figment of simple Pollyanna platitudes.” [1]
Yet that reviewer failed to appreciate the scope of struggles common to man and portrayed throughout one man’s life, showing the triumph of that man’s faith and investment in people.
Bob Welch also points to John Newton, former slave trader who “once was lost but [then] found.” With deepest gratitude, Newton wrote the hymn “Amazing Grace.” The apostle Paul too, rescued from legalism and pride, lived out a life of amazing grace and wrote half the New Testament.
You and I cannot imagine the world apart from the incalculable ways these two lives alone have benefitted others.
Circles Inside Circles
I’ve been repeating for years now, “circles inside circles” to suggest how our lives overlap and intersect, how our stories can encourage and benefit others far beyond the brief moments we exchange.
Take time to watch It’s a Wonderful Life this Christmas season, again or for the first time. Read Bob Welch’s little book. You will be glad you did.
Timing.
If not today, then perhaps sometime––like a time-capsule (or an angel sent in answer to prayer)––the simple lesson that you make a difference to other people’s lives will reach that place in your heart when you need hope.
[1] “52 LITTLE LESSONS from It’s a Wonderful Life” by Bob Welch
[2] “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, . . .” Ephesians 3:20-21.
[3] I’d never heard of this book until recently (© 2021). Curious, I ordered it in October to read first and then give to someone in my family who doesn’t like this movie. Wonderful discovery!