It Really Is a Wonderful Life

A friend commented that there are five people in the country who don’t like Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life and he married one of them—though she’s coming around. And Dottie and I have made watching the film a yearly holiday tradition.

When it was released two weeks before Christmas in 1946, however, it was a flop. Reviews in the United States rated it as mediocre at best. In England, the reviews were terrible. It was so bad that, as Patrick Coffin wrote recently, “Frank Capra might well wish that his creation had never been born.”

But watching the story of George Bailey and seeing through his eyes what life would have been like if he had never been born gently nudges us to ask the question, “What would the world be like if I had never been born?”

And after a weak start, that question took hold. Coffin writes, “[T]he personal, often emotional, fan letters started rolling in. Less than a year after the film’s anti-climactic debut, the warden of San Quentin prison mailed him a bag stuffed with more than 1,500 letters scrawled by inmates; the letters told of the film’s impact on them. For decades to come, the letters kept arriving, and Capra personally answered every one of them.”

If 1,500 inmates at San Quentin could find solace in the film, surely we can. What if you had never been born? The lives you have touched would have never been touched. More than once I’ve had a friend tell me that something I said years earlier changed his life. In none of those cases could I remember ever saying the life-changing words. But if I wasn’t there to say them….

We need to keep that in mind especially as we age and are tempted to think we’re nothing but “old and in the way.” John Henry Newman (1801-1890) addressed the George Bailey in all of us when he wrote:

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work. I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments. Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.

So rejoice in Jesus’ birth and rejoice in your own birth. In spite of the evils, problems, and struggles, it’s a wonderful life.