What We Can Learn From Palm Trees

| Faith and Family Flicks News and Notes

The Walk to Kalama Beach

One of my favorite beaches in the world is on the windward side of Oʻahu. You come down off the Pali Highway, drive through Kailua, take a left at the roundabout, and head toward Kalama Beach. It’s kind of tucked away. It’s not Kailua Beach Park, where everybody goes. It’s the same stretch of sand, just a little further down the road.

There are only about a dozen parking spots, but nine times out of ten I find one. If I have to wait, it’s not for long. You gather up your stuff and start walking in. At first the trees and foliage close in around you. There’s a spot to change and rinse off, and the branches block out most of the sky and the ocean.

But as you keep walking, it starts to open up. It’s like the aperture on a camera that’s been closed, and all of a sudden it opens in slow motion. There’s that vibrant blue sky. There’s that green and blue water. And right there in the foreground are these amazing palm trees, calling you to make that last 50 yards. Calling you to the white sand that feels like butter between your toes, the warm water, and the shade of those beautiful palms.

Standing under those palms, it’s easy to think of them as just part of the postcard. But those trees aren’t just pretty. They’re survivors. They bend in hurricane winds and stand back up. They drink from water you can’t see. They keep bearing fruit for decades. And long before anyone ever put a palm tree on a vacation brochure, God chose this very tree as a picture of the people who love Him.

Psalm 92:12 puts it plainly: “The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree, he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.” And the very first psalm in the book opens with a similar picture. The person who delights in God’s Word “shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that brings forth its fruit in its season, whose leaf also shall not wither” (Psalm 1:3).

I’ve read those verses for years. But I recently got curious and started reading about how palm trees actually work. What I found made those verses come alive in a whole new way. God didn’t pick this tree at random. Nearly everything about the way a palm is built tells us something about how He grows a faithful life.

The Palm the Psalmist Knew

The palm in Psalm 92 almost certainly wasn’t the coconut palm of a Hawaiian postcard. It was the date palm, Phoenix dactylifera, a tree people in the Middle East have cultivated for at least 5,000 years. In ancient Israel, date palms were everywhere. Jericho was nicknamed “the city of palm trees” (Deuteronomy 34:3). Deborah held court under a palm in the hill country of Ephraim (Judges 4:5). The name Tamar, carried by several women in Scripture, means “palm.”

This tree was more than scenery. It was a pantry, a lumberyard, and a hardware store all in one. Records from the Middle East list some 800 uses for the date palm, from building material and roof thatch to rope fiber. Its fronds made baskets, mats, and fans. Its fruit fed families and caravans crossing the desert.

So when an Israelite heard “the righteous shall flourish like the palm tree,” the picture wasn’t decorative. It was a picture of a life that’s useful, nourishing, and a blessing to everyone around it. And the palm showed up again at the most important moment in history: the crowds waved palm branches when Jesus rode into Jerusalem (John 12:13).

Roots That Find the Water

Here’s something that surprised me. The date palm grows in some of the driest places on earth, yet it’s a thirsty tree. So how does it thrive in the desert? It sends its roots down to water you can’t see from the surface.

Researchers studying a date palm farm in a Moroccan oasis found that during the hottest, driest months, with no irrigation at all, half of the palm’s water came straight from the groundwater below. The roots had reached as deep as 30 feet to tap the aquifer. On the surface the ground looks parched. Underneath, the palm is drinking.

That’s exactly the picture of Psalm 1. The blessed person is “planted by the rivers of water.” Notice the word planted. This tree didn’t just happen to sprout near a stream. Someone put it there on purpose. And notice where the psalm says that person’s strength comes from: “his delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2).

Even the Israelites in the wilderness learned this. After the bitter water at Marah, God led them to Elim, “where there were twelve wells of water and seventy palm trees” (Exodus 15:27). Where you find palms, you find water.

Desert travelers have known that for thousands of years. Spot a cluster of palms on the horizon and you’ve likely found an oasis. If the water isn’t on the surface, it’s down below in a well or an aquifer. There’s an old Arab saying that the date palm keeps its feet in water and its head in fire.

But here’s the part that really got me. A palm’s roots follow the water. Water it from the surface every day, like the palms around a resort with sprinklers, and its roots tend to stay shallow. Make it reach, and it sends them down deep. Those deep roots don’t make the tree taller. What they give it is staying power. When the surface dries up or the storm rolls in, the deep-rooted palm holds on.

I think God works in us the same way. The dry seasons we’d never choose are often the very things that push our roots deeper into Him.

The people around you may see dry ground in your life. A hard season. A diagnosis. A layoff. But if your roots go down deep into God’s Word and His presence, you’ve got a source that the drought can’t touch.

Bending Without Breaking

If you’ve ever watched hurricane footage, you’ve seen it. Oaks and pines snap and topple, while the palms bend nearly sideways and then stand back up when the wind passes. There’s a reason for that.

A palm isn’t built like an oak. It has no growth rings at all. Instead, its trunk is packed with tough fibers scattered all the way through, more like the strands of a steel cable than the rings of a log. A University of Florida researcher explains that these fibers snake through the trunk rather than running straight up and down, which gives the palm far more flexibility and resistance to breaking than a typical tree. Some palm trunks can bend about 45 degrees without snapping.

The roots help too. Instead of one big taproot, palms grow hundreds of fibrous roots that grip the soil like a net. When the storm pushes, the tree flexes. It doesn’t fight the wind; it rides it out.

That’s a picture of resilient faith. The righteous aren’t promised a storm-free life. Jesus said plainly, “In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Flourishing like a palm doesn’t mean you never bend. It means you don’t break. You may get bent low by grief, pressure, or disappointment, but when the wind dies down, by God’s grace, you’re still standing.

Growing From the Heart

Here’s another thing most of us never notice. A single-trunk palm has only one growing point, a bud tucked up at the very top of the tree where the new fronds come from. Gardeners sometimes call it the “heart.” An oak can lose a dozen limbs and keep growing from its other branches. A palm can’t. If that heart is destroyed, the tree eventually dies, no matter how healthy the trunk looks.

That’s why palm experts say it can take a while after a storm to know if a palm is truly recovering. You have to watch for new growth coming out of the center.

Scripture has a lot to say about guarding that center. “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23). God told Samuel that while people look on the outward appearance, “the LORD looks at the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).

We can spend a lot of energy on the trunk, how things look from the outside. But real growth only comes from the heart. As parents and ministry leaders, that’s worth remembering. The goal isn’t kids who look good on the outside. It’s kids whose hearts are alive to God, because that’s where every new frond comes from.

Still Bearing Fruit in Old Age

Psalm 92 doesn’t stop at verse 12. It keeps going: “Those who are planted in the house of the LORD shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bear fruit in old age; they shall be fresh and flourishing” (Psalm 92:13–14).

The date palm is a perfect fit for that promise. It’s a slow starter, usually taking five to eight years before it bears any fruit. But once it gets going, a mature female palm can produce somewhere around 100 to 300 pounds of dates a year. It doesn’t hit its peak until roughly 30 to 35 years old, and many keep producing for 60 to 80 years. With good care, a date palm can live past 100.

Think about that. The palm’s best years aren’t its early ones. Its most fruitful season comes after decades of steady, quiet growth.

And then there’s Methuselah. In the 1960s, archaeologists digging at Masada, Herod’s fortress above the Dead Sea, found a cache of ancient date seeds. Decades later, in 2005, Dr. Elaine Solowey planted one. It sprouted. Carbon dating confirmed the seed was about 2,000 years old, the oldest seed ever known to germinate. They named the tree Methuselah, after the oldest man in the Bible. The Judean date palm had been extinct for centuries, and here it was, alive again from a seed that existed in the days when the teachings of Jesus were first spreading.

You’re never too old, and it’s never too late, for God to bring life and fruit. The grandparent praying faithfully for grandkids, the retired Sunday school teacher who still shows up, the senior saint mentoring a young couple: that’s Psalm 92 in action.

Planted on Purpose

So what does it mean to flourish like a palm tree? Put it all together and you get a pretty clear picture. Deep roots that find living water when everything on the surface looks dry. A flexible strength that bends in the storm but doesn’t break. A guarded heart where all new growth begins. And a long, faithful life that keeps bearing fruit well into old age.

But here’s the key word in both psalms: planted. Psalm 1 says “planted by the rivers of water.” Psalm 92 says “planted in the house of the LORD.” Palms in the desert don’t drift around looking for water. They stay put and send their roots down.

For our families, that might look like a few simple things:

  • Stay planted in the Word. Read a psalm together at dinner or before bed. Psalms 1 and 92 are a great place to start.
  • Stay planted in the house of the Lord. Show up to church, even in the dry seasons. That’s where the roots grow deep.
  • Honor the older palms. Invite grandparents and senior saints to share how God has been faithful. Their fruit is meant to feed the next generation.
  • Prepare before the storm. Help your kids memorize a few verses now, so they have roots to hold onto when the winds come.

The next time you see a palm tree, whether it’s on a vacation postcard or in a movie scene, let it preach a little sermon to you. God is in the business of growing people who flourish, not because life is easy, but because they’re planted by the water.

Dave Almgren – FaithandFamilyflicks.com & Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie

Sources

Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Live Like Fred – Reflections about the Neighborhood

| Faith and Family Flicks News and Notes

A few years ago, I had the privilege of working on the marketing for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the Tom Hanks film about Fred Rogers. I loved working on that film.

But I’ll be honest. When I first sat down to watch it, I thought I knew what I was getting: a biopic about Fred Rogers’ life and the making of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And that’s not really what it was.

It was a movie about a man who chose to make an impact through his actions, and about the impact he had on one journalist, Tom Junod (Lloyd Vogel in the film), who was reluctantly assigned to write about him. The story became less about Mister Rogers and more about what happens to a hurting, cynical man when someone simply chooses to be kind to him. I didn’t see that coming. I heard the same thing from so many others who watched it: “That was not what I expected.” But by the end, it was one of the most impactful stories I’ve seen on screen.

Working on that film also opened a door I never expected to walk through. I was invited to the red carpet premiere in Pittsburgh, Fred Rogers’ hometown, to celebrate the film’s opening. That trip became less about a movie and more about a man, and about the people whose lives he shaped.

Walking Into the Neighborhood

While I was in Pittsburgh, we got to visit WQED, the PBS station where Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was filmed. If you grew up with Mister Rogers, you understand what that means. This was the place. This is where it all happened.

I walked into the studio and saw the painted floor, that cobblestone-colored path that led into the Neighborhood. I just stood there for a moment. Something so simple, a painted floor, and yet it carried decades of memories. Millions of children were invited into that space through a television screen, and here I was, standing in it.

We heard stories from people who worked with Fred. And over and over, the message was the same. People have always wondered, “Was he really like that?” The answer from the people who knew him best was a resounding yes. The man on TV was the man they knew. They were one and the same.

That matters. In a world where so many people have a public image and a private reality, Fred Rogers was consistent. What you saw was who he was.

Meeting Mr. McFeely

At the premiere, I sat right behind Mr. McFeely, David Newell, the Speedy Delivery man himself. Later I got to meet him in the lobby.

I have to be honest. Even now, thinking back on it, I get emotional. He was so kind. Gentle. A genuinely nice man. And listening to him tell stories about his life alongside Fred Rogers was something I’ll never forget. These weren’t stories about fame or ratings. They were stories about a friend, a man who cared deeply about children and about people.

It struck me that kindness is contagious. The people who spent years around Fred carried that same gentleness with them.

A Portrait Made of a Life

On that trip I also met Wayne Brezinka, a Nashville artist who created a remarkable piece called Mister Rogers: Just The Way You Are. It’s not just a painting. It’s a large mixed-media collage built from pieces of Fred’s life, including items from the Fred Rogers archive and from his wife, Joanne Rogers.

Standing in front of it, you realize the portrait is literally made of his life. Every piece tells part of the story. And isn’t that true of all of us? Our lives become a mosaic of the choices we make, the people we love, and the kindness we show along the way.

A Young Man Named Colton

One of the most inspiring people I met on that trip was a young man named Colton DeBiase. Colton started something called Live Like Fred with his mom. It wasn’t a big official organization. It was a grassroots idea: go around Pittsburgh, find “inspiring neighbors” who were carrying on Fred Rogers’ spirit of kindness, and tell their stories.

Colton was a college student when he started, interviewing ordinary people doing extraordinary acts of kindness. Teachers. Students. Neighbors. People simply choosing to love the people around them. He even had a Live Like Fred Kindness Bear that visited schools to share lessons on kindness. Today Colton is a play-by-play sportscaster in Pittsburgh, but the simple idea he started with his mom has stuck with me ever since.

Live like Fred. Three words. A whole way of life.

The Moment in the Theater

Then there was that one scene.

Fred Rogers, played by Tom Hanks, is sitting in a restaurant with the journalist. Fred asks him to take a minute of silence, to think about the people who loved him into being.

And then Tom Hanks turns and looks right at the camera. He breaks the fourth wall. He’s looking at you, sitting in the theater.

The whole room went quiet. It was one of the most profound moments I’ve ever experienced in a movie theater. Even years after his death, you could feel Fred Rogers’ impact coming right through the screen. In that minute, everyone in the theater was thinking about someone who had loved them, shaped them, believed in them.

That’s the power of a life well lived. It keeps speaking long after the person is gone.

Simple, But Profound

When you look back at Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, it was so simple. A man changing his shoes. Putting on a sweater. Feeding his fish. Talking slowly and looking right into the camera to tell a child, “You are special just the way you are.”

Simple. But profound.

Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister, but he never had a pulpit in the traditional sense. His pulpit was a television studio, and his congregation was every child who tuned in. He truly wanted to live like Christ, to be kind, and to make an impact on the world. And he did, not through anything flashy, but through faithfulness, consistency, and love.

So, What Does It Mean to Live Like Fred?

Here’s my challenge to you. What would it look like for you to live like Fred this week?

  • It might mean slowing down and really listening to someone, giving them your full attention the way Fred did.
  • It might mean telling a child, or a grown-up for that matter, that they matter just the way they are.
  • It might mean being the same person in private that you are in public.
  • It might mean taking a minute of silence to thank God for the people who loved you into being, and then picking up the phone and telling one of them.
  • And it might mean finding the inspiring neighbors in your own community and celebrating them, just like Colton and his mom did.

Jesus said the greatest commandments are to love God and love your neighbor. Fred Rogers spent his life showing us what that second part looks like, one neighbor at a time.

Won’t you be my neighbor?

Live like Fred.

Dave Almgren is the founder of FaithAndFamilyFlicks.com, Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie Podcast helping families and churches make media choices worth their time.

The Rest of the Story Behind It’s a Wonderful Life

| Faith and Family Flicks News and Notes

You’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life. Chances are you’ve seen it more times than you can count. You know the bridge in the snow, Clarence the angel, Zuzu’s petals, and the whole town of Bedford Falls crowding into the Bailey living room at the end. You know George Bailey.

But how well do you know the man who played him?

Paul Harvey used to say, “And now you know the rest of the story.” That’s exactly what Jimmy gives us. It opens in theaters nationwide November 6, and it tells the story behind the story. Not George Bailey’s. James Stewart’s.

I’ve spent close to twenty years watching faith and family films for a living, and I’ll be honest up front. Jimmy isn’t a faith-based movie in the way we usually use that label. It’s a true story about one of America’s most beloved actors, from winning the Academy Award to flying combat missions over Europe, coming home a different man, and then being asked to play George Bailey. And yet the gospel is all through the film. Not dropped in. Woven into his life.

Here are my thought about a movie like this. It builds outward, from the film, to the man, to the mirror.

The Film

First there’s the film, the story playing out on the big screen. On that level alone, Jimmy delivers. KJ Apa takes on the role, and director Aaron Burns pulls back the curtain on a man most of us only know as a voice and a grin, the aw-shucks every man from the movies our grandparents loved.

We meet Jimmy at the top of the world, Oscar in hand. Then we watch him set it all down to serve. He didn’t want special treatment. He didn’t want to be a celebrity in uniform, propped up for the newsreels while other men did the fighting. He wanted to do the job, and he did it.

He came home changed, carrying things he didn’t know how to put down. That’s not the Jimmy Stewart of the posters. That’s a man. And that’s who walked onto the set of It’s a Wonderful Life.

The Man

The second layer is the man, and this is where the rest of the story really starts.

When Jimmy headed off to war, his father gave him a book of Psalms, hoping God’s word would comfort his son on the battlefield and in life. Think about that. A father who can’t go with his boy, can’t protect him, can’t shorten the war by a single day, so he points him toward where real comfort is found. He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge (Psalm 91:4). But a father can only introduce his son to it. Jimmy still had to open that book and decide for himself.

He did. In real conflict, he leaned on Scripture, on the Lord, and on God’s promises to steady himself. God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble (Psalm 46:1). His faith wasn’t for show. It held him when it counted.

And the comfort he found, he didn’t keep to himself. He shared it with others the same way it had been shared with him. God comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God (2 Corinthians 1:4).

Then came the despair. In that low place he reached out to God in prayer, and he came to realize God’s help had been there all along. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18). If you’ve ever been moved by George Bailey praying in Martini’s bar, now you’ll understand why that scene feels so real.

There’s a question that runs underneath his whole life, too. He keeps asking himself and others: Am I a good man? That’s the question underneath an honest life. Search me, God, and know my heart (Psalm 139:23). Here was a man the whole country admired, still asking whether he measured up.

He wanted to serve his country. He didn’t want to be treated special or duck his duty. He had the integrity to do the right thing and be an example. He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8).

To me, these are all biblical principles, observed and applied.

All of it, the war and Hollywood, the pain and the struggle, and his leaning on God, gave Jimmy a healthy, balanced perspective. That didn’t just inform his performance as George Bailey. It played out in his real life. It kept him from believing his own press. He stayed grounded and lived with humility and integrity. That truth in the life is why there’s truth in the performance, and it’s a big reason It’s a Wonderful Life has endured and still captivates audiences eighty years later.

The Mirror

And then there’s the third layer, the one that matters most. The mirror. At some point Jimmy’s story stops being only his. You start seeing your own life in it.

The image I keep coming back to is how divers raise a shipwreck. They send a device down to the bottom, fill it with air, and what’s been sitting on the ocean floor for years rises to the surface. A movie like Jimmy does the same thing. It lifts up what we’ve let settle out of sight and brings it up where we have to look at it.

And it doesn’t just happen to me. It happens to everyone in the theater, each person quietly taking their own inventory in the dark.

What do I do when times get tough? Am I sharing my faith? Have I been in that place of desperation? Am I leaning into God’s word? Am I living out his purposes? Am I a good man? And when I stand before the Lord, will he say, well done, good and faithful servant?

Nobody preached those questions at me. A story brought them up. That’s what a good film does.

Then Go See George Bailey Again

Here’s what I’d encourage you to do this season.

Start with Jimmy. It opens nationwide November 6th, the week of Veterans Day, which fits a story about a man who served. Take someone with you. The neighbor who’d never come to a church event. The father-in-law who loves old movies and rolls his eyes at anything preachy. The veteran in your church who might see his own homecoming in Jimmy’s. You don’t have to be a believer to be moved by this story, and you don’t have to be a classic film buff either. If you love Jimmy Stewart, if you love It’s a Wonderful Life, if you just love a good, inspiring, feel-good movie, this one’s for you.

Then mark your calendar. Fathom is bringing It’s a Wonderful Life back to theaters nationwide December 18th through 25th for its 80th anniversary, remastered in 4K. Go see it on the big screen, the way it was meant to be seen.

I promise you, you’ll watch it differently. When George stands on that bridge, when he prays in that bar, when he asks whether his life has amounted to anything, you’ll know what the man playing him had carried home. You’ll be watching George Bailey, but you’ll be seeing Jimmy Stewart.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight (Proverbs 3:5-6).

And now you know the rest of the story.

Dave Almgren – FaithandFamilyFlicks.com and Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie Podcast

Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

What One Explorer Makes of the Latest Noah’s Ark Headlines

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Every few years the headlines come back around. “Noah’s Ark found.” “100% confirmed.” This time the buzz is around the Durupınar site in eastern Turkey, and the claims are as confident as ever.

So I sat down with Kevin DeVries, a man who spent five summers on Mount Ararat looking for the Ark, and produced the documentary Finding Noah, narrated by Gary Sinise. I wanted to know what he makes of all this.

“We know where Noah’s Ark is not”

That’s how Kevin sums up five summers of searching. It sounds like defeat until he frames it the way Edison did — every failed attempt is one more thing crossed off the list. They didn’t find the Ark. But they narrowed the map.

Two very different sites

Durupınar is low, drivable, and sits on dirt. There’s already a visitor center there called Noah’s Ark Park. Kevin’s geologists looked at it and saw a basalt mudflow formation — and pointed out you can spot similar shapes all over Google Earth. He also notes the Hebrew word for the ark describes a box or a barge, not a pointed-prow ship like the one the Durupınar outline suggests.

Kevin’s own dig site was on the eastern plateau of Ararat, at 16,800 feet, on top of roughly a hundred feet of glacial ice. Base camp was near Doğubayazıt, around 5,000 feet.

“We felt like it was a slam dunk too”

Here’s the part that should give everyone pause. Kevin’s team had ground-penetrating radar anomalies. They had drill bits that stuck at depth. They ran electrical resistivity tests and pulled core samples. They cut ice trenches eight by eight by forty feet. He calls it a trifecta.

And they never went to the media claiming confirmation — because lab work takes months, sometimes years. The current team’s results reportedly won’t be in until the end of 2027.

A mountain that wants to kill you

Ararat is freestanding, so it makes its own weather. Electrical storms roll through nearly every week; John Morris’s team was once electrocuted and thrown. PKK militants camped on the slopes. A Turkish tank battalion sat at the base. Something like thirty to thirty-five thousand people have died in the regional conflict since the mid-eighties.

Kevin guided about fifty people up that mountain over five summers, and brought every one of them back alive.

Why Kevin believes the flood happened

Simply put: because Christ treated it as history. Beyond that, he points to Josephus, to marine fossils found at altitude, and to Robert Ballard’s submersible work in the Black Sea and the ancient shorelines he documented there.

The ark he was actually meant to find

Ararat’s Turkish name is Ağrı Dağı — mountain of pain. At 16,800 feet, Kevin wrote in his journal: “I feel more animal than human.”

Somewhere in there it clicked. He wasn’t meant to find the Ark. He was meant to find the arc — of his own story. That turn led to a men’s ministry, a global storytelling movement, and his latest project, The Third Man.

Hope is not a strategy

Kevin borrows the line from Shawshank Redemption. Hold hope loosely. Let the science speak on its own timeline. Put your ultimate hope in Christ, not in a discovery.

Or as he put it: “Allow God to let you see what you need to see, not what you want to see.”

Maybe the Ark is out there, and maybe someone will find it. But Kevin’s five summers on that mountain suggest the better posture is patience — letting the evidence come in on its own schedule, and remembering that our faith was never resting on a boat.

Dave Almgren- Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie Podcast

Watch the Finding Noah trailer at FaithAndFamilyFlicks.com, and catch the full conversation on Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie.

When Our Lens Gets Smudged

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There are two hospital rooms in this story, separated by an ocean and about twenty years.

In one of them, a couple in Australia is being told that their newborn son has no arms and no legs, and that nobody can tell them what his life will hold. In the other, my wife and I are being handed a diagnosis for our daughter, along with the careful language about all the things she might never do.

In both rooms, the same unspoken question is sitting in the corner. What kind of life is this going to be?

I have spent years learning that we were asking the wrong question.

Broken, by the world’s math

Our daughter Grace lives with Down syndrome.

We live in a culture that says, with startling consistency, that a diagnosis like hers is a problem to be solved before the child arrives. Abort. Abort. Abort. That is the cultural default, and it is delivered as compassion.

In that other hospital room, the one in Australia, the doctors could offer no explanation and no prognosis. Nobody could say whether he would have a life worth living, would he ever marry, or become a father, or what his life might hold. By the same cultural math, he was a tragedy.

His name is Nick Vujicic, and his story is in theaters now across the country.

And there is a question that has been following me around ever since I first heard it:

What if the thing you spent your life trying to fix is the very thing God wants to use?

Sit with that for a second. Not the thing you overcame. Not the thing you worked around. The thing you would have handed back if the returns desk had been open. The thing you have quietly asked God to remove, maybe for decades.

What if that is the point?

No arms, no legs, being the hands and feet of Jesus

Somebody described Nick to me as a guy born with no arms and no legs who has spent his life trying to be the hands and feet of Jesus. That statement hit me right between the eyes, and then I got quiet, and contemplated these words and their meaning in my life.

The church has used that phrase for generations. Be the hands and feet of Jesus. Go do the work. And here is a man with neither, who has carried more hope into more countries than most of us with fully working limbs will manage in a lifetime.

He did not get there by pretending it was easy. Nick has been open about the years between eight and thirteen when depression crushed him. He convinced himself there was no hope, and that if God existed at all, He was unfair. He prayed for a miracle, and the miracle did not come.

What came instead was a shift in perspective. At thirteen, Nick hurt the one small foot he does have, and he realized he needed to be thankful for what he had instead of angry about what he didn’t. Then he read the story of the blind man in John 9 and landed on a simple conclusion: if God had a plan for a blind man, God had a plan for him.

The limbs never grew. The lens changed.

Two wings of the same airplane

Two truths fly together here, like the two wings of the same airplane.

The thing you would fix is the thing God uses. And the person the world writes off becomes the one carrying hope to everybody else.

Nick is the proof at full volume. But I did not have to fly to Australia to watch it happen, because the same thing has been going on quietly in my own living room for twenty-six years.

Right between those two wings is a young woman with an extra chromosome and a violin.

Grace taught herself to play by watching videos. At our previous church she wanted to be part of worship, and a compromise was reached: she could play from the balcony, from her seat, during the worship set. She accepted immediately. The balcony would do.

So every Sunday she carried that violin up the stairs like she was carrying something important, because she was. She sat down, lifted it, and worshiped. People started glancing up mid-song and seeing a young woman with her eyes closed and her bow moving, lost in something that had nothing to do with performance.

Some of them came to us afterward in tears. Then we told them the part they had not realized. There are no strings on that violin. She had been offering completely silent worship, week after week, and it was moving a congregation.

It went further. At a pastors’ conference, Grace was sitting in the back with her mom while the worship team rehearsed, playing along from her seat the way she always does. Somebody noticed. They walked back and invited her to come up and play with the band, in front of three thousand ministry leaders.

She did not hesitate. She walked to the front, took her place, lifted a violin that makes no sound, and played. Many in that crowd were undone. Some wept. Others were visibly moved.

I think about those first questions in the hospital room. Will she have a life? Will she make an impact? We did not know based on the information we had at the moment. But we would soon discover that Grace was destined to make an impact. We just could not see it yet.

God is not looking for perfection. He is looking for a heart that is fully His. Grace offers that every single time, no strings attached.

Cleaning the lens

Most of us are not walking around in despair. We are walking around with a smudged lens. The glass isn’t shattered. It’s just dirty enough that everything looks a little worse than it is.

The work stress, the bills, the family tension, the thing that didn’t go our way this week. It all looms large because we’re looking through a film of grime we stopped noticing years ago.

Then a story like Nick’s, or a moment like Grace in the balcony, comes along and wipes the glass clean.

I want to be careful here, because there’s a cheap version of this I refuse to write. The cheap version says: look at that man with no arms and no legs, so your problems are nothing, buck up. That isn’t perspective. That’s dismissal, and it helps nobody.

Your struggle is real. The anxiety that makes mornings hard is real. The diagnosis, the treatment schedule, the grief nobody at work knows about. Autism, cancer, depression, loss. None of it gets waved off because someone else has it harder. Suffering isn’t a competition, and there’s no trophy for placing.

But there’s a difference between minimizing your circumstances and enlarging your frame.

Bethany Hamilton, who lost her arm to a shark attack and went back to surfing anyway, says it in five words: “I don’t need easy, I just need possible.” That is not denial about how hard it is. It is a refusal to call it over.

Nick and Grace don’t shame anyone into gratitude. They widen the picture. They show, in public and at real cost, that joy isn’t the absence of hardship, and hope doesn’t wait for circumstances to improve. Nick puts it this way: hope without Jesus means waiting for your situation to change. Hope with Jesus doesn’t need the situation to change at all.

So here’s the question worth carrying into the weekend. Not why is my life hard? but:

In the middle of hard, how do I keep the joy?

Grace answers it every morning. She wakes up smiling and asks what’s next, already leaning into the day. Nick answered it at thirteen, with one small foot and a story about a blind man.

What they can do

Here is what I notice about Grace and about Nick. Neither story is really about what they cannot do. Both are about what they can.

A girl who was not supposed to amount to much helps to lead a room in worship. A man born with no arms and no legs carries hope around the world, being the hands and feet of Jesus.

That is not a lesson about limitation. That is a story about possibility, and possibility is just another word for hope.

The rest of Nick’s story

What I have given you here is only a sliver of Nick’s story. His whole story is on the big screen now, and it is worth ninety minutes of your evening. You will walk out carrying more hope than you walked in with, and you will see your own life a little differently on the drive home.

No Limbs, No Limits: The NickV Story is in theaters nationwide starting today (September 25th). Take your spouse. Take your small group. Take the teenager in your house who is carrying more than they let on, or consider taking the person you know who needs some hope today.

Then go home and ask the question the film asks: what is the thing you’ve spent your life trying to fix?

Because it might not be the obstacle in the way of your purpose. It might be the instrument.

Even without strings.

Dave Almgren – Two Pastor, Popcorn and a Movie Podcast

Sources

The Road to Clear Creek: What I Almost Missed

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Saturday morning, August 29th, 2026, I boarded a plane in Portland en route to Anchorage and then Fairbanks, and I landed in the heart of Alaska needing to pick up a truck for my friend Todd Hoffman, of Gold Rush fame, and drive it roughly 450 miles to his mining camp in Clear Creek, in the Yukon Territory. At that same time, Todd was making his own drive to Clear Creek, roughly 2,100 miles from Portland, Oregon. Somebody needed to bring a second truck up from Fairbanks. That somebody was me. Todd also wanted footage for an upcoming podcast season, so this trip was doing double duty. What. I didn’t fully understand yet was how much more I’d get out of it than either of those reasons promised.

Into the North

The drive north took me through the North Pole, yes there is an actual town called the North Pole, where I stopped and visited Santa’s house, and Santa himself, because how often do you get to say that, and on to Tok, Alaska by the end of day one. Day two started with the stretch from Tok to Chicken, Alaska, and then onto the Top of the World Highway, which carries you across the border into Canada and down into Dawson City, Yukon.

“Top of the World” isn’t just a scenic name. Between Chicken and Dawson City, part of the road is paved, but even the pavement is a minefield of potholes and washboard ruts. You crawl along at twenty miles an hour, find a stretch to open it up, then slam back down before you lose an axle to a pothole you didn’t see coming. Coming out of a town called Chicken, it felt fitting, since I spent hours playing a very literal game of chicken with the road itself.

Long inclines of loose gravel had me slipping for traction while I climbed along the tops of mountain ranges, with views stretching out over territory most people will never see. In the hours I spent on that stretch, I passed maybe fifteen other vehicles. No towns. No cell service. A couple of roadside outhouses, no plumbing, just a small building with a hole in the ground. Just me, the road, and a Starlink unit mounted in the truck for GPS and emergency communication if something went wrong.

There’s a real temptation out there to take your eyes off the road. The scenery pulls at you constantly, mountain ranges, wide open sky. But the second you let your eyes wander too long, a pothole or a washboard rut is right there waiting to take out an axle or blow a tire. You have to stay locked in, present, watching what’s directly ahead, even while everything around you is begging for your attention. I think that’s true spiritually too. There’s no shortage of things pulling our eyes off where we’re headed, plenty of it even good and beautiful in its own way, but if we’re not intentional about staying fixed on the road in front of us, those distractions are exactly what run us off course.

Fear, Even When You Know Better

Here’s the honest part. I know Scripture. I know what it says about not being afraid. I had Starlink mounted on the top of the truck as a real, practical safety net, active GPS, and a way to call for help if something actually went wrong. On paper, I had every reason to feel at peace. And still, out there alone, my mind found ways to wander into the what-ifs anyway. What if I break down out here. What if I’m actually lost. What if this is the wrong road and I run out of daylight before I figure it out. Knowing truth and feeling it in your chest at mile marker nowhere are two very different things.

2 Tim. 1:7 “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, & of love, & of a sound mind.”

I know that verse. I’ve probably quoted it to other people going through hard things. And I still had to preach it back to myself out there, mile after mile, because knowing it and feeling it were two different battles. I think that’s one of the more honest confessions I can make about faith. It’s not that the fear doesn’t show up. It’s that you have to keep choosing to set it back down, over and over, even when you already know better.

I didn’t have some clean, instant victory over it either. It came and went in waves the whole drive. But I tried, as best I could, to let the fear give way to something better, to actually look up and notice that very few people in the world ever get to see the top of the world like this, alone, on a road this quiet. The emptiness wasn’t only isolating. It was proof of how rare and unearned the view actually was. Fifteen cars in hours of driving meant fifteen other people who’d also decided this view was worth the risk of the road.

Rolling down into Dawson City only deepened that feeling. Coming off the Top of the World Highway, you land on the west side of the Yukon River, with the town itself sitting on the east side, so you cross by auto ferry to actually get across the river, no bridge, just a boat, same as it’s been for well over a century. Dawson City still looks like the Klondike gold rush never ended: old trading posts, period buildings, a town frozen in the 1800s. It was surreal.

Trust the Guide

From Dawson City, the directions got vague fast. “Go about an hour out of town, turn left on Clear Creek” isn’t exactly a street address. The turn itself was just a small sign and a dirt road disappearing into dense trees. I had no way of knowing if I was going the right way. I ran the numbers in my head, how much gas I had left, whether I could turn back if this was wrong. Because I didn’t know the road, the last stretch felt endless. Days later, on the following Friday, when Todd drove that same road out and I sat in the passenger seat, it felt like it took no time at all. Same road. Same distance. The only difference was that I was in the hands of someone who’d driven it a hundred times before.

That contrast is the whole thing, really. When you can’t see the road ahead, trust doesn’t feel like trust. It feels like risk. But the road isn’t actually longer or more dangerous just because you don’t know it. Someone who’s walked it before can drive it without a second thought. Maybe that’s the closest thing I’ve got to a working definition of faith: keeping your eyes on a guide you trust, even when you can’t see where the road goes next.

That Starlink GPS did the same thing for me the whole trip, kept me pointed the right direction even when the road ahead looked like nothing but trees and gravel. I couldn’t help but see the parallel. Our spiritual GPS is God’s word, and the leading of the Holy Spirit through that word, through scripture.

Psalm 119:105 “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”

Not a floodlight lighting up the whole journey all at once, just enough light for the next step. That’s exactly how the drive to Clear Creek felt. I couldn’t see the camp from the highway. I couldn’t even see it from the turnoff. I just had to trust the next stretch of light in front of me, one bend at a time. And that’s really the definition of faith, isn’t it.

Hebrews 11:1 “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

I knew where I was going. I just couldn’t see the way there. The camp was real, the destination was certain, but the road between here and there stayed hidden until I was actually on it.

What You’d Never See

If I’d said no to Todd’s ask, none of this happens. I never see the massive articulated rock trucks hauling ground at the mine, never fly a drone over a valley that size, never nearly tip a four-wheeler crossing permafrost, never watch a family of beavers stacking up their home of mug and sticks for the winter. I would never sit with a group of guys whose stated priorities, in order, are God, family, and gold. I would not have had the opportunity to see the vast expanse of the sky so clear and dark that the stars actually look close.

It’s The Process

Before any of that gold ever sees daylight, though, there’s an enormous amount of unglamorous work. Miners are essentially dirt farmers. They have to figure out where ancient glaciers once carved through the valley, strip away what’s called the overburden, all the dirt and rock sitting on top that isn’t worth anything, and dig down until they finally hit pay dirt. That pay dirt then runs through a sluicing plant, and from there it goes to the gold room, where it’s refined again and again until every other mineral is gone and all that’s left is that one color, yellow. First they move the overburden out of the way entirely, and only then do they haul the pay dirt underneath it, sometimes a hundred and fifty thousand yards of pay dirt, to be processed down to thirty or fifty ounces of gold. That’s not a typo. A hundred and fifty thousand yards of pay dirt, moved and processed and washed, for a result you could hold in one hand.

I couldn’t stop thinking about that word, overburden, long after I left the mine. It’s a good name for it, honestly. Not garbage, not worthless in every sense, just dirt and rock that has to be moved before anything valuable can be reached. We carry our own overburden too. Worry we’ve hauled around for years. Old hurts we never quite set down. Distractions and doubts and fear, the same fear I felt driving that road alone, all of it sitting right on top of whatever God actually wants to do in us. None of it is necessarily evil. Most of it is just weight, dead ground piled on top of the good ground underneath. And the mine doesn’t skip that step. Nobody gets to the pay dirt without first moving the overburden out of the way. I don’t think we do either.

I got to stand in the gold room and watch the very last step of that process happen in real time, and then I got to shift through a couple of pans myself. I watched the water and grit swirl away and that unmistakable yellow finally show up against the bottom of the pan. It’s a small moment, but it doesn’t feel small when you’re the one holding the pan. That’s the answer, right there in your hands, after everything it took to get to it. That’s the real payoff of this trip. Not just the podcast footage, though I got plenty of that too. The payoff was everything I would have missed entirely if I’d never said yes: the rock trucks, the drone shots over the valley, the beavers stacking their dam for winter, the stars so clear and close they didn’t look real, the conversations with Todd and his crew.

Just Say YES!

None of it happens if I don’t say yes to Todd, if I don’t trust a GPS pointed at a dirt road with no address, if I don’t push through the fear on that long, empty stretch of highway.

And maybe that’s the whole point underneath all of it. The overburden has to be moved before you ever see the gold, in the ground and in us. The unknown road has to be driven before you reach the camp. The fear has to be walked through, not around. The worry and the old weight we carry has to be set down again and again, the same way that mine clears ground every season.

If the unclear way, the longer road, and the fear along it are enough to make us turn back, we may never see the gold. We may never see the victory.

But when we say yes, even with the way unclear, even when it takes longer than we expected, even carrying more than we wished we had to carry, we get to see the gold. We get to see the victory.

Dave Almgren – Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie Podcast

Beware of Greeks Bearing Wi-Fi

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I watched The Odyssey recently, and it sent me straight back to one of the oldest stories in Western civilization, a story that, oddly enough, has never felt more relevant to the American family than it does right now.

You know the tale, even if you haven’t thought about it in years. After a decade of failed siege, the Greeks couldn’t break through the walls of Troy by force. So they got creative. They built an enormous wooden horse, hid their best soldiers inside its hollow belly, and left it at the gates as a “gift”, a peace offering, a symbol of surrender. The Trojans, weary from war and hungry for good news, hauled it inside their own walls. They celebrated. They let their guard down. And that night, the soldiers climbed out and opened the gates to the rest of the Greek army. Troy, a city that had withstood ten years of siege, fell in a single night — not because the enemy overpowered them, but because the Trojans invited the danger in themselves.

Here’s something interesting: the Trojan Horse barely gets a mention in Homer’s Odyssey, just a passing reference. Homer’s Iliad ends before Troy even falls. It’s actually the Roman poet Virgil, writing centuries later in the Aeneid, who gives us the full story we know today. And it’s Virgil who gives us the line that’s echoed for two thousand years: “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”, “I fear the Greeks, even when they bear gifts.” A Trojan priest named Laocoön said it, warning his people not to trust the horse. Nobody listened. He was right, and it cost his city everything.

I don’t think that line was written just for ancient Troy.

I think it was written for us.

The Gifts We Welcomed Inside

Think about what’s crossed the threshold of the American home over the last twenty years. The smartphone. The streaming service. The endless scroll. Each one arrived looking like a gift, connection, convenience, entertainment, a window to the whole world in your pocket. And in a lot of ways, they are gifts. I don’t believe a phone or a TV is inherently evil any more than a wooden horse is inherently evil. It’s just wood. It’s just glass and circuitry.

But a gift is only as good as what’s hidden inside it. And for years now, we’ve been wheeling these things through our front gates without asking the one question Laocoön asked: what’s actually inside this?

Because something got in. Quietly. While we were busy celebrating the convenience, the entertainment, the connection, nefarious actors climbed out of the horse and got to work. Not the device itself, but the people and forces using it with intention, working to reshape how our kids think, what they value, how they see themselves, and what they believe is normal. We didn’t see it happen because it wasn’t a battering ram at the gates. It was a gift we brought inside ourselves.

If that theme sounds familiar, it should. It was basically the whole point of the 2025 film that had families talking, the quiet, creeping way devices steal children from their parents’ laps and their families’ tables without a single dramatic moment marking the loss. No siege, no battle. Just a slow opening of the gates from the inside, one notification at a time.

More Connected, More Alone

Here’s the line that should stop us cold: we have never been more connected as a culture, and we have never been lonelier. We carry the entire world in our pockets, and yet deep, meaningful relationships, the kind that used to define neighborhoods, churches, and families are quietly disappearing. We’re tethered to hundreds of people online and estranged from the ones sitting across the dinner table.

That’s the Trojan Horse working exactly as designed. The gift promised connection but delivered isolation instead.

Say that one out loud. Sit with it for a second. Because that’s not just a clever turn of phrase, that’s the diagnosis. That’s what happened to Troy, and it’s what’s happening in living rooms across this country. The horse didn’t look like an invasion. It looked like a blessing. And by the time anyone realized what was inside it, the gates were already open.

What’s the Horse in Your Home?

I’m not writing this to make you throw your phone in the driveway or cancel every streaming subscription tonight. That’s not the point, and honestly, it’s not realistic. The Trojans weren’t wrong to want peace. They were wrong to stop asking questions the moment something looked like a gift.

So here’s the challenge: name the horse in your home. Maybe it’s a device. Maybe it’s a show your kids watch without you ever having watched an episode yourself. Maybe it’s the algorithm quietly shaping your teenager’s sense of identity while you assume it’s “just entertainment.” Whatever it is, don’t just wheel it through the gate and celebrate. Look inside it. Ask what it’s actually carrying, and who benefits from what it delivers into your family’s life.

Judeo-Christian culture in America wasn’t sacked in a single battle. It’s been a slow, patient siege and like Troy, the walls didn’t fall because the enemy was stronger. They fell because we stopped asking what we were letting inside.

Troy fell in one night. But it took ten years of exhaustion to get them to accept the gift.

Don’t be exhausted into complacency. Ask the question Laocoön asked. Look inside the horse before you bring it through the gate.

Dave Almgren – Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie Podcast

Stay Focused. Keep Going. Finish Strong.

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At seven o’clock on the evening of October 20, 1968, a few thousand spectators remained scattered across Mexico City’s Olympic Stadium. The air had turned cool and dark. The last of the marathon runners, spent and staggering, had long since been carried off to the medical tents. More than an hour earlier, Mamo Wolde of Ethiopia, the race’s eventual winner, looking remarkably fresh, had crossed the finish line to complete the 26-mile, 385-yard course. He was the reigning champion of the event, and he’d run like it.

The medal ceremony was over. People were gathering their things to leave. Then, from beyond the stadium gate, came the sound of sirens and police whistles. Heads turned. A lone figure entered the stadium wearing the colors of Tanzania. His name was John Stephen Akhwari — himself the reigning African champion, no stranger to finishing near the front of a field. But tonight he was hobbling. Somewhere around the 19-kilometer mark, in the chaos of jostling runners, Akhwari had fallen hard, dislocating his knee and badly injuring his shoulder. Dehydrated, disoriented, his leg wrapped in a rough, bloodied bandage, he had gotten back up.

Of the 79 men who had started that marathon, only 17 would finish. Akhwari was determined to be one of them, even if it meant being the last.

He circled the final stretch of track in visible agony, grimacing with every step. The remaining spectators rose to their feet and cheered him as though he were crossing first, not last. When he finally reached the finish line, Akhwari didn’t stop to soak in the applause. He simply walked off the field.

Afterward, a reporter asked him the question everyone was thinking: given the injury, and with no chance of a medal, why hadn’t he just quit?

Akhwari’s answer has outlived the race itself: “My country did not send me 7,000 miles to start the race. They sent me 7,000 miles to finish the race.”

You were not put here just to start. You were put here to finish.

The Race Marked Out for Us

There’s a reason that answer still stops people in their tracks more than half a century later. It touches something true about the life of faith.

The writer of Hebrews uses this same image, a race, to describe what it means to follow Christ:

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” (Hebrews 12:1)

Notice what the verse doesn’t say. It doesn’t say “let us start the race.” Starting is the easy part. Nearly everyone starts. Seventy-nine men lined up in Mexico City that afternoon, and every one of them believed, at the starting gun, that they’d finish. The verse says run with endurance, language that assumes resistance, fatigue, and the real possibility of quitting long before the finish line comes into view.

That’s because the Christian life was never sold to us as a sprint. It’s a marathon, and marathons have a way of finding your weak points. Somewhere around your own 19-kilometer mark, something is going to knock you down.

For some of us, it’s a health diagnosis nobody saw coming. For others, it’s a financial collapse, a business that fails, a job that disappears, a debt that won’t stop growing. For others still, it’s a marriage or a friendship that fractures, a wayward child, a season of grief that seems to have no bottom. None of us get to choose our injury. We only get to choose what we do after we’re on the ground.

Getting Back Up

Here’s what’s easy to miss in the Akhwari story: nobody would have blamed him for stopping. He had already lost. There was no medal waiting, no title, no reward visible from where he lay on the track. By every practical measure, finishing changed nothing about the outcome of the race.

And yet it changed everything about what his finish meant.

That’s the picture Hebrews is painting. We don’t run with endurance because finishing guarantees us a trophy in the eyes of the world. We run because we were sent 7,000 miles for a purpose bigger than the applause at the finish line, sent by a God who isn’t interested in how fast we started, but in whether we’re still moving forward when it costs us something to do it.

The passage goes on: “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame…” (Hebrews 12:2). Jesus himself modeled this. He didn’t merely start toward the cross — Gethsemane makes clear how real the temptation to stop was. He finished it. And because He did, we have both a model and a source of strength for finishing our own race.

Finish Well

Maybe you’re reading this in the middle of your own fall on the track. Maybe the injury is recent, and you’re still deciding whether to get back up. Or maybe you’ve been limping along for a while now, wondering if anyone would notice — or care — if you just quietly stopped.

Akhwari’s answer is worth carrying with you: you were not put here just to start. You were put here to finish.

That doesn’t mean pretending the injury doesn’t hurt. Akhwari didn’t hide his bandage or his limp, he ran through the pain in full view of everyone, and that honesty is part of what made his finish so powerful. Faith isn’t the absence of a limp. It’s choosing to keep moving with one.

So take the next lap, whatever it looks like. Wrap the wound if you need to. Slow the pace if you must. But don’t leave the track. There is still a stadium of witnesses cheering, not because you’re winning, but because you’re finishing. And in the economy of God, that’s what it means to finish well.

Dave Almgren – Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie Podcast

The Story of Hudson & Maria Is Finally Becoming a Movie

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After more than a decade of prayer, six rejected screenplays, and what can only be described as a faith journey in its own right, Half Crown Media — in partnership with OMF International, the organization Hudson Taylor himself founded has officially announced that their film HUDSON & MARIA is going into production. The first press release went out May 6th. Director Matt Mikalatos, a former missionary who also wrote the screenplay, confirmed on his Substack that filming begins this summer in Malaysia, with casting underway right now.

This one has been a long time coming. And from everything I’ve seen, it’s going to be worth every year of waiting.

Who Was Hudson Taylor?

If you don’t know the name, you need to.

James Hudson Taylor was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire, England in 1832. His parents prayed over him before he was born, specifically asking God to send him to China as a missionary. As a teenager he walked away from that faith entirely. But at seventeen, alone in his father’s library, he picked up a gospel tract and read it to the end. That afternoon changed everything.

He started learning Mandarin. He studied medicine. He gave away most of what he owned to the poor, quietly testing whether God could really be trusted to provide. And in 1853, at twenty-one years old, he sailed for China, arriving in Shanghai in the midst of the Taiping Rebellion, stepping off a boat into a country in upheaval, with nothing but a calling he couldn’t shake loose.

What happened next would reshape the entire history of Christian missions.

The Man Who Refused to Stay Foreign

Here’s what made Hudson Taylor unlike virtually every other missionary of his era: he refused to stay an outsider.

While most Western missionaries of the 1800s planted themselves in China’s coastal cities, lived in foreign compounds, dressed in European clothes, and largely moved in circles of other Westerners, Taylor did something that got him mocked by nearly everyone, including his fellow missionaries. He shaved his forehead, grew a queue, put on Chinese clothing, learned the language until he was fluent, and moved into the interior of the country where no foreign missionary had gone.

He was called an embarrassment. A laughingstock. One missionary suggested he “ought to be horsewhipped.” But Taylor was unmoved. He had understood something most of his colleagues had not: that the Chinese people would never hear the Gospel as long as it arrived wearing a British suit.

He said it plainly: “Let us in everything not sinful become like the Chinese, that by all means we may save some.”

In 1865, Taylor founded the China Inland Mission, revolutionary in every way. No guaranteed salaries, just faith and God’s provision. Non-denominational, open to working-class missionaries and single women when no one else would send them. Focused entirely on the unreached interior, the hundreds of millions of souls that coastal missions weren’t reaching. By the time he died in 1905, the CIM had sent more than 800 missionaries to every province in China, planted 300+ mission stations, and seen more than 20,000 Chinese come to faith. Today that organization continues as OMF International, the very organization co-producing this film.

Historian Ruth Tucker has called him the most visionary missionary since the Apostle Paul. The man earned it.

But This Film Is a Love Story

The movie isn’t just a biography of a missionary hero. At its heart, HUDSON & MARIA is a love story and one of the most remarkable ones in the history of the church.

Maria Dyer was born in China to missionary parents. She was everything Hudson hoped for, passionate, deeply faithful, with a courage that matched his own. When he declared his love for her, the entire missionary community in Ningbo erupted. The woman overseeing Maria’s school despised Taylor, thought him uneducated and unconventional, and did everything in her power to stop them, including threatening a lawsuit.

Maria’s response? She drew a line in the sand: “If he loves me more than Jesus, he is not worthy of me — if he were to leave the Lord’s work for the world’s honor, I would have nothing further to do with him.”

They married in 1858, and together they built something extraordinary, facing poverty, illness, the deaths of children, and the sheer weight of a mission that seemed too large for any two people to carry.

The film also introduces a third key character: Wang Laijun, a loyal Chinese friend whose insight bridges cultures, and who represents the Chinese believers who were not merely recipients of the Gospel, but partners in carrying it forward.

A Director Who Knows the Story from the Inside

Matt Mikalatos is a former missionary himself, which is exactly why he was the right person to write this screenplay, and now to direct it.

He told CBN News that the story lands with particular force in today’s world. “There was a lot of unrest, uncertainty in the world,” he said of the film’s historical setting — the era of the Opium Wars and the Taiping Rebellion. “Disease was running rampant in a way that we have recently experienced. And there was just uncertainty among so many people. In the midst of that, what we see is this 21-year-old and his fiancée and then wife who looked at the unrest of the world and believed, like many young believers do, that they could change the world through their commitment to Christ and their willingness to sacrifice. And it turns out they were absolutely correct.”

Mikalatos also noted on his Substack that this was the first paid screenwriting work he ever did, five years ago and that the path from writing it to now directing it has felt nothing short of “supernatural.” Casting announcements are expected soon.

A Project Built on the Same Faith It Tells

Half Crown Media has been developing this film for over a decade, and the way they’ve done it looks a lot like the way Hudson Taylor did everything: by trusting God to provide rather than chasing the money first.

The total budget is $14 million — $7 million for production, $7 million for distribution, raised entirely through donations, not investment, in keeping with the faith-based DNA of OMF International. They rejected six screenplays over the years before finally connecting with Mikalatos. Their board chair, Dr. Jennie Fung, reflected on the journey in their January 2026 newsletter, describing it as standing on the east bank of the Jordan, years in the wilderness, now on the edge of the Promised Land.

They also note that the film’s production coincides with the 160th anniversary of the Lammermuir Party, the historic voyage in 1866 when Hudson and Maria Taylor, along with sixteen missionaries, sailed for China on a ship called the Lammermuir, the largest single group of missionaries to China at the time, battered by back-to-back typhoons in the Taiwan Strait before arriving safely to begin the work of the CIM. Honoring that anniversary as cameras roll on the story feels like more than coincidence.

As Taylor himself said: “There are three stages to every great work of God: first it is impossible, then it is difficult, then it is done.”

They have arrived at done.

Why This Film Matters

We live in a cultural moment when the church is wrestling with big questions about calling, sacrifice, cultural humility, and what it actually means to follow Jesus into hard places. Hudson and Maria Taylor’s story speaks directly into every one of those conversations.

He wasn’t polished or pedigreed. He was a young man from Yorkshire who said yes, got on a boat, and gave his life away. He dressed differently than everyone expected. He went where no one else would go. He built something that outlasted him by more than a century. And his wife Maria stood beside him at every step, not as a supporting character, but as a full partner in the mission.

That’s a story the church needs to see on a screen.

On-site filming for HUDSON & MARIA begins in Malaysia this August. You can follow the project and sign up for updates at HudsonAndMaria.com, and follow Half Crown Media at halfcrownmedia.com.

Stay tuned here at FaithAndFamilyFlicks.com — as casting is announced and production moves forward, we’ll keep you in the loop. This is one worth praying for and one worth watching for.

Dave Almgren is the founder of The Advance Team and host of the “Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie” podcast. He writes regularly about faith-based film at FaithAndFamilyFlicks.com.