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

| Faith and Family Flicks News and Notes

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

| Faith and Family Flicks News and Notes

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.

| Faith and Family Flicks News and Notes

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

| Faith and Family Flicks News and Notes

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.

Why Families Need to Show Up…

| Faith and Family Flicks News and Notes

Let me ask you something that might sting just a little.

How many times have you sat through a movie preview, watched something raunchy or violent flash across the screen, and muttered to the person next to you, “This is why I don’t go to the movies anymore”? How many times have you scrolled through a streaming service, clicking past title after title, shaking your head at what passes for entertainment these days?

If you’re a person of faith, especially if you have kids in the house, this probably happens more than you’d like to admit.

Now here’s the question I really want to ask: What did you do about it?

Because a movie was just made for you. For your family. For your grandmother who loves to laugh. For your kids who you want to take to the theater without having to cover their eyes. It didn’t happen by accident, it happened because someone decided to put their convictions on the line and make something that reflects the values we say matter to us.

And right now, it’s in theaters.

So the question is – are you going?

The Spectrum of Faith-and-Family Films

Before we get to the movie itself, let’s talk about something important: what “faith-and-family” actually means, because it’s a much bigger tent than most people realize.

On one end of the spectrum, you have explicitly biblical films. The Passion of the Christ. The Chosen. I Can Only Imagine. Jesus Revolution. King of Kings. These are chapter-and-verse stories — scripture brought to life on screen, direct and unapologetic about their message.

On the other end, you have films that aren’t quoting scripture but are absolutely shaped by faith. Stories about marriage, family, sacrifice, integrity, and what it looks like to actually live out the values we profess, in a house, with kids, in the middle of ordinary, messy, hilarious real life. Biblical principles communicated through story, not sermon.

Both are faith-and-family content. Both matter. And both need our support.

The Breadwinner — comedian Nate Bargatze’s debut film, now in theaters — lives in that second category. It’s not a biblical epic. It doesn’t have an altar call. But it is built on the kind of values that faith communities have been begging Hollywood to reflect: commitment to family, self-sacrifice, a husband and wife who are genuinely for each other, and content so clean you can bring literally everyone in your family without a moment of awkwardness.

Who Is Nate Bargatze, and Why Does It Matter?

If you’ve somehow missed Nate Bargatze up to this point, here’s what you need to know. He’s a Nashville-born, Southern-raised Christian comedian who has spent over twenty years building one of the most remarkable careers in stand-up comedy, all without ever crossing a line your mom would be uncomfortable with. No crude jokes. No profanity. No shock value. Just genuinely funny storytelling about family life, marriage, and the everyday absurdity of being human.

His recent “Big Dumb Eyes” World Tour sold over two million tickets — more than Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour. He hosted the Primetime Emmy Awards. He has been the highest-grossing stand-up comedian in the country. And he did all of it clean.

He’s been asked about this over and over again throughout his career, and his answers are always the same. His faith shaped who he is. And he has always believed that the best room is one where everyone, grandma, the teenagers, the little kids — can all laugh together without anyone being embarrassed.

“I just want to make something that all of them can be in the room together,” he’s said. He considers clean, family-centered comedy his calling, not just a career choice, but something God put on his heart.

Now he’s brought that calling to the big screen. And he didn’t do it alone, The Breadwinner was co-produced by Wonder Project, a faith-based production company that partnered with Sony Pictures because they believed in exactly what this film represents. This movie was built from the ground up with faith-and-family values at the center.

What The Breadwinner Is About

The premise is simple and instantly relatable. Nate plays Nate Wilcox, a top-performing car salesman married to Katie (played by Mandy Moore), who runs their household and raises their three daughters with what can only be described as superhuman competence.

Then Katie lands a deal on Shark Tank for her household invention. The catch? She has to travel overseas for two weeks to get production rolling. That means Nate — the breadwinner — is suddenly home alone with three daughters and absolutely no idea what he’s doing.

What follows is the kind of comedic chaos that feels completely real because it is real. Anyone who has ever watched their spouse handle everything and thought “I could do that”, only to discover forty-five minutes later that they absolutely cannot — will recognize themselves in this movie. Underneath all the laughs is a story about what it means to truly see and honor the people we love, to step up when it’s hard, and to realize that keeping a family together takes more grace than we usually give it credit for.

It’s rated PG. It runs 99 minutes. And yes, there’s a horse.

Here’s the Part Where We Have to Be Honest With Ourselves

Faith communities — and I say this with love, because I am one of you, have a habit of doing something that genuinely baffles Hollywood.

We complain about the content. Loudly. Passionately. We share articles about the moral decline of entertainment. We post on social media about how Hollywood has forgotten families. And then, when a movie comes along that gives us exactly what we’ve been asking for, we… wait for it to come to streaming.

We say we’ll catch it on Netflix.

We tell ourselves we’ll take the family “when things slow down.”

And then we wonder why there aren’t more movies like this being made.

Here’s the hard truth: Hollywood is not a values system. It’s a business. And businesses follow the money. When faith-and-family films succeed at the box office, whether they’re The Passion of the Christ or a PG comedy about a dad who can’t figure out laundry, studios greenlight more of them. When those same films under perform in theaters, the message Hollywood hears is clear: there’s no market for this.

The opening weekend box office is the vote that counts. Not the streaming numbers six months later. Not your positive review on social media. Ticket sales are what determine whether the next faith-and-family filmmaker gets a green light — or whether Hollywood goes back to making what it knows will sell.

What You Can Do Right Now

The Breadwinner is still in theaters. Here’s how you can make a difference:

Go this week. Every ticket still in the theatrical run matters. Take the kids, bring the grandparents, call your small group, text your neighbors. Make it a thing.

Talk about it. Share it from your church social media. Mention it in your newsletter. Tell people there is a genuinely funny, genuinely clean family movie in theaters right now — and that showing up is a statement.

Bring people who don’t usually go to “faith” movies. This isn’t a sermon on screen. It’s a hilarious, warm story about family — made by people of faith, for everyone. That’s actually the most powerful kind of outreach.

Think bigger. Every time you buy a ticket to a faith-and-family film — whether it’s a biblical epic or a PG comedy — you are casting a vote for the kind of content you want to exist. Use that vote.

The Bigger Picture

The faith-and-family film space is growing and it is growing because audiences have shown up. The Chosen exists because people showed up. I Can Only Imagine shocked Hollywood because people showed up. Every film that breaks through changes what gets green-lit next.

The Breadwinner is the current opportunity. It’s funny, it’s clean, it’s in theaters right now, and it was made by a man whose faith quietly shapes everything he does — backed by Wonder Project, a production company that exists specifically to bring more content like this into the world.

The least we can do is show up.

Go see it. Take your people. Laugh together. And let Hollywood know that faith-and-family audiences are real, we are paying attention, and we vote with our dollars.

Because if we don’t show up, they’ll stop making them. And then we’ll be right back to complaining about our streaming queues — with nobody to blame but ourselves.

The Breadwinner is rated PG and is now playing in theaters nationwide. Running time: 99 minutes. Co-produced by Wonder Project in partnership with Sony Pictures.

David Almgren – Two Pastors Popcorn and a Movie Podcast

Before He Was on the Dollar Bill, He Was Just a 22-Year-Old Who Messed Up

| Faith and Family Flicks News and Notes

I’ve spent years working with film and faith communities, and I have to be honest with you, I don’t get excited about every movie that comes across my desk. But Young Washington, releasing July 3 from Angel Studios and directed by Jon Erwin, is the kind of film I’ve been waiting for.

Not because it’s a patriotic story. Not just because the timing with America’s 250th birthday is perfect. But because it tells the truth about something we don’t talk about enough in our churches and our homes:

Failure is part of the story. Even for great men of faith.

He Wasn’t a Legend Yet

Here’s what most of us never learned in history class. George Washington was 22 years old when he made a decision that helped ignite an international war. A young man, not yet tested, not yet the face on the dollar bill, just a soldier who got it badly wrong at Fort Necessity.

And then he had to decide what to do next.

That question — what do you do after you’ve failed? — is the beating heart of Young Washington. And it’s one of the most relevant questions any family can ask around the kitchen table right now.

Even as a young man, Washington carried a gravity of character that put responsibility in his hands before most guys his age had figured out their direction. But gravity of character didn’t mean he was perfect. It meant he had the weight to keep going after he wasn’t.

A Man Who Talked to God — Long Before He Was Famous

This is the part of Washington’s story I wish more people knew.

Before he was a general. Before the Constitutional Convention. Before he ever set foot in a presidential residence. George Washington kept a prayer journal.

He wrote things like this:

“O eternal and everlasting God, direct my thoughts, words and work. Wash away my sins in the immaculate blood of the lamb, and purge my heart by thy Holy Spirit… daily frame me more and more into the likeness of thy son Jesus Christ.”

That’s not the language of a man performing faith for public consumption. That’s someone who actually believed he needed God to shape him, daily, personally, from the inside out. He wasn’t asking for victory or fame. He was asking to be made more like Christ.

And here’s what’s remarkable: he was writing prayers like that while he was still young, still being formed, still carrying the weight of his failures at Fort Necessity.

The spiritual life wasn’t something Washington added later, after he’d arrived. It was the ground he was standing on while he was still figuring out who he was.

Providence Doesn’t Wait for Perfect People

One of the most stunning moments in Washington’s actual history happened during the Battle of the Monongahela. He rode into a battlefield disaster alongside General Braddock, and by all accounts he should have died. Bullets passed through his coat. Two horses were shot out from under him. Every man around him was falling.

And he walked away without a scratch.

Washington didn’t chalk it up to luck. He wrote afterward that he had been “protected beyond all human probability or expectation” by the hand of God. He saw Providence not as a distant theological concept but as something actively at work in the specific circumstances of his life, including the painful ones.

Years later, a Native American chief who had been on the opposing side that day sought Washington out to deliver a message. His marksmen had tried to bring Washington down and couldn’t. They concluded, in his words, that Washington was “under the special guardianship of the Great Spirit” and that he “can never die in battle.”

Now, I’m not making a theological claim about that chief’s words. But I am saying that Washington’s sense of being watched over, protected, and directed by Providence was not something he invented after his victories. It was something forged in near-death, in failure, in the confusion of a 22-year-old trying to figure out what God was doing in a situation that had gone badly wrong.

In the film, we see Washington ask his mother about exactly that, how God could possibly be at work in something so broken. If you’ve ever asked that question yourself, you’re going to feel this movie.

His mother, Mary Ball Washington, gives him the answer that becomes the theme of the whole story:

“You can learn from failure. But if you don’t — you’ve failed twice.”

That line stopped me cold. Because it’s not just wisdom for a young soldier. It’s wisdom for every dad, every mom, every kid who’s watching their parents right now to see how we handle our own Fort Necessity moments.

When He Could Have Taken Power — He Walked Away

Here’s a moment that deserves more attention than it gets.

After the Revolutionary War ended, Washington commanded the most respected fighting force on the continent. His men were loyal. The country was in chaos. And there were serious voices urging him to step in, take control, and impose order. In the way Cromwell had done in England. In the way that powerful men have always been tempted to do when they believe they’re the right person for the moment.

Washington refused.

On December 23, 1783, he stood before Congress in Annapolis and resigned his commission. He said, “I consider it an indispensable duty to close this last solemn act of my official life by commending the interests of our dearest country to the protection of Almighty God.”

He gave the power back. And then he went home to Mount Vernon.

The man who could have been king chose to be a servant. That’s not a personality trait. That’s a theological conviction. He genuinely believed that authority belonged to God and was held in trust — not seized and kept.

That kind of character doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from years of prayer journals and Fort Necessity moments and asking God to frame him more and more into the likeness of Christ.

What This Film Is Really About

It’s about character formation. And character formation is almost never pretty in the middle of it.

As someone who spent nearly two decades in kids and family ministry before moving into faith-based film work, I’ve watched a generation of families struggle to find stories worth telling their kids. Stories that are honest about failure without being hopeless. Stories that show faith working in real life, not just as a feel-good tag at the end.

Young Washington is that story.

The film highlights traits we used to call virtues — humility, courage, accountability, perseverance, faith, stewardship. And it shows them being forged in difficulty, not handed out as rewards for good behavior.

A Few Questions Worth Bringing Home

I’ve had the chance to work through the Family Discussion Guide built around this film, and I want to share a few questions that struck me as genuinely conversation-starting, not the kind with easy answers.

What would you have done at 22, with everyone watching?

At Fort Necessity, Washington had four real options: openly admit the mistake and take full responsibility, blame the French and argue he was justified, walk away from military life entirely, or stay quiet and try to prove himself through future service. As a family, rank those from wisest to least wise, then talk about why you ranked them the way you did. You might be surprised where the disagreement lands.

Where do you see Providence in your own hard seasons?

Washington asked his mother how God could be at work in something that went so badly. Have you ever asked that? What did your family decide?

Who in your family is still being “formed”?

At 22, Washington wasn’t the man on the dollar bill yet. He was still being shaped. Who in your home is in that process right now, and what does it look like to support them in it?

That last question wrecked me a little, personally. I think about my own kids. I think about the teenagers in my community. We’re quick to celebrate the finished product. We’re less patient with the becoming.

Bring Your Whole Church — and Save 33%

Young Washington opens July 3, 2026, right in time for Independence Day weekend and America’s 250th birthday. There’s no better occasion to sit with your family, your small group, or your entire congregation and watch the story of the man who, by God’s grace and his own hard-won character, helped make that celebration possible.

Groups of 15 or more save 33% on tickets.

Get your group tickets now at angel.com/cherrytree — and make it an event your community will be talking about long after the credits roll.

If you’re a pastor who wants to preview the film before recommending it to your congregation, visit faithandfamilyflicks.com/young-washington-pastors for a private screening link.

This is the kind of story we need right now. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s honest. And in a culture that tends to either whitewash its heroes or tear them down entirely, a film willing to say he was 22, he failed, and God wasn’t done with him yet feels like exactly the right message for the right moment.

I hope your family — and your church — is there for it.

Dave Almgren is the founder of The Advance Team, a faith-based film marketing consultancy, and runs outreach campaigns through FaithAndFamilyFlicks.com. He’s also the host of the podcast “Two Pastors, Popcorn and a Movie.”