So You Think You’re in Love

While Kathleen Kelly is flaying the heartless suit who destroyed her professional life, the audience knows what she doesn’t — that he is also the guy she’s fallen in love with online. Painfully, he knows it too. He didn’t set out to deceive her, but now he can’t close the gap between these two impressions. To win her at all, he has to win her on both fronts — keeping her attachment to the pen-pal she thinks she loves, while winning her over to the “suit” she thinks she hates.

“You’ve Got Mail” (1998) is not only a retelling of “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940), it is a spin off of every story ever told about falling in love. What we love at first is always a partially mistaken identity. What we see may be real, but we’re filling in all the blanks with our own wishes. We probably don’t even know what our own hearts want until we realize that we’ve been half making up a person who fits the description.

So falling in love turns into disillusionment, then sobering self-realization, then (if the story and the beloved are both ultimately good) a path to reshaping our hearts.

When Jesus called the disciples, they dropped everything and went after their Messiah. At least, they thought their hearts wanted the Messiah, and that He was it. As they followed Jesus, He kept affirming this conviction and deepening their devotion to Him with miraculous signs, spiritual authority, healing power, wisdom, and dearest friendship. But then He’d up and do what they thought were un-Messiah-like things: He’d include the wrong kinds of people, forgive the wrong kinds of sins, aim at the wrong kind of Kingdom. And what shattered every hope was the Cross. The Kingdom they sought knew nothing of crosses. This was not the Messiah they’d fallen in love with.

So they fled, and left Him to die alone. And they said, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”

…Take just two minutes to read how the Resurrected Jesus melts down and reshapes their hearts, as He opens their eyes to accept that the Cross is central to their Messiah’s identity: Luke 24:13-35.

Again this Sunday, may our hearts burn into softness at His words. May our eyes be opened to recognize Him. May we be reshaped still more to love the Messiah — the One who offers us His own flesh, blessed and broken.

Laura Henrich