You Know Who You Truly Are
This blog post was first published on meglynchwriter.wordpress.com on August 18, 2018.
I’m not much of a crier, but if you know me, I’ve been bragging about the beautiful movie Moana, and the fact that it makes me cry. Every little bit of it brings me to all sorts of emotional tears, but the scene with Moana and Te Kā/Te Fiti makes me sob. every. time.
Moana is a pretty relatable character; we all have expectations to live up to that squelch what we feel is our true calling. But does anybody else relate to Te Kā – the lava monster that mercilessly attacks anything that gets near to her?
Just me? Well…
For those who don’t know, the demi-god Maui steals the heart from a sleeping goddess Te Fiti, and Moana is tasked with bringing it back to her or watching her island be turned to hard, dead ash in front of her eyes. The thing is, when Moana reaches the peak of the mountain where she should find Te Fiti, she finds, instead, a bottomless lake where she should be. Turning to look back at the monster attacking her, Moana finds the markings where she’s supposed to place Te Fiti’s heart on the lava monster’s chest.
In stealing Te Fiti’s heart, Maui turned her into a raging monster with a new name: Te Kā, who turned to survival mode, attacking everything in sight. Everything about who she was changed completely; instead bringing life to the islands surrounding her, she brought them death. That is, until Moana caught her attention and spoke these words to her:
“I have crossed the horizon to find you.
I know your name.
They have stolen the heart from inside you,
But this does not define you.
This is not who you are.
You know who you are…
Who you truly are.”
*Cue Meg crying*
Can we stay in that moment for a minute?
It’s hard to catch the reason for the tears the first time.
It’s still difficult to articulate the second and third times.
In one singular moment, Moana makes the choice to not feel scared of Te Kā any longer. The story of Te Fiti, the being that brings life to the world, has been told for generations. Moana knows this is but a temporary embodiment of the goddess and not her true form; this is a result of injustice done to Te Fiti. Moana knows her true form is more beautiful than anything she’s ever seen, and she trusts in this knowledge though it’s not what she’s seeing in front of her eyes.
Moana knows the identity of Te Fiti, even while she’s staring at the evil monster Te Kā.
How beautiful that is. So much hope can be found there. Do you see it yet?
We are the lava monsters, and Jesus is the beautiful Moana.
He crossed the horizon to find us.
He KNOWS our names.
Sin has stolen the hearts from inside us,
But by His grace, this does not define us.
If you’re reading this today, I promise you are not a lava monster, regardless of how much you might feel like one. That changed the day Christ took our sin upon His shoulders. That’s the true beauty of the Gospel – God split the sea so we can approach Him; He brings our hearts back to us, cools our fiery anger with His loving touch, and returns us to the humans He created us to be: life-bringing beings who dig up the crispy, burned soil around us so that it may produce good fruits again.
You CAN produce good fruits again; all you need to do is accept Christ’s gift of a brand new heart.
We are all of us lava monsters, and God gives us all our hearts back.
+85,000 smile points