Little Miss Sunshine

I just saw Little Miss Sunshine last week and it was AWESOME. Great story, very interesting characters that grow through the story, and lots of failure and humiliation.
The character Greg Kinnear played bothered me in particular because he was such a jerk and unfortunately all too like me. The movie opens with him teaching a seminar on his foolproof nine step program to success. He judges all the other charchters by his system and his judgments are ugly and offensive. Everyone else that knows him realizes that his system doesn't work except him.
A major part of his system was a refusal to accept failure which I reject utterly. The point at which I saw a connection with me was the way in which I have tried to use Christianity as my own 9 step program that would guarantee success to those around me if they would just subscribe to it. I don't think that is what Christ came to teach us, not a way of avoiding making mistakes, not a way to be right, not a way to correct everyone else, certainly a mirror by which to inspect ourselves for those who can bare to look at themselves.
The weakness of a "9 step system" approach to life would seem to be that:
-It over simplifies life
-It is overly optimistic
-When it fails you have to alienate those for whom it didn't work
-Jesus didn't give us a list of 9 things that would make everything work well for us
-"Success" is not, in my opinion, what Christianity is about. Many passages of scripture give the distinct idea that Christianity will produce a life that looks like a failure in the eyes of the world.
On the other hand:
-9 steps would be so much simpler than daily trying to make sense of a constantly changing life in light of a more or less unchanging holy text
-"Success" feels better than getting knocked around all the time
-9 steps would make it easy to determine if you are accomplishing anything valuable

As much as I hate a "9 step worldview" I still live it. When someone else's kids act up I have the strong urge to go tell them what they are doing wrong. "Earth to mom and dad, he needs a spank." When I see vagrants, homeless, and criminals I judge them as though they all the support that I did growing up. "Pull yourself up by your boot straps damn it!" When my wife or children make a mistake I can't let them learn from it I have to instruct them in how not to make the mistake again. "Everytime you order the pizza you..." I generally think that people are mindless idiots that need me to explain things to them. "This is how you make the DVD player work."

The movie bugged me because I saw myself in a repugnant character, and I, Mr. Fixit, don't know how to fix the broken reflection that I saw. I'd love to hear some discussion, comments, suggestions for me, on this one.

My starting point

OK so if every way of looking at and making sense of the world starts from a position of faith in a set of personally unproven statements, then this is where my way of looking at the world starts from. I believe that this magnificent world we live in was envisioned and created by a higher being. I believe that this world and we creatures in it were created for a purpose. I don't believe we are cosmic accident, or the product of random selection winning a million "lotteries" that each are statistically improbable. I believe we were designed, as the systems of our body seem to make clear.
I believe that the being who created us reveals himself most clearly and pointedly through the Old and New Testament of the Bible. I can't prove that I'm right. It's a faith commitment. I have other rational reasons for believnig my faith commitment is "reasonable," but it is "unreasonable" too because it is based on faith. But as I said in my last post all of us do this whether we admit it or not.
I believe, because of the way I hear the scriptures speak, that God desires to have connection with us, but does not force himself on us. That is to say that he allows us the freedom of conscience to deny his existence. If we do so we have to find some other way of explaining the "order" all around us in the world, the cycles, how death produces life, the presence of the magnificent array of life on it, the turning of the earth, the change of seasons, and the development of it all.
He lets us walk away from him, but he consistently calls us back to himself. It seems that those who don't wish to know God get so good at ignoring God's voice that miss him all around them. I think this is one of the reasons why prayer is so important. God so frequently communicates with us, through nature, through the kiss of our dog, through the amazement of a young child at a decorated Christmas tree, but a relationship has to be two way to be real. I feel like I know a lot about Brittany Spears from television and magazine covers at the grocery store. I could probably tell you personal things about her that might give you the impression that we were friends but if we were to meet Brittany the lack of a true relationship would be apparent. We haven't ever talked. She doesn't know me at all and I probably don't know anything truely important about her either. I know facts but don't have a relationship. This, I believe, is why prayer is so important.
One might argue that God doesn't audibly answer our prayers, or at least that has been my experience thus far, and that is true, but there are many other ways to communicate. God answers our prayers. God brings new people into our lives. He takes some away. He tries, I believe, to speak to us through these people. Sometimes he does this through their words, somtimes through actions, somtimes through their negative example, sometimes through the words of a character in a book or movie. I hear him answer everywhere. Of course I want to hear him everywhere too, I'm listening.
Lately I have done a pathetic job of talking to God. I hear him trying to tell me things but the ideas seem so scatter shot its difficult to know what to do and I wonder if part of that isn't because I'm not really taalking to him. Telling him what I'm thinking about. Askinghim for what I want. Submitting myself to his will. It feels like maybe I'm hearing answers to questions I've been to lazy to ask. Like when you came to a college class without doing the last nights reading and are lost in the discussion.