Memories can weigh us down.
In the movie Up, Carl and Ellie Frederickson fix up a house together and fill it with memories. They grow old together, and one day, Ellie passes away. Carl grows cold to everyone around him, until one day, a little boy named Russell shows up on his porch. With skyscrapers closing in around his home, Carl decides to tie a bunch (no, like, a bunch) of balloons to the top of his place, and fly it towards Paradise Falls, a place him and Ellie had always dreamed of visiting.
He takes flight in his now-airborne home, and gets a ways out before he hears a knock at the door. It’s Russell, who wasn’t quite aware of the adventure he was about to be apart of when he walked up to Carl’s front porch that day. The two of them (and some other friends they meet along the way) have quite the journey, and come up against some unforeseen dangers. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, stop right now and go watch it, then come back!
At the lowest point in the story, the house had too much weight for it to reach the altitude it needed to. It came down to Carl making a choice between staying at Paradise Falls, in his home; or saving a friend. In the end, he throws his belongings out in front of the house, to lose the weight necessary to take flight and save a friend.
At the very end of the movie, having saved the friend, Carl and Russell watch his house float away, out of reach. Russell says, “I’m sorry about your house.”
But Carl simply says, “It’s just a house.”
That’s always stuck with me. It’s not that the house wasn’t important to him, but it wasn’t everything anymore. And he realised that you can keep all those memories with you, without them weighing you down.
It’s easy to let memories weigh us down. We lose the metaphorical house, and we lose ourselves with it. I’ve been there. Sometimes we can chain ourselves to the memory of a good thing, afraid that we’ll never find anything as good as what that seemed to be. And so we hold on to what once was with such a tight-closed fist that nothing can pry us loose from it. Along comes something new and beautiful, and we’d never know it because we can’t see the possibility of anything new. Memories can weigh us down. Dreams can, too. It’s all too possible to hold on to a dream so tightly that we don’t allow God to mold our life into what He desires to do with it. We can believe that we have the best plan for ourselves.
We’re to keep a loose grip on the past, and the future, and a tight grip on the One who holds both of them. We weren’t made to live in the past or future. We’re to live in the here and now. It’s not that we can’t reminisce about the past and be grateful for it. And it’s also not to say that we can’t dream about the future. But it’s all God’s.
Sometimes we have to say: “It’s just a house.”
The Treehouse 