A little reflection on treating our Bibles like our cell phone.

A reflection on the need to listen in prayer.

As I reflect back on my childhood, I cannot help remember loving watching the G.I. Joe cartoon each weekday after school. A few years ago, it was great excitement that I heard that Hollywood was going to make a live-action version of the cartoon. I would never consider the first live-action G.I. Joe a cinematic masterpiece but I enjoyed seeing the characters from my childhood up on the big screen. As the movie ended with Cobra Commander being locked away in a weird prison, I wondered if Hollywood would do a sequel.

Last July, I decided to devote the last week of July to a religious movie and I plan on carrying on that tradition this year by focusing on one of my favorite movies The Scarlet and the Black.

Cardinal Van Thuan offered some beautiful insights into living out one's faith. 10 Rules of Life & Discerning Between God and the Works of God.

The big movie this past year has been Disney?s Frozen. The movie is about Elsa who was born with the gift of ice magic. She is able to make ice and snow at will. Her younger sister Anna absolutely adores her and they would often play together in the middle of the night when everyone was a sleep. One night while they were playing Elsa accidently hurts Anna with her magic. The king, queen and Elsa take Anna to the troll king who is able to save the girls life by removing Anna?s memories of Elsa?s magic. Elsa is warned by the troll king that she must overcome her fear and learn to control her magic otherwise more people will get hurt.

For this week?s movie, I am going back into the archives for one of my favorite John Wayne Movies: ?El Dorado?. This movie is set in the Old West and John Wayne plays a gunslinger-for-hire, named Cole Thornton. At the beginning of the movie Cole Thornton has arrived in the old west town of El Dorado to meet a man named Bart Jason (Ed Asner). Bart wants Cole?s help in pressuring another family, the McDonalds, out of their water rights. Cole, despite being a gunslinger, has a conscience though and when informed by the local sheriff, who is also an old friend, J.P. Harrah (Robert Mitchum) that Bart Jason is no good, he refuses the job.

As our month of movies goes on, I would like to focus on the Bourne Legacy. This movie is unique in many ways because it is at once the fourth movie in a series and at the same time it is the first in what I hope will be a new series of action movies.

Every July in my Spiritual Ponderings, I like to focus on different spiritual insights from movies. When I first started my spiritual ponderings close to ten years ago, I had no problem finding movies that I wanted to see. This year, I actually found it very difficult to find movies that I wanted to see much less write about. I went so far as to open up a Netflix account and I was amazed at the number of movies but many of them did not seem worth watching. Eventually I did discover four movies that I liked and that I thought offered some great spiritual insights.