BRUCE ALMIGHTY

Universal Studios
PG-13

In Bruce We Trust
Bruce Almighty stars Jim Carrey as God. It sounds blasphemous, but the movie actually has some great topics for discussion. Bruce has a bad day and rages at God over his mediocre life, and prays for God to give him a sign, and answer him. God (Morgan Freeman) does answer, by deciding to let him try to be God for a while, to see if he can do a better job.

You can take your pick of the multitude of topics to bring up with this film.

Here are some options for you:

Show me a sign
As Bruce complains about his life, he prays to God and asks God to show him a sign. As he is praying, he is passing construction signs that tell him to "Turn Around," or say "Dead End," "Wrong Way," and "Do Not Enter." He ignores them all and crashes his car. His pager beeps a number he refuses to call. When the pager continues to beep after it has been destroyed, he decides to call it, and ends up meeting God in a building called "Omni Presents."

Discussion questions

• What signs did Bruce see that might have been from God?
• Do you think God sends us signs? How?
• Have you ever been through a time in your life when you think you ignored signs, but recognized them later? 
• Why doesn't God just come out and tell us stuff? (Here you can bring in that whole subject of free will, discussed later on.)

Bible helps
Mark 8:1-13. This passage is the story of the loaves and fishes, and concludes with the Pharisees arguing with Jesus and asking for a sign from heaven. Jesus sighs deeply, asking, "Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to this generation." Clearly, this generation had already been given many signs--the prophets who foretold of Jesus' birth (Isaiah 7:14, 9:2-7) and many miracles, including the one they had just witnessed of the multiplication of loaves and fishes. The Pharisees were much like Bruce, ignoring the signs right in front of them.

Free will
When God hands over God's powers to Bruce, he tells him he cannot mess with free will. Bruce finds out how frustrating this is when he starts to lose his girlfriend, (a very kind woman named Grace) and says to God, "How do you make someone love you without affecting free will?" and God answers, "Welcome to my life. If you figure out an answer to that question, let me know."

Discussion questions
Talk about how many of the questions that we have for God boil down to the idea of free will: why doesn't God end hunger and poverty, war, environmental problems, crime, etc. These are all problems that exist in the world, to varying degrees, because we choose to do things that end up affecting other people or creation in negative or positive ways. Free will influences people in small ways too. God is certainly at work in everyone's lives, but as we can see from the previous discussion, we don't always choose to recognize it or pay attention to God's presence, influence, or actions. 

• What problems did Bruce run into when he struggled to use the free will given to him?
• How do you think the world would be different if there were no free will or if God directed every detail of life? How would your faith be different?
• What do you think about the comment, "it was God's will," in response to things that happen in life? What's the relationship between God's will and our free will (a gift from God)?

Bible helps
In Genesis 3, we see that God gave free will from the very beginning.

Answered prayers
Bruce uses his powers for selfish gain for the first week to please his girlfriend, to get ahead at work, and for revenge. When he encounters God again, God asks about this, and Bruce understands that the annoying voices he keeps hearing are other people's prayers. He has millions of prayers to answer; he tries to find good ways to organize them, and finally develops a Yahweh Website to hold them all. But there are so many that he finally decides just to answer yes to everything.

Through both answering his own prayers (in the first week) and everyone else's later, Bruce learns what kind of damage can be caused when people always get what they want (prompting God to ask, "Since when have humans known what they want?"). Bruce pulls the moon closer to create a mood, and a tsunami happens on the other side of the world. A bunch of people win the lottery; so many that they all only get $17 each. People's stocks go up and the financial market freaks out. The city's team wins and a riot starts.

Discussion questions

• What happens when Bruce gives everyone what he or she wants?
• Have you ever prayed for something and not received it? Have you ever discovered later that it was good you didn't get what you wanted? (A good resource for this discussion is Garth Brooks' song "Unanswered Prayers.")
• You may want to encourage youth to keep a prayer journal so they can keep track of their prayers and who and what they pray for. Go back and see if they can recognize the answers they eventually received or how their lives may have been changed or influenced by prayer.
• How do you recognize an answer to a prayer? (This gets a little tricky!)
• God also says, "People too often ask me to do things for them that they can do themselves." Do you think this is true? Have you ever prayed to do well on a test? What other prayers might be about things that people could or need to do for themselves?

Bible helps
Romans 11:33 talks about how impossible it is to understand God's decisions. In Matthew 26:39, Jesus prays a prayer that does not get answered the way he would like, when he prays "My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me, yet not what I want but what you want." Think of how different the world would be if God had chosen to answer that prayer differently.

A quote to close with from Goethe: "Every solution of a problem is a new problem."

Other things you'll get a kick out of in the movie:

• Parting the Red Sea: One of the first things Bruce does with his new powers while playing with his tomato soup.

• Most Lutheran line: Bruce says to his girlfriend, "Nothing feels right without you, Grace."

• God plays three roles in the movie: Janitor (Christ the servant?), electrician (Spirit?), and boss (God the Father?).

• God asks Bruce to "Take a closer walk with me."