Thirty seconds after I got off the plane, I forgot what it was like to be warm. The wind blew through me like I was a screen door. The blood cells in my veins froze together. My lips cracked like a forty year-old driveway.
When I was nineteen, I worked at a Wal-Mart in Montevideo, Minnesota. The wind chill would sometimes go down to sixty below, and I would push shopping carts back into their corales, all while wearing a t-shrt, enjoying the cold. Since then, I always joked I’d never get cold again.
Well, Oklahoma City, you’ve proved me wrong.
I was there on a film assignment. My Pastor, Chris Chadwick, was speaking at a Church Planter’s Conference at Heartland Baptist Bible College. It’s a small campus, with about five hundred students–mostly from Kansas, Oklahoma, or Washington.
The trip was buckets of fun. The Cimarron Steakhouse served the best nine dollar steak I’ve ever had. I ate at Whataburger twice–which, by the way and contrary to popular belief–is just okay. The church services I filmed were energetic and… well, southern (”YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-HEW!!”). The people were kind. The footage was powerful.
There’s a strange magic to filming a documentary: every time you hit ‘record,’ the story turns on its ear. My Master Plan for the film–the grand, specific outline I spent two weeks on in December–is now out the window. I made the mistake of filming an interview with Chris Chadwick’s parents, who were there to cheer their son on as he preached.* One element in particular derailed me: Gerald Chadwick’s pride in his son.
While on camera, Chris’s parents told me their son’s life story. They painted a picture of Chris Chadwick the boy… his focus in school, his love for basketball, his tender attitude toward his mother, his home-body character as a young man, his fleeting desire to be rich as a teen, his passionate commitment to Christ as an adult. It was the most human interview I’ve ever had the privilege to film. Just to see the magic in his parents’ eyes… it made me miss my Daddy.
I contemplated Chris Chadwick with his Dad. They’re both curch planters (they move to towns that need churches and then plant them). As I prepared the film, my cynical side imagined some sense of inadequacy in the younger Chadwick: a competition, a hunger for attention.
Nope.
What I saw between them was…
….relief. Rest. Warmth. Pride.
When you film a documentary, your goal is to just BE THERE, observing as life happens in front of you. The highest privilege a filmmaker has is to observe love–familial or otherwise. These moments are fleeting, vaporous. They’re to be venerated… God forbid they should be forgotten in this life. My highest calling is to help us remember.
In short, I had a nice trip to Oklahoma.
I still can’t feel my lips.
*Incidentally, now I don’t have to fly to Texas to interview them. Yay for saving money!
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