OPINION:
One of the Christmas movies our family repeatedly watched when my boys were growing up was “The Polar Express.”
As you likely know, this is an animated film starring Tom Hanks as the conductor of a train that takes its passengers on a magical Christmas Eve trip to the North Pole, where the children are challenged to “believe” in Christmas.
At the end of the movie, one little boy is still wrestling with what to think of his adventure. What should he believe? What is true and what is false? Is Christmas real or just a childhood dream?
As the train chugs to a stop dropping each child off at their respective homes for Christmas morning, the conductor (Mr. Hanks) turns to this little boy and says, “The one thing about trains: It doesn’t matter where you’re going. What matters is deciding to get on.”
I can’t watch this movie without thinking of how our nation’s schools have completely bought this lie. “It is the journey that matters,” we are told over and over again, “not the destination.” There is no such thing as a final answer. It doesn’t matter what worldview, morality, sex or gender you choose as long as you choose one. To travel is better than to arrive. Just get on a train — any train — and enjoy the ride. It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as it works for you.
But we all intuitively know something is desperately wrong with this. We know there must be more to life than simply choosing from an amoral smorgasbord of personal values, opinions, desires and passions. At the end of the day, we understand some things are true, and some things are false, some are right, and some are wrong. When it all comes out in the wash, everyone knows some ideas are good, and some are simply evil.
When I was a college president, I reminded my students of this all of the time. I told them repeatedly that the “liberal” arts goal was liberty. I beat this drum over and over again. It was my one-string banjo. “A truly ‘liberal’ education is one that liberates,” I’d shout. It frees you from the consequences of those things that are wrong and lets you enjoy the beauty of those things that are right. Put simply, I wanted my students to get on the right “train” going in the right direction so that they, and others around them, would enjoy the blessings of living a right life; a life guided by the good, the true and the beautiful rather than the opposite.
In the 1990s, another movie also featured a train ride. This train, however, was not leading to the snow-filled skies of the North Pole but, instead, to the ash-laden courtyards of Nazi prison camps. The movie was “Schindler’s List” and, in this film, the point is made quite clear that the choice of trains does matter and that getting on the wrong one headed in the wrong direction can be a matter of life and death.
Who can watch fellow human beings herded like cattle into boxcars bound for the furnaces of Auschwitz and Dachau and argue that the joy is in the journey and that the destination is of little consequence? Who among us would be so calloused as to look our Jewish brothers and sisters in the face and say, “The one thing about trains: It doesn’t matter where you’re going. What matters is deciding to get on one and just enjoying the ride.”
Truth is always directional, and so are lies. The ideas we embrace do not remain stagnant. They are never morally neutral. Every idea — every train — will take us somewhere. We are always going in one of two directions: either toward the forgiveness and freedom that only God’s revelation offers or toward the brokenness and bondage that always and inevitably results from our fantasies and fabrications. Our choice to either embrace the truth or imbibe lies sets our course for not just our days on earth but for all eternity. It is a choice between freedom and slavery, a choice between heaven and hell.
Two thousand years ago, a child born in a manger grew to proclaim, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free,” and the direction of the world changed.
Maybe the best Christmas reflection for all of us is this: When we get on the right train and go in the right direction, we can celebrate and sing, “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, I am free at last!”
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Daycare: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery) and, most recently, “Grow Up: Life Isn’t Safe, But It’s Good.”
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