In the film “Bean”, the bumbling Mr. Bean travels to America when he is given the responsibility of taking the highly valuable painting “Whistler’s Mother” to a Los Angeles museum. He is mistakenly taken to be an art expert by his hosts in America, rather than the more hands-on, art gallery assistant that he is. Mr Bean thinks this is a wheeze, and proceeds to unwittingly create mayhem and stress for his hosts, acting like a child and treating the trip as a holiday. All this changes when told he must deliver a speech to accompany the unveiling of the painting, his hosts still assuming he is an eccentric world art expert.
Rather than admitting the truth, Bean attempts the speech. He is unprepared and understandably rather nervous at the likelihood of his true identity being revealed. Whistler’s Mother is a picture of the artist’s mother as an old lady in period dress. It is rather plain. Bean rambles on a bit, then suddenly hits on an amazing idea of why the painting may be significant: the fact that Whistler bothered to paint it at all showed his love for his mother. This revelation brings the audience to their feet in rapturous applause.
I sometimes wonder why God bothered creating us. Humans have obviously caused him great anguish and anger at times over the centuries, something he would have known in advance. It is not as if God needs us: as God he is whole.
Maybe the fact that God was bothered to create us shows his love and reveals his character.
As a (sometimes) lazy person, this challenges me. Why should I bother….. ?(fill in the blank, washing-up for example). I think that I should bother because I am made in the image of God, and God is love, and I know that partly because he bothered to create me.
Jon Seaton
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