Bungee Jumping with Walter Mitty

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” doesn’t hide it’s identity as a moral play.

The crisp acting, inspiring scenery, and suspenseful chase kept me entertained until the moral emerged: stop living vicariously through your dreams, and go live your dreams. In case you don’t deduce that from the story, writer Steve

Conrad has the Cheryl character explain, “Life is about courage and going into the unknown.”
You could see the didactic nearing, though, with the various stunt scenes—like Walter jumping out of a helicopter into Arctic Ocean water. Seated between my wife and her dad on Christmas day, I leaned over to him during that scene and said, “I’d do that.”  And if you’ve seen my recent Facebook posts, you probably know that’s true.

See, my buddies wouldn’t need to dare me to jump out of an aircraft; and we paddle in frigid water just about every year. In just one 26-hour period last week, I attended an international soccer game, climbed a 57-meter construction crane, paraglided off a mountain then over high rise apartments, ate food at a South African braai that I don’t eat in the States, rode a decorated bike to celebrate full moon with almost 2,000 people I’ver never met, and shared a dorm room with a German fashion photographer and an Australian couple.

So, while I didn’t really need to learn Walter’s primary lesson, it was the “two” of the movie’s “one-two” educational punch that hit me so hard that I got emotional in the theater.

When Walter finally catches his photography idol in remote Middle East mountains, he finds a man whose adventures weren’t difficult choices—just part of his job as a photographer.  While that nonchalance was compelling to me, it was these exchanges that convicted me.

Sean: “They call the snow leopard the ghost cat.  Never lets itself be seen.”
Walter: “Ghost cat.”
Sean: “Beautiful things don’t ask for attention.”
Walter: “When are you going to take it?”
Sean: “Sometimes, I don’t.  If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don’t like to have the distraction of the camera.  I just want to stay in it.”
Walter: “Stay in it?”
Sean: “Yeah. Right there. Right here.”

For someone who takes a GoPro—okay: up to four GoPro’s—seemingly everywhere, that was a gut punch.  For someone who rarely, if ever, goes on an adventure and doesn’t post evidence of it on social media, that was a UFC leg sweep.
It reignited a haunting question before I left a couple weeks ago on another adventure trip: “Are you bungee jumping off that 708-foot bridge for you or for the audience?  Would you do any or all off this if you couldn’t tell anyone?”  Based on how many times I checked my Facebook to see if anyone liked my vacation media—and the fact that it was on social media before I even got on the plane to return home, I fully know the answers to these questions.

Half way through writing this post, I was talking to two of my church’s pastors after a Saturday night service.  They took this indictment one step further.  One of them told me my world view was jacked—in another area that also touches the heart of the issue of approval. The other leaned in uncomfortably close, looked me straight in the eyes, and told me that I still chase approval too hard for someone that should be chasing Jesus.

With those “faithful wounds of a friend,” they challenged me to fast and pray and ask God daily for direction on how to “get small”—how to make the story less about me and more about what God is doing in, around, and through me.
It will likely be one of the biggest adventures and challenges of my life.  So, it’s ironic, I guess, that somebody dared me to do it—and that I won’t be able to capture it on anything GoPro makes.