~by Julia Roller

We went to see The Lego Movie at the drive-in a few weeks ago. Popcorn, Reese’s Pieces, beanbags and blankets in the back of the car–it was a sublime evening.

The whole way home, all four of us kept humming the movie’s theme song, “Everything Is Awesome.”

A few days later, my husband convinced me to download the song—you know, “for the kids.”

Now everything is awesome in our house all the time. The kids hide around the corner and beg me to play it so they can make an “Everything is Awesome” entrance into the kitchen each morning. (I have to admit, this is super cute.)

“Everything Is Awesome” is quite possibly the biggest earworm ever. I find myself singing or humming it to myself all day long. And since it is really an upbeat song, it’s kind of hard to feel sad when you’re listening to it. Annoyed, yes. Sad, no.

The movie itself is about a conflict between the teamwork driven, follow-the-directions regular people and the individualistic, directions-shunning “Master Builders.” “Everything Is Awesome” is the government-sponsored theme song of the team players. The lyrics are a tongue-in-cheek assertion that, well, everything, from allergies to a book on Greek antiquities to socks and a very old vest, is awesome. Basically, “Everything you see, or think, or say…Is awesome!”

Even as you’re singing along with these lyrics, you can’t help but laugh at this send-up of our marketing-mad culture. Everything, even the stuff that is so obviously NOT awesome, is awesome!!

But when my mother-in-law, an ordained pastor and retired hospital chaplain, was visiting last week, she couldn’t get enough of the song, and its theology. She loved the reminder that, indeed, everything was awesome.

She had a point. “Everything Is Awesome” is like a audio gratitude journal. We should be grateful for all the things in our lives, even those that, on the surface, don’t seem like anything to appreciate.

In Something More, Catherine Marshall writes about how she felt God asking her one day to praise him for everything in her life, even the things that irritated her. She was skeptical but obedient. To her great surprise, she found that doing so put all of her petty problems into perspective, that she started to see the humor in all those things she had taken so seriously, and feel God’s humor too.

But she still questioned, “‘Lord, I can see praising you for bring good out of all these things, but I still don’t understand how I can praise You for the bad things. Doesn’t that make you the Author of Evil?’

[God responded,] ‘I am Lord over all—good and evil. You start praising. I’ll supply the understanding.'”

Every time I read this I find it newly profound. We praise; God helps us to understand.

So I praise. And I play, “Everything Is Awesome,” and dance in the kitchen with my boys.

Everything is awesome, indeed.