KEYWORDS: love, god, world, war, everything, faith

Happy Endings

David Berg

—About Modern Movies & Skylab!GP 80219 June 1979

1. "LOVE STORY" WAS A BEAUTIFUL MOVIE up until it got toward the end. It was all about romance, but everything took a weird perverted twist at the end. It was about these two kids that met at Yale, & their love story developed & it was beautiful. Then they got married, she got pregnant & they were going to have a baby.

2. BUT THEN SHE GOT SICK WITH LEUKEMIA & DIED IN THE HOSPITAL! All I remember is that horrible leukemia scene‚ & then seeing him out there on the sidewalk cursing his father & saying, "You don't love me, you never did love me!" & blah, blah! And one of the most horrible quotes I remember from that whole damn picture was an absolute lie! He said: "Love is never having to say you're sorry!"

3. MY GOD!—WHAT KIND OF PHILOSOPHY IS THAT? Everybody makes mistakes, even if you love somebody. I'm always telling Maria, I'm sorry. I was telling her this morning, I'm sorry.—"Love is never having to say you're sorry!"—Isn't that ridiculous?—What kind of philosophy is that? My goodness!

4. LOVE IS SAYING YOU'RE SORRY—just the opposite! If you make a mistake or you hurt somebody, if you love them you say you're sorry!—What a terrible thing: "Love is never having to say you're sorry"! I thought & thought & thought about that. Oh, that made me so mad!

5. IT'S REALLY A TWISTED, PERVERTED ENDING ON THAT "LOVE STORY"!—What a lie! It's really a "Hate Story"! She died in agony, & he cursed God & his father & hated life! The whole thing was a blast at God & a blast at love & a blast at life! Somebody wrote that who was absolutely soured on life & love & God! It was anything but a love story!

6. IT WAS LITERALLY A HATE STORY, A REAL HATE STORY!: "I hate you, Father! I hate You, God! I hate you, Life! I hate you‚ Love!"—And all the rest! I mean, that's what it was. "Love Story" was a misnomer if I ever heard one! "Love Story"! Boy, it was a Hate Story if I ever saw one! It's one of the first weird American movies that I ever saw!

7. IT'S BEEN ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO NOW WHEN AMERICAN MOVIES FIRST STARTED HAVING BAD, UNHAPPY ENDINGS. American movies when I was young used to be famous for the "Happy Ending"! They used to criticise the European movies & drama because there was so much tragedy & tragic & unhappy endings in European theatre, & it was true!—European drama in those days usually had sad endings.

8. I THINK IT HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH PEOPLE LOSING FAITH & becoming very pessimistic. They've lost faith in God, so therefore they lose faith in Love & therefore they lose faith in Life, they lose faith in people & they lose faith in everything. So how could anything have a happy ending? Of course everything's sad & everything's tragic & everything has a bad ending‚ if you have that outlook on life!

9. BUT IN THE OLD DAYS AMERICANS WERE STILL PRETTY RELIGIOUS & STILL BELIEVED IN GOD & were somewhat Christian—formally at least—& churchy. They had a fairly faithful outlook on life: God was in control & everything was going to work out right somehow.—And all the movies had nice‚ happy endings. They were success stories or love stories, where the guy finally gets the girl or the job or something or other. Everyone always had all kinds of troubles, but it always finally turned out all right in the end.

10. BUT JUST ABOUT THE TIME OF WORLD WAR TWO things changed. Up to World War Two people really thought there was never going to be another World War. They really thought they had solved all the problems: They had the League of Nations now & World War One was gone forever, & certainly there would never be another World War. They'd had one horrific war & they never wanted another one! They thought they had it all solved & there would never be another World War.

11. THEN HITLER CAME ALONG. ...

12. THAT WAS ALSO ABOUT THE TIME WHEN EVOLUTION & UNBELIEF & ATHEISM REALLY BEGAN TO TAKE ITS EFFECT on America. Up to that time, up to World War Two, America was still pretty Christian & pretty religious & churchy. At least formally & professionally they were supposedly Christian & a Godly nation‚ & it was really a happy time. Even in the Great Depression people were happy. They didn't have much money‚ but the War was over & they weren't getting slaughtered so much.

13. WORLD WAR ONE, & LATER HITLER, WERE ALL JUDGMENTS OF GOD ON THE PEOPLE FOR LOSING FAITH. They went rampant & didn't need God anymore because they had solved everything‚ solved the depression, solved the wars. So they threw God out too, mostly through evolution. So God let another war come.

14. BUT AFTER WORLD WAR TWO IT SEEMED LIKE ALMOST EVERYBODY ABANDONED THEIR FAITH IN GOD. They lost their faith in peace, had the atom bomb, got scared stiff of blowing themselves to Hell, & still are! My God‚ what people will endure just to stay alive! I think if I had been that guy in that movie last night ("Midnight Express") I would have prayed to die before I would have gone through all that!

15. (MARIA: WITHOUT KNOWING THE LORD, THEY'RE AFRAID TO DIE!) I would have been so thankful to get out of it all. It's a fact!—They are hanging on to life for dear life because they're so damn scared of going to Hell where things could be worse! Well, I don't think even Hell could be as bad as what he was going through in that damn picture! Wow!—That was like Hell on Earth, that prison!

16. (MARIA: BUT QUITE A BIT OF IT WAS BECAUSE OF HIS OWN MISBEHAVING. The prison actually wasn't, to me, I didn't think it was unbearable. It was pretty rough‚ but I thought they had quite a bit of freedom. They suffered mostly for their own rebelliousness, trying to escape & fighting & stealing & doing a lot of things they shouldn't have done.)

17. YOU WONDER WHY they would even want to take care of those guys & keep them so many years? You'd think they'd do like they used to do with the bums in Dade County: They'd haul them up to the County line & dump them into the next County, then the police there would pick them up & haul them up & dump them into the next County just to get rid of them!

18. I USED TO WORK AT THE JAIL with a lot of those drunks & bums: there's nothing some of them liked better than landing in jail!—There they had some security & three square meals a day & a nice warm bed at night & everything taken care of—everything but their liquor, & sometimes they could get that too!

19. AFTER WORLD WAR TWO IT SEEMED LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD TURNED PESSIMISTIC‚ especially the Americans who had been rather optimistic up till that time. But then after World War Two they became pessimists too & nearly all were skeptics after World War Two. It seemed like everybody turned sour, pessimistic, skeptical & unbelieving.

20. EVEN THE MOVIES TURNED SOUR & began having unhappy & tragic endings & screwy, weird, twisted‚ perverted plots—just like people were thinking & believing!: There's no point in life & there's no point to living, there's no love, there's no God‚ there's no peace, there's no safety, so we might as well end it all!

21. I THINK SOME PEOPLE WANT THE ATOMIC WAR TO COME!—It's like worldwide suicide! They'd love to have something come & destroy everything & put an end to it all! That's the Devil's attitude, of course, that's what he would like to do! He's the Destroyer! He'd like to destroy the world & its people, or get them to destroy themselves, which they are going to do.—Like the Scripture: "Them that love death!" (Pro.8:36.)

22. (MARIA: REMINDS ME OF THAT MOVIE "THE BODY SNATCHERS," about the aliens who were taking over the Earth by possessing people's minds! After one man's fight against it all & although he seemed determined to win it for the good, instead he finally joined them too! He becomes one of them. There was nothing, no more hope! So he even turns on his own girlfriend & betrays her! There was no hope in that movie.)

23. WELL, THEY'VE LOST FAITH IN GOD, SO THEY'VE LOST FAITH IN EVERYTHING. I mean‚ without God, without faith, there's no hope‚ there's no love, there's no God, there's no nothing! (Maria: And evil triumphs!) Yes, exactly! You hit the nail right on the head! The principle of the old movies & the old attitudes was that good—in spite of everything—the good will always triumph in the end. Now the basic philosophy is that, in spite of everything‚ Evil (or the Devil) will finally triumph in the end! It's almost like they are already worshipping the Devil, that he's the winner, & in spite of everything, despite God, despite everything man can do, the Devil is going to win in the end, Evil will triumph & the whole world will be destroyed in the final disaster!

24. PEOPLE ALREADY HAVE A REAL DOOMSDAY SPIRIT! I guess the Lord lets them have it because they deserve it, because Evil has triumphed with them, & so they let it triumph, because of their lack of faith in God. So they have a kind of guilt complex & an apprehensive feeling that somehow or another, they are going to be destroyed & the world is going to be destroyed, some kind of doom is going to hit them!

25. IT LOOKS LIKE NEXT MONTH THERE IS GOING TO BE SOME DOOM! "The Sky is Falling!"—The Sky Lab! Remember that funny little chicken in that kids' story?: The first time Chicken Little ever felt rain, he thought the sky was falling on his tail‚ so he ran around screaming, "The sky is falling! The sky is falling on my tail!"

26. THE FEAR OF DOOM IS A PART OF THE JUDGMENTS OF GOD ON THE GUILTY & those who deserve it, who "all their lives live in fear of death," how does that Scripture go? (He.2:15.) "... who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." (Maria: "Bondage through fear.") Yes!

27. AND YET THEY HAVE AN EVIL FASCINATION FOR DEATH! That's why they ride these motorcycles at breakneck speed & love these fast car races & dangerous sports, anything that dares death, defies death, these stunt men doing death-defying stunts, dangerous mountain climbs & dangerous feats of all kinds.

28. IT'S LIKE THEY HAVE AN EVIL FASCINATION FOR DEATH! It reminds me again of that Scripture: "Them that love death!" (Pro.8:36) They are fascinated by death! They act like they really want to die, like they're daring the Devil to kill them! But when it comes right down to it, then they don't want to!

29. BUT PTL! TYL! WE DON'T HAVE TO FEAR BECAUSE WE'RE READY TO GO! (2Co.5:8; Phil.1:21,23; 2Tim.4:6.) God bless & keep us today, give us wisdom, Lord, in Jesus' name! Amen. Well, Hey!

30. ONLY ONE MORE MONTH & SKYLAB FALLS!—God only knows where!—500 pieces over a path 4,000 miles long & 100 miles wide, think of that! Ummm! That's enough pieces to have one piece fall every eight miles! That's going to be quite a mess, huh? A thing like that could start the next war, if those pieces land in the wrong places!

31. (THEY SAY THEY CAN'T CALCULATE WHERE IT'S GOING TO COME DOWN, BUT ...) Yes, they can calculate exactly where their rockets go & send rockets to the moon, rockets to Mars, & rockets to Venus, rockets to Jupiter‚ rockets to Saturn & take pictures & everything & calculate so exactly that they can by their controls send them down gently on a soft landing on Mars‚ millions of miles away!—Then they tell us they can't calculate where one big Skylab's going to fall!—How ridiculous!—Maybe they're afraid to tell!

32. (MARIA: NEITHER CAN THEY DESTROY IT, THEY SAY!) Yes, why can't they blow it up? Why can't they, with all their knowledge of ballistic missiles & everything, why can't they send a missile up to blast it out of the sky? If they can't even hit Skylab with a missile‚ how the hell are they going to hit all these missiles that are going to be flying overhead hitting them someday?—Huh?

33. HOW RIDICULOUS! Why shouldn't they get one of those atom submarines out there in the middle of the ocean & fire away, & sock it to it so it will fall in the ocean? Isn't that ridiculous? They have no more control over that thing than—well, they had more control over the man in the moon!

34. I MEAN, IT'S JUST UNBELIEVABLE THAT THEY WOULDN'T BE ABLE TO STOP THAT THING SOMEHOW or destroy it before it does any damage!—To think they would take a chance like that on that thing coming down on major population areas!—Worst of all on their enemies who might decide to shoot back! Well, the world is headed for doom, that's for sure!—And they seem to know it, & they seem to be very pessimistic about it!

35. THANK YOU, LORD! TTL FOR THE LORD! We have the Lord & we have love & we have life & we have faith, & therefore we have hope for better things & the best‚ that things are going to turn out all right in the end, & not so pessimistically distorted & twisted & perverted & weird & awful as the way some of these movies are going nowadays, & the way the world is going!

36. AT LEAST WE STILL HAVE FAITH IN THE HAPPY ENDING BECAUSE OF THE LORD! TYJ! In Jesus' name, amen!—Have you? Are you ready for whatever comes? If not, receive Jesus & His Spirit of Love today! Tomorrow may be too late! We're not worried because even if it kills us, we'll wake up for ever in the Heavenly Kingdom of God on Earth with peace & plenty & love for all forever!—Wanna come with us?—You can!