Name

So, to be honest, up until last night, i had only ever seen two nooma videos. One, i watched while i was on internship - partially as a way to waste some time, and the other, i believe they played one at LYC in the not too distant past. I had always liked what i had seen - and everyone i know and respect seems to think they are ok, good even, but i had just never had the occasion to watch them.

If you don't know what nooma videos are click here.

Anyway, back in the fall i (and my wife and son) joined a small group through our church. Most small groups are people of like minded age, life stage, beliefs etc, getting together to learn, to hang out, to be friends. I had only really been in one small group before and it was short lived because Cara and I moved away from Calgary to V-town. So, we joined this small group, it has friends, we aren't all at the same stage of life, and we haven't done much learning. So far we have spent our time getting to know each other and having fun, which is cool. But last night, we kicked off the learning, deep talk type stuff that one would normally associate with small groupings of the church variety. And we decided to try out these Nooma videos (of which our church has the entire collection). I have to say that this video of approximatly 11 minutes was really sobering to me. It talked about our identity - who we are - what is our name - and as the speaker or narrarator spoke, we watched images of 4 people removing layers of shirts from thier bodies that had simple words on them. The words were all the names or identifying things about them. Some of them were connected to thier abilities or jobs, some were health and body type related, some were connected to faith or moral beliefs, some were beliefs that the person had about themselves and they seemed to get more personal as it went. I won't give away the ending in case you ever decided to investigate this little ditty yourself, but it was very powerful to me. It challenged our group to really give thought to where we place and recieve our identity, and what a healthy version of that would and should be. So, i recommend this "thing" i don't know if i would call it a film, but whatever it is, it was powerful in my life, as it caused me to wrestle with my identity and who i believe myself to be and why. The teaching was excellent, the imagery was excellent, and the discussion that it caused had depth.