I Still Believe Move Review and Giveaway

Just a warning, there are spoilers in this review. Well, hello, this is Michael Coughlin with another edition of Be a Marine. This is a very special edition of the podcast because it's different because I am going to talk about a movie review. I still believe the movie about Jeremy Camp and his wife Melissa. But I also have my daughter with me, Alexandra, who watched the movie with me.

And I thought it might be fun to review the movie together and just talk about it. So I want to start out by telling you that this movie was given to me to watch for free from a marketing campaign, Level 3 Digital. And so in exchange for watching the movie, I agreed if I liked the movie that I would promote it and I would have a giveaway contest. And I will promise you if there was ever a movie I really didn't like, I wouldn't promote it.

I've actually reviewed movies that have, and they're usually Christian faith-based movies, where after seeing it I had to tell the people that let me see it that I refused to promote it. So let me give you a few of my criteria for reviewing movies. The first thing is this. I do not review a movie, even a Christian movie, the same way I would critique a sermon, for example.

My concern when I'm watching the biography of a Christian person is not that they always had perfect doctrine that was displayed, nor even if they had it toward the end of the movie. Having said that, I'm also sensitive to the fact that movies often send messages, and I will critique a movie for its inability to maybe properly exalt Jesus Christ as it could have. But I'm not the one who made the movie, and so I can't...

Let me put it this way. I'm not going to not watch a movie and maybe even be inspired by it because the people who presented it didn't do it maybe in as bold a fashion as I would have. My exhortation to you, if that's how you feel about it, is that you get out and you preach the gospel to people and maybe you'll inspire movie makers to do the same thing in their movies. now having said that I watched I Still Believe and it's the story of Jeremy Camp he's a Christian singer and songwriter his lyrics are generally speaking very very God-centered I wrote in my review on thingsabove.us that published on May 9 I wrote that Camp stands out because his songs cannot be mistaken for being about his girlfriend instead of Jesus he writes things about God that are unmistakably about God and not necessarily about a teenage boy love interest.

If you know about Jeremy Camp's life, the movie's already spoiled. From a spoiler perspective, there won't be too many surprises because we know what happens. If you don't know who Jeremy Camp is, I encourage you to watch the movie and get to know his story a little bit. for the most part he seems to be a decent christian man who has not brought any kind of public reproach upon christ or disqualified himself and so for that we're grateful and uh i'll tell you one story when i was a when i was a very new open-air preacher i was very convinced that i needed to preach the gospel everywhere i went and i tried to bring tracks everywhere i went i was at a wedding and at this wedding they had a karaoke machine and the entire reception was people going up and taking turns singing karaoke and there was a there was a lot of there was a lot of older ladies there and and they were they were christian women it was supposed to be a christian girl getting married and uh there were these guys singing these really wicked songs like the lyrics were dirty it was basically like heavy metal which in and of itself isn't isn't wrong i'm not saying but certainly when you have a room full of ladies in their 60s and 70s and you're just pounding out secular heavy metal it's not going to be appealing to them and so i actually wanted to find a way to counteract what they were doing without basically making a rebuke of someone else's wedding who i didn't know that well and so i went to the dj and i found that he had Jeremy Camp's song, This Man, in his karaoke list.

And so I sang This Man, which is overtly about Jesus Christ. And it really encouraged the saints there that day. And so that's one of my memories of listening to Jeremy Camp and using something that he created for good. So let me stop there. And I'm going to ask my daughter what she thought. Like, what did you think just overall of the movie?

I really liked it. I thought that it was great. I didn't know the story before I saw the movie, so I thought that it did a good job of presenting the important parts and also including little details along the way, and it added to the story. And I also felt that the whole movie wasn't necessarily centered around Jesus but there was still like a significant amount that did like show where their faith was throughout the movie yes I agree and and I said in my review um this movie suffers from the the uh quote talks about God a lot but not about Jesus syndrome that drives me bananas So this movie was clearly about people of some kind of faith and their faith was kind of obviously if you know the story in the god of the bible i personally wish they would have done more overt explanations of who god is who jesus christ is and things like that i like to believe that in so so the story is really about suffering yeah there's a woman who suffers throughout the movie and and she has to make up her mind that God is still good, basically, even in the midst of her suffering.

And his song, I Still Believe, is very much about even when he doesn't understand what God is doing, even when what we can see in this world actually seems bad, that we still believe in God's faithfulness and goodness. Well, and I would say even while watching the movie, I kind of noticed that it fell along the same lines of I Can Only Imagine, like that movie. It was made by the same people.

Right. So, like, when we were watching it and you were, like, doing the review, which I thought was, like, for, like, the Christian, like, you watch Christian movies and do a review. So when I saw it like that, while watching the movie, I was kind of surprised that Jeremy Camp, like, in the movie wasn't more Christ-centered. But, like, Melissa was. I felt like for the majority of the movie, it was coming mostly from her than from really anywhere else.

And for him, it was mostly just his music and not talking to people about that or stuff like that. That's a good point. It did seem like he learned a lot from her faith. Yeah. And everybody did. Yeah, for sure.

For sure. And even us now today are able to look at her faithfulness through her trial. This woman was suffering through a trial back at a time before I was a Christian. and I was thinking about as I watched this movie when I was her age and the types of things I was doing and there she was suffering and giving praise to God so that was very encouraging so yeah so if you're a hardcore Christian and every movie has to be non-stop exaltation of Jesus this would be a tough one for you if you enjoy a good biography if you liked I can only imagine.

If you liked I am not ashamed. If you liked biographies of regular Christian people who God may have used in extraordinary ways then then this is a this is a good story and we like to believe we like to believe that we can be forgiving of movie makers who don't do things the way we do I guess. So I didn't remember anything in the movie that I would have said was overtly bad.

So, you know, if you were worried about like some random tongue speaking section or somebody saying something, you know, overly heretical, denying Trinitarian doctrine, there was none of that. There was no there was no exaltation of other religions. You know, it was clear that these people were trying to do the right thing, even in the scenes in college when he's dating his wife.

There was no hint of them going in the bedroom together. In fact, after their first date, he sort of looked like he was going to lean in. And she just shuts the door on him. And so you kind of get this idea that these were kids that were susceptible to temptation, but they were still trying to do the right thing. And so I appreciated that. There was no immodesty to be concerned about.

So for me, it was a good kind of family movie, and it was a chance to learn about a Christian. Now, let me ask you this, Alexandra. Is there a scene in the movie that particularly impacted you, either at the time or afterwards even, you remember? Yeah, so while we were watching it, actually, when this scene happened, I was thinking about what Melissa said in the scene. and I was like, I need to write it down before I forget.

And I ended up forgetting, so we went and found it. But I think that one of my favorite scenes in the movie probably was when Jeremy and Melissa went on a date, or they hung out, really, and they went to an observatory. Planetarium, basically, right? Yeah, and they were looking at stars and galaxies that had been projected up on the ceiling. and she she has like a big monologue in this section and she's talking about how god created all the stars and and just like the beauty of it all and him painting the sky and and she said the god of a trillion stars knows my name and he has a destiny just for me and i just thought that that was a really great line in the movie yeah it's a it's a very it it's a good picture of you know i I think it's Psalm 8, where David wrote, Who am I that the God of the universe would know me?

Let me just look it up here. In Psalm 8, David writes, What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? And that's following up when he says, When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, What is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you care for him?

And that scene really encapsulates what that psalm was talking about. This idea that you look up at a trillion stars in the Andromeda galaxy, 300 billion stars in our galaxy. You realize that God just whipped those together with no effort at all. That any of those stars would dwarf us and engulf us. in a moment if we got if we got anywhere closer to the Sun like a hundred miles closer to the Sun we die yeah it's crazy and if they were any farther we would die yes yeah yeah and when we realized that this great God who so infinitely vast knows our name it humbling and it wonderful to think if you a Christian today that he has set his love upon you.

And then, of course, the book of Hebrews interprets this verse as being about Jesus Christ himself. And it's Jesus Christ who came and became a man, and God loved him perfectly. And there's a song by Casting Crown, like, Who Am I? Yeah, that's from this song. That has the same kind of, yeah. When you started reading it, that's what it made me think of, too.

Yeah. Yeah, a lot of songs are taken from the Psalms, because that's how the Psalms were originally written. Many of them were made just for singing to the choir master, right? That's what Psalm 8 says. So, yeah, for me, I found it really significant in the movie that two things. the first one is that Melissa Camp was going to go through she gets married to him her name is Melissa Camp but Melissa Camp we're not trying to spoil the movie but this is a true story that's been public for 15-20 years so if you don't know the story it's not that far from you if you wanted to look it up on Wikipedia if you watch the trailer too it kind of shows stuff You kind of know what's going to happen.

But Melissa Camp had to face the fact that she was suffering when, in her mind, God had a plan for her. That's what you just read, that he has a destiny for her. And in her mind, that plan would be fall in love, get married, bear children. That's shown in the movie that she wanted children. I'm going to start crying talking about it. I know, yeah.

Me too. But she wanted, when this happened, it's portrayed that she really accepted that this was God's will for her. And that for her, she would do whatever, if it would bring him glory and maybe, hold on, I'm sorry, and help another person. Even just one person. And she said even just one person. And there's, you know, this movie does a good job of foreshadowing.

So you pay attention early, you'll see things later in the movie, and you're like, oh, wow, yeah. And the other thing, though, is that she referenced that song by Ginny Owens where she says, I will go through the fire if you want me to. It's a really sweet song by Ginny Owens, If You Want Me To. But the other thing that was significant to me that was, it wasn't overly played. and in fact because Jeremy Camp was one of the producers of the movie and maybe we can give him some credit for this the movie really seems to exalt Melissa and her faith and it almost makes him look a little bumbling at times and maybe that was intentional because maybe he has humility and he didn't want the movie to be all about the great Jeremy Camp but there was one part where he likes this girl and she gets sick.

And you see in the trailer, she's going through an MRI machine and stuff. And she's getting sick. And she's obviously sick in a very serious way. And he says, I want to marry her. Yeah. Like this isn't like, hey, you're going to hold me back from my career if I've got to go to doctor's appointments. and stuff.

Yeah. This isn't, well, you know, I'm a 22-year-old guy. He was 20. At the time, yeah. Yeah. He wasn't saying to himself why.

Yeah, he dropped out of school to help her. So this wasn't a guy who was thinking, I need to find a nice, young, you know, beautiful girl, and if the one I find starts to get sick, I'll go find another young, healthy one. Because they didn't, they hadn't even known each other for very long either, and he just loved her yeah yeah they met freshman year at college it looks like and then um they were married in 2000 2001 2000 i think because she died in 2001 i just spoiled that didn't i yeah you did i you you started going downhill a little when you started talking about her getting sick yeah so spoiler alert well put the spoiler alert in after we say it well if she died in 2001 And so we just ruined the movie for anyone.

Nobody who listens to my podcast does not know this already. So anyway, the point is that he decided that he wanted to love her. And this was a very real situation, I think, of godly husband love that Jesus Christ has for his church that men in the church are supposed to have for their brides, where he did not, there was almost nothing selfish about marrying her.

Yeah. This was all about, like, I'm going to just stand by her. And he was very hopeful that she would make it. He constantly referred to a miracle happening, you know. Yeah, he had people praying for her at his concerts. but so you just see this picture of let me put it this way i think a lot of young people even even older people when looking for a spouse they're not looking for what jeremy camp must have been looking for he was looking for a woman with godly character yeah who who he could love whereas a lot of people are looking at how they could use someone like oh well will she be a you know good for ministry well you know what I mean hey she could offer him very little at that point yeah and and he said I'm gonna spend my life with you and it reminds me of a secular movie I watched a long time ago I think it's called here on earth with uh what his name Chris Klein and Lee Lee Sobieski I know is oh is that right And it was the same concept where a guy decides to love a girl who sick And you just see this self-sacrificial desire to care for someone else rather than worry about what they can do for you.

And here's a young guy that potentially was thrown away, a possible career and things, you know. So then as we know, God blessed him later with records. And he sold a lot of records and he's done a lot of performances. And so the story itself is amazing to me. And I do think that Christians should be able to see Jesus Christ work in their lives. Does that make sense?

Yeah. So do you have any other comments? Anything about the movie that struck you? I mean, no. The one thing that you... We kind of talked about the two parts that were most significant or standing out to me already.

And I cried most of the movie anyway, so it kind of was all on the... Yeah, it's hard to remember some of it. Yeah, it was all... But definitely the one scene that I talked about and then just like Melissa's faith through the whole thing and her trying to use her life to help others. Definitely a tearjerker. And you definitely get to relate to the pain of someone else.

You see them go through things and you put yourself in their shoes. Yeah. And you think, well, what would I do if I had to go through that? Right. What if it was my daughter? What if it was my wife?

You know what I mean? I did think about that when, like, we already talked about her getting sick when she went in for surgery once. Like, I saw, like, Jeremy standing there behind the doors, and then I just kind of noticed, like, her parents and her sister were there. And, like, the whole movie, you're focused on Jeremy and Melissa's story, but you don't really think about how it's affecting, like, her other family, too.

Because they were there, like, throughout the movie. Yeah. Yeah. And they, by all accounts, both of the families were decent Christian families. Yeah. And loved each other.

And so there was some, something they went through there. Well, I, I enjoyed watching it. I enjoy, I enjoy seeing it and knowing that if, you know, one of the keys to Christian biographies to me, you know, is that God shows us often through the lives of other Christians. how he will be faithful. And in some cases that means healing. In some cases it means long life, prosperity.

And in some cases it means what we would call a life cut short. And of course we know that's not the case from God's perspective, but to us, a 22-year-old woman dying is a life cut short. And what we can have hope in, though, is that since 2001, she's been suffering less than any of us. Yeah. She doesn't feel any pain. I'm watching you and I'm listening and I'm like, don't start crying, don't start crying.

It's an emotional movie. Even though we spoiled it, you should still watch it. No, you should watch it, and you should go to thingsabove.us, and you should read my review there. Really, what I want you to do is enter my giveaway. What am I giving away? I don't prepare for this stuff enough.

It's like a movie, like a pop socket. Yeah, you can win a free digital edition of I Still Believe. You can win an I Still Believe pop socket for your smartphone. Can you tell the people what that is? that it's like uh it sticks on the back of your phone and it's a circle and it flattens and then you can pull it out and you can set your phone up so it's like tilted so if you're like watching something on your phone or you don't want to hold it you can still like it's tilted up so it allows you to prop your phone up but it's not yeah but it is it's not real big and bulky once you put it on your phone though it is like kind of stuck like you can't take it on and off yeah so i don't know if you like to watch videos and things on your phone i guess it's pretty useful you can win an I still believe wristband.

That's for the U.S. only, those last two, because they're not shipping those out of the country. And there's an exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Camp via video. And when we say exclusive Q&A, what I mean is this. If you go to my blog post at Things Above Us, you can actually submit questions for Jeremy Camp and his wife, and they will answer those questions. or I'll submit the questions to the marketing people and then they'll filter which questions will actually be spoken about.

So I do encourage you if you want to get to know Jeremy better, you could try to do that. But if you go to my blog post too, you can see the giveaway. I'll put the link to the giveaway in the blog post for this podcast as well. alright so that was an official spoiler edition movie review of the Be A Breein podcast we did pretty good for the first 15 minutes I'm going to have to go back to the beginning and just toss in some and thank you Alexandra for joining me hopefully it's not the last time this is my 16 year old Alexandra she's one of the the lights of my life.

So thank you for joining me. Thank you for listening to Be a Berean with your host, Michael Coughlin. I am a writer at thingsabove.us, and I also have a personal website, michaelcoughlin.net. contact me by emailing me, michael at thingsabove.us I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.