As some of you may know, I am a die-hard Marvel Comics fan. I grew up reading Incredible Hulk and Spiderman Comics with my male cousins. So, I always enjoy a good Marvel Superhero movie, but the Captain Marvel movie spoke to me in a different way and the Holy Spirit used it to point out a few key principles that I would like to share. If you haven’t seen the movie, beware spoilers are about to follow.
Set in the 1990s, Marvel Studios’ “Captain Marvel” follows the journey of Carol Danvers as she becomes one of the universe’s most powerful heroes. The film has positive messages related to self-control, perseverance, identity, courage, and more.
Control Your Emotions
Early in the movie, Carol Denvers is training to become a better warrior. The message during her training is largely “you have a mission. Serve well and with honor.” As well, she is told repeatedly to “Control your emotions.” For some this may seem negative, but Scripture tells us to control our emotions. We are to be “slow to anger” (Prov. 16:32), to guard against fleshly impulses (Gal. 5:16-24), and to display self-control (1 Pet. 1:5-6). Her mentor was trying to train her to keep her head in the midst of warfare. This is a lesson we all have to remember. Often, the enemy presents warfare in a very personal way—he attacks our bodies, our relationships, our finances…and it feels personal. It’s designed to feel intimate and to elicit an emotional response rather than a spiritual response. Often, when we respond emotionally, we look at our circumstances; we embrace our fears; we act out of frustration, rather than the leading of the Holy Spirit. When we respond spiritually, we seek the Lord for the root issues and the battle strategy to win. And then we go to war determined to settle for nothing less than victory.
We Have to be Resilient And Keep Getting Back Up
The movie’s defining moment was when Danvers remembered several moments in her life when she got knocked down and kept getting back up. Oftentimes, the difference between winning and losing is to just keep getting back up after getting knocked down. Carol Danvers doesn’t remember anything about her past but she is manipulated into just seeing the parts in her life where she has failed or fallen. In her quest to find herself, the moment where she can show her strength, her memory goes to all of those times after being defeated, where she stood up and kept fighting.
This is what it means to fight with honor—Trying again and again. The devil is the master of deception and we are targeted with lies all the time like, “you are not good enough. Your best efforts aren't enough. You’ll never make it.” What we often forget to see is the strength God gives us to get back up again and again and again.
When You Embrace Who God Made You to Be, You Become Powerful
In the film's climax, Carol Danvers finally owns her identity and personal power and in this moment becomes virtually indestructible. She is a one woman army! She realizes she was taken away from planet earth and taken up by the “Cree”. The closer she got to finding her authentic self, the more freely she could live.
“I have nothing to prove to you.” – Carol Danvers
Captain Marvel finally realized a powerful truth. She had nothing to prove to anyone else. She didn’t need to work for the approval of others. Initially, Vers, as she is called has no memory of her origins only mere flashes of a seemingly past life and she believes it is the Cree aliens that have given her super power abilities, which they have ultimate control over and can take back from her at any given time. Eventually, she finds that they didn’t give her super powers and the device that she thought empowered her was in fact limiting her. As she embraces who she is outside of what people have told her, she realizes that she is more powerful than she has ever known.
The moment Carol finds her true identity, she responds with, “you’re right, I’m only human” and then is flooded by those images of victory. For us as Christians, the same truth applies. We are only human. The devil tries to manipulate that truth into something we should be ashamed of. But if our identity is fully in God and we are completely confident in Him, we will finally be able to complete our mission on earth. The moment she was able to be humbled by her true identity, she was free and powerful.
“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”
― St. Catherine of Sieni
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