“JUST KEEP SWIMMING” is the line most remembered and quoted from Disney/Pixar’s Finding Nemo.  When I saw the movie again in 3-D this past weekend, I knew that would be the moment that all of the kids and many of the adults would join in like it was a movie made for audience participation.

One particular scene really tugged at me this time.  I’ve seen the movie a number of times (not always paying all that much attention to it), but I can’t say that I remembered the moment where Marlin gives up and decides to leave Dory behind.  It goes like this:

A default life is one that gets by without what Marlin offered Dory: someone who didn’t just listen or believe in them.  No, Marlin had become a signpost of something better.  Dory calls it home.  Home is one word for it, a thing that points to a greater reality.  It is the place of love, where fear is absent, work brings creation and where rest brings recreation, where the rules of the world do not apply.  For the Christian it is the kingdom of God, that invasion of eternal living into the world of the walking dead.  Those people are beyond price, their often inadvertent gift beyond compensation.

Who, then, are the Marlins in our lives?  Who reminds us of things vital and true?  What family members and friends and students and teachers bring us back to that good place we so often forget in our default living?