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Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Jake's Take: Star Trek V - God and the Tough Truths

Deriving financial insights from today's blockbusters and yesteryear's classics.


When trying to teach their children about the value of truth, many parents use books like The Emperor’s New Clothes, or The Boy Who Cried Wolf. I’m sure I’ll get around to using those stories with my kids some day, too, but I’m also going to use Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.

Oh, sure, laugh if you will, but there’s a powerful message of truth in that movie.

Star Trek V was the first Star Trek film to approach the question of God and his existence in the universe. In the film, the Enterprise and its crew are hijacked by a man who believes he has found God and Heaven and he uses the Enterprise to take him there. When the crew arrives at a desolate planet, they find a divine being that calls itself "God," and he has an unusual request: he wants to use the Enterprise to explore the galaxy.

Which is when Captain Kirk poses this question: “What does God need with a starship?”

The rest of the crew is stunned that Kirk had the audacity to ask such a question to such a powerful being, and “God” is clearly annoyed. When Kirk asks again he gets shot in the chest with a bolt of energy. The rest of the crew begins to doubt that this is truly the benevolent God of the universe, and they boldly take up Kirk's challenge: What does God need with a starship? After they continue to pressure the divine being, “God” finally reveals that he is actually an alien prisoner long held on the planet and he needs the starship to escape.

Ah, the revealing power of truth.

There is a wonderful lesson here: bringing truth into a dangerous situation is never without its risks, but the bigger risk is not having the audacity to seek truth, to ask the tough questions... which could lead to an alien prisoner being released on the galaxy and creating all kinds of havoc!

Seriously though, how many husbands find their marriages slowly slipping into disaster because they don't confront their wives about poor spending habits? How many wives are so afraid to upset their husbands that they don’t ask them about inconsistencies or errors they see in the budget? How many money mistakes do we make when we fail to communicate with each other?

We not only have to be willing to ask those questions, even if we risk exposing a tough truth, but we also need to be ready to receive those questions with a loving heart, and not knock our loved ones down with a bolt—a sharp rebuke, discipline, or worse. We should want our spouse to tell us that there are problems in the budget. We should feel free to approach them if we want to make changes or improvements.

So take a lesson from Captain Kirk and ask the tough questions.

Keep pinchin' :-)

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