Like Potatoes had a profound effect on my faith. I suspect that part of the reason people ask this question is that watching the movie probably had a profound effect on their faith, and that of many others. But it’s a hard one to answer directly because the experience of making the movie was vastly different to the experience of watching it.
It was incredibly fulfilling for me to pour my heart and soul into the story and to bring Angus to life on the big screen. I instinctively communicate through storytelling and that is what I tried to focus on throughout the shoot.
I would often rewrite my dialogue, especially in the scenes where Angus preached or spoke to a large group of people. I imagined myself speaking to the real people who would be watching the movie. In my performances, I drew heavily on my own faith journey to give heart and substance to those scenes.
In the end, I believe we managed to produce a movie with lots of heart, which resonated with our audiences’ own stories. This would explain why they received it with open arms.
The movie was a surprising runaway success. No one expected that. According to Sony Pictures in the US, hundreds of millions of people around the world have watched it. Millions of DVDs have been sold and it has been translated into 17 languages.
In reality, though, when we started shooting Faith Like Potatoes, we were just hoping that we could distribute it locally on DVD. It was only during the fifth week of the shoot, when we watched a rough 45-minute edit of some of the footage, that we started thinking that it might be something special and that we should try to secure a theatrical release.
Being involved in Faith Like Potatoes had a profound effect on me, especially when I saw how our work touched so many people’s lives. It left me in awe of God’s grace, and what He could do with the telling of a heartfelt story.
I remember about four weeks into the shoot asking Reg why they had only cast the starring role three weeks before the shoot. He said that they had held auditions for almost three months – they saw many good actors, but none of them felt right for the role of Angus.
So, shortly before shooting would begin, a very frustrated Reg found himself walking around his apartment, praying and asking God for help. And that’s when my name popped into the director’s head.
Even though God uses our talents for his purposes, let’s not forget it was his grace and favour that allowed Faith Like Potatoes to do what it did and continues to do. It profoundly affected my faith by demonstrating that God is sovereign. We get to be a part of what He is doing – not the other way around.
A lesson I would learn over the next few years as, ‘The Lord took me through the fire.’
A VAGABOND
vag·a·bond
‘vægə‚ bɒnd
noun
1. a person who wanders from place to place without a home or job.
adjective
1. having no settled home.
‘God’s love takes us on journeys we do not wish to go, makes us travel by roads we do not wish to use, to take us to places we never wish to leave.’
Thomas Cranmer, fifteenth-century theologian
THE BEGINNING
I made my entrance into the world on a Friday. The date was 12 May 1972. History books and Google searches indicate that this was a pretty uneventful day as far as world events were concerned. BJ Vorster was in office as South Africa’s seventh prime minister, the Cold War was simmering in the background and Roberta Flack’s hit, First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, was the number-one hit on the Billboard Charts.
Apart from my parents seeing my face for the first time, I think it’s safe to say that, for many people in the world, 12 May 1972 was just another random day.
But, for me – it was my birthday. Birthdays are special and they have this magical, almost sacred, feel about them.
Deep in our hearts, there seems to be a feeling or a hint that we did not arrive on this planet by accident. That, somehow, we were created with intention. And, if we can still our hearts long enough, we find there a longing to know what we were made for. Of course, our parents played their part in the story of our creation, but even they are surprised and overwhelmed when we finally make our appearance. Like they were given the most precious gift.
Why, for the most part, do we as humans respond like that? Why is life so precious? Why does it feel like there is an intention to our lives and we can’t help seeing it as a gift, even though we get to play a part in creating it?
I personally believe that the answer lies in a few lines taken from a poem written by the great Hebrew king, David: ‘You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb … You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed’ (Psalm 139:13-16, NLT).
This poem tells us that, long before King David’s parents even had the desire for a child, God already had plans for him. This beautiful poem was not only written for David and Israel’s sake, it was written for all humanity. Your life and my life are as sacred and special as this poem describes. Its words are in the strands of the DNA God created and used to knit us together. That is why there’s a shadow or a hint in us that maybe, just maybe, we were made for a purpose because we were certainly made on purpose.
With all this intention and purpose, I must believe that 12 May 1972 was not just a random day for me to be born on; it was a day God handpicked for me. I don’t think I will ever fully know the reasoning behind his decision, but as time goes by I am still discovering the courage to believe that ‘Every day of my life was recorded in your book’. No one’s birth is random.
From God’s point of view, then, if our lives were worth making, then surely they must be worth living?
But what happens when the truth of those words is not the truth of our lives; when – for whatever reason – we feel that our lives are not worth living any more?
Maybe you’re a Christian and you’ve heard that God wants you to have your best life now. But it feels more like you’re living your worst life now. Maybe someone prophesied a great future and a hope over you and it’s been years, but nothing has changed for the better in your life.
Or someone did prophesy a very accurate word over you, one that you deeply identified with – as if they were reading your heart’s thoughts and you knew in an instant that God was speaking to you about your future. That God was calling you. There was great excitement and you felt like you were walking on clouds.
Now you berate yourself for being so naïve. For believing such ‘nonsense’, because nothing that you thought was going to happen has played itself out as you expected it would. Maybe you’ve walked away from your faith, disillusioned by how much you struggled to keep things together while waiting on God to fulfil his promises.
Perhaps you grew up in a country where, based on your race, you were discriminated against. No thanks to the injustice of this system, you could never reach your full potential.
The truth is, it is heartbreaking when broken dreams or dashed expectations leave our lives high and dry. Even more overwhelming when you realise your dreams can never be fulfilled because you simply can’t get those years back.
To defend ourselves against the onslaught of unfulfilled dreams we hide the pain by finding a ‘level of despair we can tolerate and call it happiness’, as Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said.
If you are young enough, we might simply say that we’ll live to fight another day. What happens when you run out of days, or you simply don’t have the energy to fight any more? Or, you got what you wanted but – as many celebrities and billionaires have discovered – it still wasn’t enough. That’s when we might find ourselves accumulating despair or realising how despairing we really are.
Dealing