Four Great Lessons from Christopher Robin (With a Spiritual Twist)

Last updated on: August 2, 2018 at 8:17 pm by Paul Asay

Four Great Lessons from Christopher Robin (With a Spiritual Twist) 2018-08-02T16:19:16-06:00 Paul Asay

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Ewan McGregor from Disney’s Christopher Robin, photo courtesy the Disney trailer

Don’t Worry So Much

Piglet has never lost his fear of heffalumps—gigantic beasts that suck the life and joy and fun out of everything, we’re told in the film. And when Piglet thinks he sees one, he naturally begins to run, carrying a handful of acorns with him. He chatters about how those nettlesome nuts are weighing him down, but he can’t seem to let a one of them go.

You could say the same thing about Christopher Robin and his case of Very Important Things, or his brain filled with Very Important Thoughts. Burdened with all manner of adult-level worries and cares, he can’t seem to let them go, even when he finds himself in the Hundred-Acre Wood once again. All those cares and worries and anxieties press on him like demons, and that turns him—at least in the eyes of his old friends—into something of a demon himself: A Heffalump.

Pooh, being a bear of very little brain, is unencumbered by such worries. He insists the best place to go is nowhere, the best thing to do is nothing. “Doing nothing,” Pooh says, “Often leads to the very best of something.”

That’s a deeply countercultural message for us, I think. We work hard in an effort to achieve and succeed. All of that is, naturally, compounded by the frenetic pace we live at and the constant noise we deal with in our schedules and smartphones. If Christopher Robin thought things were frantic in his day, imagine what he’d think of what’s happening in ours.

There’s nothing wrong with working hard, of course. It’s biblical. But while the work is good, the worry associated with it is bad—and we worry an awful lot.

The Bible says to cut it out already. Easier said than done, I understand, but the book’s pretty clear. “Anxiety in a man’s heart weights him down, but a good word makes him glad,” we read in Proverbs 12:25. “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God,” Philippians 4:6 tells us. And then there’s this gem from Matthew 6, from Jesus Himself:

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Loot at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value by they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these …

It’s a pretty Pooh-like philosophy, if you ask me.

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