Discipleship In The Color Purple

The foundation of the Christian faith was strongly built on love. From the beginning, Christians are taught about God's love for his creation, and are told that discipleship is the best way to mirror it. The Color Purple, however, illustrates a false idea of what it means to be a Christian, and what it means walk like a disciple. Christianity is often inaccurately represented, if represented at all, by some of Christ's followers, thus true Christians must forefront God's love in their own lives, reflect God's love for all individuals with their actions, speak kind words, and learn to effectively spread the gospel in order to depict the meaning of Christianity well. Establishing what discipleship is and the associated behaviors can be difficult,
if the concept of love is not well understood. The book of Galatians was written early on by Paul, where he was trying to illustrate what being a follower of God’s love looks like. In Galatians, he says “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things, there is no law.” (The Holy Bible, 5:22-23).
These are the true conception of God’s love, and it has no limitation.
God expects his Christian believers to be a representative of his love within their faith, which means carrying out the said values mention by Paul. Failure to do so can be detrimental to an individual, especially when they show such little faith mainly because, if they do it means that they are not following the criteria of be a good disciple. Overall pain that they may have caused someone can whey heavy on their heart, in return of their punishment. Furthermore, this was seen in the film adaptation of The Color Purple, which we will later on
explore. The Color Purple is a movie directed by Steven Spielberg in 1982 according to Nishikawa, Kinohi . The story was about Celie, a young African American girl, growing up in South of the United States. Celie, who was abused and treated as an outcast in society, had no friends, other than her only sister, so she found another way to vent, searching for love she hardly endured while growing up. Celie wrote numerous of letters to God and tells the story of her life, ranging from the disturbing sexual abuse growing up as a child to her break through transformation into a successful forgiving adult.
In addition Celie story can relate to the 2 Corinthians, it states, “For the sake of Christ, then, nI am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”(2 Corinthians 12:10). This quote explains what Celie was going through and why she held onto her faith, the way she did. In addition, because this was during the biblical time, women had no say and people within the community could not step in to save Celie. It took another outcast to come in and shield her from that mental and physical abuse.
In all that was going on in Celie’s life, she had a quest set out to continue knowing and believing in God even in her darkest time. The disturbing things that were happening to her, made Celie questions God reasons as to why, or what has she done to deserve such, but she never gave up on him. However, many people do not have the discipleship to hold a strong faith like Celie. In contrary, "Surprise by Joy" happened to share a similar but opposite story, it is about the journeys that lead one away and eventually towards the disciplineship of faith, the book was written by C.S Lewis. C.S Lewis takes his audience, through his childhood and adulthood experience. While growing up he was brought up in a religious family and happen to slowly loose his faith in God because of the pain he experienced, by losing his mother through cancer. During that period Lewis watched his relationship with his father deteriorated and had to deal with the agony of being sent away from his brothers to an old fashion boarding school at an early age.
Just like Celie in the color purple, C.S Lewis questioned Gods reasons for his action but he, didn’t believe in God like Celie did.
C.S lewis started to loose faith especially when another love one by the name of Joy his wife was taken from through cancer, his faith was no long there, it went out the door.
In the book of surprise by joy, C. S lewis mentioned, his mother condition that led him to pray and have faith because that is what he was was taught to do when tragedy occur. However in result nothing came out of it his mother passed away, C.S Lewis states “ I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. He was, in my mental picture of this miracle, to appear neither as Savior nor as Judge, but merely as a magician; and when He had done what was required of him I supposed He would simply- well, go away”.(Lewis 21) . Its interesting how Lewis had lose all faith in God with tragedies occurring around him compare to Celie who still had strong faith in God regardless of what was going on her life or. This defiantly shows discipline ship vs. non discipline and their commitment towards the faith, which can either bring you closer or draw one further away from God. Sometimes with tragedies happening in ones life, like C.S Lewis for example, may take a long period to get nearer to God. Also, it shows the extremity of Gods Test towards one faith in
him.