"I'm a Christian now. The things that drove me crazy growing up was how everyone works at fault-finding with different religions. The people I don't understand are atheists. I go surfing and snowboarding and I'm always around nature. I look at everything and think, 'Who couldn't believe there's a God? Is all this a mistake? It just blows me away."
These are the words of ex-Mormon and actor Paul Walker, best known for his starring role in the Fast and the Furious franchise, whose sudden death in 2013 sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry. Walker died in a freak car accident when the Porsche he was a passenger in crashed and caught fire. This happened in the middle of the making of Fast and Furious 7. The movie was completed using CGI and Walker's brothers as body doubles in the unfinished scenes.
The end of the film provides a tribute to the actor. Walker's character Brian O'Conner is given an idyllic happy ending with his wife and son living happily ever after in a beach paradise complete with golden sand and deep blue sea. The song that accompanies this scene is Wiz Khalifa's "See you again" which features the rapper Charlie Puth. The song was specially commissioned to commemorate Paul Walker's life and broke all sorts of records including the most-streamed track in a single day on Spotify in the United States (4.2 million times on April 13, 2015) and the most streamed song in a single week in the UK. It was also the first hip hop music video to reach 1 billion views on YouTube.
The song seemed to strike a nerve, perhaps because Paul Walker's death, like the death of rugby player Jonah Lomu this year, saw an iconic larger than life personality come to an apparently premature end. The song promises hope when faced with our own mortality and recognises the most important parts of our lives involve the relationships we are in.
How can we not talk about family when family's all that we got?
Everything I went through you were standing there by my side
And now you gon' be with me for the last ride
The song's refrain reminds me of the famous quote attributed to a friend of US Senator Paul Tsongas when he decided not to run for reelection because he'd been diagnosed with cancer: "No man ever said on his deathbed I wish I had spent more time in the office."
But the central theme of the song, highlighted in the powerful visual ending of the movie, is the hope of reunion.
So let the light guide your way, yeah
Hold every memory as you go
And every road you take, will always lead you home, home
It's been a long day without you, my friend
And I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
We've come a long way from where we began
Oh, I'll tell you all about it when I see you again
When I see you again
The message of this song is that death is not the end, a funeral is not the last opportunity to see a loved one, and that the departed are not lost forever. At the core of the Christian faith is the hope of the resurrection and reunion with our Father and Christian family. For those of us that have put their hope in Christ, we are assured by the Bible that death has been conquered and that the grave will not have the final say.
This song is a powerful reminder that the longing in the human heart for life beyond death has fulfilment not in fairytale sentimentality, CGI or in cryogenic technologies but in the sure and certain hope of the historic resurrection of Jesus.
