If you could jump ahead about thirty years and see where you’d be in life, would you want to? If you were suddenly thrown into the future and saw the results that your actions had on other people’s lives, what would change in your life?

Last weekend, we returned to the Pine Hill drive-in for our first movie of the 2007 season: “Meet the Robinsons.” As many of you know, I jumped on the whole “boycott Disney” bandwagon a decade ago, and I’ve been very reluctant to jump off. Disney has made some very anti-family moves over the past ten years, and I have a sour taste in my mouth for them. I often have to remember that most companies in today’s society are just like Disney, and in order to appropriately justify my stance against Disney, I’d have to boycott most companies with which I do business on a regular basis. So . . . I saw the movie.

In “Meet the Robinsons,” an orphaned boy travels through time to try to stop an evil villain (the worst evil villain you’ve ever seen, and I don’t mean worst as in a bad guy . . . this guy couldn’t steal an unlocked car with the keys in the ignition because he’d foul up the whole plot before he ever opened the door) from crushing his dream. It’s a very elaborate story with some funny moments (“I have a big head and little arms, and I'm just not sure how well this plan was thought through. Master?”)

Spoiler warning: If you haven’t seen the movie yet, stop reading, watch the movie, and then come back. If you have seen it, or you don’t want to see it, keep reading.

In the end, we find out that Lewis grows up to be Cornelius, the patriarch of the Robinson family. His inventions have changed the world, and without his dedication to his personal motto, “Keep moving forward,” many of the inventions of the future world would have never been made. We also find out that the villain was Lewis’s roommate in the orphanage, and some of Lewis’s actions in his childhood were the reasons Goob grew up to be so evil.

At the end of the movie, a Walt Disney quote appears. “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things - because we're curious. And curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We're always exploring and experimenting.” At that point, it’s obvious that the creators want the audience to reflect on Cornelius’s motto and realize that Walt’s dream is still alive today.

In life, we have two options. We can either keep moving forward, or we can stop and start pointing fingers. We can choose to be a Lewis or a Goob. Both boys were orphans; they had the same experiences and the same setbacks in life. Lewis chose to keep moving forward, not getting bogged down with the disappointments in life and never giving up when failure reared its ugly head. Goob chose to wallow in self pity and point accusing fingers at others around him, blaming his lack of achievement on anyone but himself and harboring resentment for those who were successful.

In the search for a new job, it’s often easy to give up after trying so hard. I’m getting to the point where I don’t know if I can take one more rejection. I keep remembering that God has a plan, and that I must look back for only a few seconds, taking note of learning experiences; then I must keep moving forward as new doors open and new paths come my way. What about you? Are you looking back, or are you moving forward?