How do we trust God with pain, suffering and disappointment? The movie Paul’s Promise, based on true events and people, asks that question. And its interwoven stories offer two answers: We can keep praying and tighten our grip on His tenacious love for us, even when we don’t understand. Or we can harden our hearts, walk away and drift into ruinous isolation.
Minnie Holderfield, whom most everyone just calls Mama, has walked the former path. And Mama has known suffering. Her husband, Will, wrestled with terrible demons, the kind that drove him to drink and punch. Still, she prays for her husband, pleads with him to accept God’s love for him.
“Look at me!” he screams at her, a belt in his hand. “Does this look like the face of someone God loves? Was God loving me when my daddy was hitting me and running out of my life? Is this God loving me? When I got so much rage bottled up inside of me?”
“You’re seeing it all wrong,” Mama tries to convince her husband. “God knows you’re hurting, Will. He wants to help you.”
It’s not an invitation that Will, broken by the bottle and by his father’s fists, can ever accept. But Mama never stops praying for him, hoping, waiting, believing.
Decades later, she’s still praying. Praying for friends at church. Praying for those who are sick. But most especially, praying for her beloved son, Paul.
Paul watched those terrible blows land on his mother. He saw the wreckage left by the bottle. He swore his path would be different, better. Most of all, he vowed never to follow a God who would let his faithful mother suffer so horribly.
But as so often happens, vows to be different can eventually fall by the wayside. Paul, now a married firefighter with two kids of his own, drinks away his own pain, his haunting memories of a father who failed him. His wife, Barb, struggles—as Mama once did with Will—to reach him. Despite a wife’s pleas and a mother’s prayers, the trajectory of Paul’s broken life looks eerily similar to his father’s.
And then the news comes: Mama has tumors. At least three, maybe more. Tests soon confirm the worst, that cancer is ravaging her body. She doesn’t have long. Maybe a week. Maybe less.
Mama prayed for years that her broken husband would receive God’s love. He never did. But she has no intention of leaving her son behind in the same place. She’s determined to pray him into the kingdom no matter what her life-eating cancer says.
The plot of Paul’s Promise largely revolves around the story of Mama’s belief and Paul’s brokenness. As her end approaches, Paul spends nearly every moment that he can with his dying mother—which, of course, gives her plenty of opportunity to continue nudging him toward Jesus. Paul’s wife, Barb, alternately encourages Paul and confronts his addiction to alcohol (which I’ll talk more about below).
Another key subplot that’s interlaced throughout the story has to do with racism. It’s 1967, and the characters here live in racially segregated North Little Rock, Arkansas. We meet a faithful, resilient old friend of Paul’s, a Black man named Jimmy Lipton (along with his wife Mary, a nurse who cares for Mama at the hospital where she’s dying).
Jimmy, influenced deeply by his faith (as we’ll see), has suffered at the hands of racists who’ve repeatedly tried to burn down his house. Yet he resists the temptation to seek vengeance, believing instead that faith and restraint are the path to real change.
After an incident (shown in flashback) in Paul and Jimmy’s childhood, Paul rejected Jimmy because of his race. And he has never patched up the relationship. A good portion of the film involves Paul summoning the courage to stand up for his Black friend (who’s ruthlessly demeaned by Paul’s racist firefighter coworkers), to apologize for being silent and to face the shameful ways he’s treated Jimmy since that fateful day in their childhood.
Paul’s Promise grapples, from start to finish, with the question of suffering. Where is God when horrible things happen, it wonders? Why does God sometimes allow those who trust Him the most to suffer the most horribly?
Those are the very things that Paul openly wonders about as well. “Paul, you need Jesus,” Mama tells her son. “I just cannot leave this Earth without knowing what’s gonna happen to your soul.” Paul responds, “Mama, he [her husband, Will] hurt you. And Jesus didn’t do a thing about it. Why would I want to be with a God in heaven after He watched Daddy put us through hell?”
In a separate conversation with Mama’s pastor, Paul says to the man, “You can thank Him for rewarding all my mama’s years of faithfulness by giving her cancer.” Then he adds, in clear disgust and contempt, “God is good. All the time.”
Later, Mama tells Paul, “I know you don’t think you can trust God. But you can.” She says that she’s had a vision of Paul later in his life as a pastor—a vision everyone believes is a result of her deteriorating mental state as cancer ravages her brain. Still, she tells people of her vision and says to Paul, “God knows the kind of man you’re going to turn out to be. Just have to remind Him to get started.”
Despite Mama’s tenacious faith, the film does give a glimpse of her own doubts and struggles with God’s seeming lack of answers to her plaintive petitions for her late husband and for her son. With regard to those unanswered intercessions, she tells her pastor, “God ain’t listening. My husband had his habits. Oh, I prayed, and nothing changed. I prayed for Billy Jean’s baby [her daughter’s lost child], and nothing changed. And I prayed for the soul of my son, and nothing changed. I’m gonna go see God. And as soon as I get there, I’m gonna ask where all my prayers ended up!”
As Mama’s impending end draws closer, Pastor Van Gorder takes up the mantle of gently encouraging Paul toward the faith. “I just don’t get it, Pastor,” Paul says. “I don’t understand.” The minister replies, “God isn’t asking you to figure it all out. He just needs you to trust that He already has. And He sees your heart, Paul. He’s ready to help you become the man you’re meant to be.” In another conversation, the minister tells Paul, “Your daddy stole a lot of joy from you, your mama, your family. Don’t let him steal what little time you have left [with your mom].
Elsewhere in the film, it’s very clear that Jimmy’s faith keeps him from responding to racism and threats with anger and violence in return.
For example, Jimmy has a tense conversation with his younger brother, Tank, regarding whose wisdom they should follow amid all the racial strife around them. Tank argues for strength to be expressed through physical resistance and perhaps violence, as an example of standing up for one’s dignity: “What about the kids, man? They need strong role models. Willing to stand up, right? Strong like me. Like you. Like me. Like Brother Malcolm [X]. Like Dr. King.” Jimmy responds, “I ain’t trying to be like Malcolm. I ain’t trying to be like Dr. King, either. I’m trying to be more like Jesus. I believe that’s the only way things gonna change, if we follow Him.” Tank eventually responds, “Yeah, I hear you, Big Bro. ‘Course, you know they killed Him too.”
Paul and Jimmy experience relational reconciliation that’s not without some significant bumps and setbacks along the way. But Jimmy encourages Paul, saying, “We all get lost sometimes. The important thing is what we do with our life when we find our way back.”
None, really, though one scene does show Paul and Barb in bed together talking. (We see his T-shirt and her long-sleeved nightgown.) Another scene pictures Paul in boxers and a T-shirt.
We hear that Will Holderfield was physically abusive to Mama. And one scene obviously takes place in the aftermath of him striking her. She’s on the floor, next to a tipped-over chair, crying, with a bruise on her cheekbone. He’s standing and yelling angrily, a belt in his hand.
In a flashback, we see young Paul walking with some other white friends through a wooded area one day when they come across young Jimmy fishing. The boys mock him for having to fish for his supper, and then begin throwing stones at him. One strikes him in the head, and we see blood through his hair and on his hand. The boys push Paul into participating in their persecution of Jimmy for his skin color, and Paul halfheartedly throws a rock into the water without aiming at Jimmy. That, we’re told, is the moment that their friendship was sundered as kids.
The movie opens with firefighters battling a blaze a Jimmy’s house. They successfully extinguish it before too much damage is done. Later, Jimmy’s house is torched again—as is happening to many other black families in the neighborhood. This time, the house burns to the ground. It’s suggested (by Tank) that the firefighters themselves are starting the fires. That accusation nearly sparks a brawl between him and the firefighters.
In an angry, frustrated moment with his wife, Paul throws a bottle of her wine at the wall, where it shatters and stains the wall red.
There’s no profanity here. But there are a couple of minor crudities (“crap,” “horse crap”) and a handful of very mild stand-ins for harsher language (“jeeze,” “what the heck,” “gosh,” “pain in the backside”).
As mentioned, both Paul and is father before him appear to be alcoholics. We repeatedly see both men drinking and with empty beer cans or bottles scattered about them. Paul drinks to the point of passing out in the chair he’s sitting in a couple of times—behavior his wife confronts, asking what kind of example it is for his children to see him in that inebriated state.
Before a point of true repentance and change, Paul rationalizes to Barb that he doesn’t drink as much as his dad did, that he’s not quite as “bad” a drunk as his father was. That said, Paul eventually reaches the point where he realizes he must change, and we see him pour alcohol down the sink.
Somewhat surprisingly for a Christian movie, the filmmakers don’t flinch from depicting Paul and his wife as smokers, too. We see both smoking cigarettes, a behavior much more culturally accepted at the time than it is today.
Almost to a man (with one possible exception), Paul’s fellow firefighters are deeply racist. One of them, Jake, repeatedly goes on and on about how he’ll never submit to any form of racial integration, and he spitefully suggests that Blacks and whites should be permanently and completely segregated from one another.
Unable to hold food down any longer in the days before her death, Mama throws up on herself in bed.
Some Christian films only lightly include faith elements. This is not one of them.
Instead, Paul’s Promise dives headlong into one of the most challenging, at times vexing, questions Christians will ever face: Where is God when life is unjust and unfair, harmful and hurtful? How do we move forward in faith when prayers seemingly go unanswered for a lifetime?
The film doesn’t necessary proffer an intellectual answer to those questions. Instead, it simply challenges us to believe, and to keep believing, no matter what. Mama does come close to stumbling in her own faith. But she picks herself up out of that doubt, and presses forward into faith even as her earthly hours ebb away.
There’s a lot of talking about faith in this film, as you might have gathered from my lengthy comments in the Spiritual Elements section. While that may not be every viewer’s dramatic cup of tea, I suspect some will engage with these scenes precisely because of their sermonizing feel. This movie preaches, ramming home the conviction that God remains faithful even in moments where that faithfulness is difficult to see.
Veteran actress Linda Purl (whose lengthy resumé includes Happy Days, Matlock, The Office, The Waltons, The Love Boat, Desperate Housewives and The Office, among many other credits) portrays Mama with a feisty zest and zeal for life that’s believable and infectious. Her performance anchors the narrative and packs an emotional wallop.
Along the way, this film also reminds us of the evils of racism and exhorts us to remember that Jesus is the only one who can truly redeem and reconcile those whose lives have been devastated by prejudice and hate.
And in the end, we see that the real Paul Holderfield really did embrace his mother’s vision by founding a church that ministers to people and moves them toward our loving heavenly Father and toward racial healing to this day.
After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.
