I have seen the movie “Seven Days in Utopia” about five or six times.  After the first time, I realized I really didn’t LISTEN to it.  So, the next few times I watched it, I made sure to listen while I watched the movie.  It captivated me.  It spoke to me.  The ending?  Yeah, I didn’t like it one bit.  Not the first few times I watched the movie.  And then, it struck me.  The ending wasn’t what was important – just as the movie showed the game of golf wasn’t the be all, end all in life.

What is even more cool is that Utopia, Texas is less than an hour south of where we live.  For the last couple of weeks, we have driven through Utopia to take our middle daughter to Girl Scout camp.

I spotted the church that was in the movie the first time we drove through Utopia.  It is really a United Methodist church but in the movie it was portrayed as just a United Christian church:

The second time we drove through Utopia, I saw the cafe that was featured in the beginning of the movie, the Lost Maples Cafe (although I believe the sign in the movie was different than the actual sign on the cafe):

Although I never found the cemetery that was in the movie, my daughter did inform me that the river scene that was funny in the movie was filed at Camp La Jita, the Girl Scout camp on the Sabinal River where she has been volunteering for these last two weeks:

Utopia is close to home and although golf is not something I really care about, the movie isn’t really about golf.  It’s about life.  It’s about loving what you do enough to forget the win and remember the process to get there.  And it’s about giving your troubles to God.  What a profound and amazing movie.  And Utopia?  Definitely a great place to film this movie.  Because Utopia is not a dream – and neither is life.