Don't Listen to the Strawberry-Scented Bear: Why I Cried at Toy Story 3

I sincerely hope you watched Toy Story 3 this Christmas. If you haven’t seen it at all then, well, I weep for you. I also potentially ruin it for you, so if you’re planning to do the sensible thing and watch it soon, look away now.

Well then, if you’ve got this far I’ll assume that either you’d already seen it, or you took the frankly ingenious step of interrupting your reading of this blog to get it off Netflix and watch it straight away. If so, I applaud you. Anyway, here’s a blog about why I love that film so much, and why I personally have cried with happiness all three times I’ve watched it. It’s probably going to feel a bit ridiculous occasionally, but I reckon there must be something quite profound going on to make me cry this much, so bear with me…

Toy Story 3 is all about where the toys' loyalties lie, and who they’re going to believe. (See? I told you it would sound mildly ridiculous. Moving on though...) Woody says that Andy, their kid, really does love them and didn’t throw them away; Lotso the strawberry scented bear says Andy did throw them away, and good thing too because they’re better off without him. Now this is something I can relate to – and in fact so could many many people throughout history – asking the question: has God forgotten us? Are we better off without him?

And it’s really funny how well the film fits as a metaphor for the big question of life – do we believe that we belong to Andy (God)? Is his name really written on the bottom of our boots? Or not?

Lotso says so much of the stuff which that thing inside of us keeps telling us: 'You belong to yourself here at sunnyside, you're the master of your own destiny, you can have anything you want, get played with all the time, you don't need Andy at all.'

And the toys like the sound of this. So do we, to be honest. Rex runs with his stumpy little T-Rex legs right in front of the door, desperate for joy, for fulfilment.

And then he gets trampled on.

Because in Lotso’s world, the world where they belong to themselves and are the masters of their own destinies, no one cares about them. They get chewed and trodden on and used as paintbrushes and hammers and sat on and tangled up and thrown around because no one cares for them. No one knows who they are or how they’re meant to be played with.

But even once they realise that it’s not always shiny in Sunnyside, they can’t get out. In fact, Lotso tells them there’s nowhere for them to go. Their kid doesn’t want them. The only way out is the trash heap. And there’s this scene where they’ve almost escaped and then Lotso is standing on the big bin with the lorry approaching and it makes my spine tingle every time because Lotso is telling all the lies that the thing in our heads tells us.

“You’re a piece of plastic! You were made to be thrown away!” he says. You’re meaningless and worthless. “Ain’t one kid ever loved a toy really!” No one loves you. You’re not worthy of love, you don’t deserve it. How could anyone love you? You’re just an animal, you live and you die and none of it matters. You think somebody really loves you? You think you really mean something to them? “Don’t be such a baby.” See things as they really are. “We’re all just trash, waitin’ to be thrown away! That’s all a toy is!”

And then the big baby toy picks him up and throws him in the bin. Because all those things are lies. They are not true. We are not worthless, we are not unloved, we are not just waiting to be thrown away.

And now for the bit that really makes me weep, in the best possible way. All the way through the film, it’s seemed like Andy doesn’t love them, like he doesn’t care about them, like if they stay loyal to him, they’ll end up rusty and old in a dusty attic with nothing to do and no one to play with. But they decide that either way, they are Andy’s toys. They choose to stick with the one who wrote his name on their boots. They say, “We’re Andy’s toys. We’ll be there for him.” And then, the final scene happens…

Andy takes them to Bonnie’s house, and he starts getting them out of the box. He starts talking: “This is Jessie -- the roughest, toughest cowgirl in the whole West…” And as I watched the film for the third time, I started crying - again - and one thought went through my head:

‘He knows us by name.’

As Andy goes through all of the toys and plays with them, and tells Bonnie who they are, and why he loves them so much, I was just smiling and tears were rolling down my face because God knows us like that. He loves us like that. Jesus talks about it in John chapter 10 – we belong to him, and he made us, and he knows each of us by name, and he knows every little thing that he loves about us.

Lotso was wrong. They are not just trash waiting to be thrown away. They are Andy’s toys. They are special, they are cherished, and they are always, and forever, loved.

It’s soppy I know, but I really do believe that it’s true about us. So I suppose what I’m really trying to say here is simply this:

Don’t listen to the strawberry scented bear. Listen to Andy.