Week 36...Never Say Never...by Liimu

Two weeks ago today, my mother-in-law went in for open heart surgery. She's been in and out of the ICU ever since. As a result, my family has spent the last two weekends in Delaware, visiting with family and supporting my husband who has been going to the hospital to visit her as much as he can. We've made the best of it, staying at a hotel with an indoor pool so the girls could swim in spare moments. When she became stable last week and was moved to a regular room, my sister-in-law suggested maybe we could take my three daughters to the movies and dinner. My husband decided to come at the last minute, and was so glad he did. We saw what may have been the best movie I have seen in the last 15 years - "Never Say Never."

Yes, that's right. It's the Justin Bieber movie. I didn't have high expectations. I wasn't a huge fan, though I did really secretly like that song, "Baby" and a couple other songs, too. I thought he was just a kid who happened to be able to sing at a fairly young age and managed to gain a following on YouTube that launched his career. Boy, was I wrong. And I have been telling everyone I can think of about just how wrong I was. The movie was riveting, inspiring, and incredibly moving.

It tells so much more of his story than I ever knew – that his mom was a single, teenage mom (his dad left when he was only 10 months old). She was active in the church and he was just around all her church musician friends. It tells of how he became interested in the drums at 4 and started singing seriously by the time he was 8 – he even sang on street corners, and put on a fundraiser to buy a real set of Pearl drums. It told about his uprising on Facebook and how the producer from Usher’s label found him and brought him to LA to tour around the country in a van playing at middle schools and churches and playing acoustic on radio stations until he started tweeting about where he would be and dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of people would come out to see him. And then, getting to meet Usher and doing his album and getting to the point where he was playing Madison Square Garden in like a year’s time and sold it out in 22 minutes. An amazing story – we were all riveted.

My 8-year old, Devon, kept saying during the movie, “I don’t want it to be over…I don’t want it to be over,” My 4-year old, Autumn, cried at the end because she wanted to stay and watch it again, and my 7-year old, Amelia, was crying real tears because she was feeling so much love for him. We were all singing along and the whole movie audience erupted in cheers and applause at the end. An unbelievable experience. I'll say it again, "Never Say Never" was the best movie I have seen in decades. And, it has inspired me to start engaging with my own music career again. Hey, if a 16-year old from Canada can do it, why not a 40-year old mom of three (with one on the way)?

Ok, ok, so there are lots of reasons why not, but hey...Never Say Never, right?