Here is information about completed screenplays, “Looking for Morning,” “Vale of Shadows,” “Backlash,” “Age of the Kingdom” and “Flyboy” plus a short film “Kapi’olani.”
Looking For Morning
A young, small-town pastor has a crisis of faith when his wife dies, leaving him with small children, and rebuilding his faith is complicated when he is drawn to an agnostic woman with tragedy in her own past.
It’s “God Bless the Broken Road” meets “The Case for Christ.” It’s “God Bless the Broken Road” meets “The Case for Christ.”
Synopsis:
DAVID PORTER is a young pastor of a small town church in rural South Georgia. He and his wife, LINDA have two children, DAVY and ALICIA. They are loved by their parishioners and they love their ministry. As a pastor, David is idealistic and a bit immature in his faith. He feels he has all the answers.
When Linda suddenly contracts brain cancer and dies within a matter of weeks, his world is destroyed, including his faith. He cannot understand why God would allow this to happen. He wonders if God is in control since He didn’t answer his prayers. His ministry suffers and he doesn’t handle his children well, especially eight-year-old Davy, who runs away from home at one point and narrowly escapes danger.
In the course of his grief, he meets JULIA WAINWRIGHT, a transplant from Philadelphia, who is as different from him as anyone can be. She is an independent divorcee and business owner. AND she is an agnostic. Julia also has grief in her past, which causes them to be drawn to one another.
As David struggles to recover his faith, Julia becomes his sounding board, eventually revealing her own pain and the history of her unbelief. She has a niece, ANNE, the brain-damaged 15-year-old daughter of Julia’s older sister who died in childbirth. The double tragedy sent Julia, a teen herself at the time, into a limbo of doubt from which she has never returned. Julia is devoted to Anne, visiting her regularly in a local nursing home.
Though he resists at first, David meets with DR. GARRETT, the town general practitioner, who is also a deacon in David’s church. He helps David work through his doubts. David has a breakthrough when he takes his eyes off himself and realizes nothing could even exist without the sustaining hand of God.
David and Julia grow closer, even as they sharply disagree about faith perspectives. She prefers the concreteness of science, while he argues for a God greater than human knowledge. Julia must re-examine her decision not to believe and David must re-evaluate and mature his formerly simplistic faith.
However, tongues wag and conclusions are jumped to in the small town about the time David and Julia spend together.
In the meantime, the church’s head deacon is not happy with David’s performance since Linda’s death and is not sympathetic with his grief process. He mounts a campaign to get rid of David, citing poor job performance since his wife’s death and the rumors about him and a woman.
Julia begins to believe there might be a future for her with David, and when he brings her a Christmas present they share a tender moment, but once David learns that the head deacon intends to replace him, he breaks it off because he feels he would have to choose between her and his ministry.
David narrowly survives a vote of the board of deacons. Unexpected support for him comes from none other than Julia herself, who arrives as the meeting is breaking up and testifies that David has become her pastor. She tells how he has ministered to her and how foolish they would be to fire him.
When David encounters Julia and Anne at the nursing home, Julia lets him know she believes again and he admits he doesn’t know all the answers, but that’s OK: “Maybe we should just trust Him.”
If you want to participate in this project, contact Gary Ivey.