While at first blush The Lost and Found Family might appear to be just another simple drama for America's faith community, it really is so much more (read the synopsis here). The first time through I didn't give it a lot of credit, and I think I had my guard up. Because I had a review copy and needed to return it, I gave it another watch and just loved it the second time around. Why? Well, it is an honest story of compassion and acceptance. It's an ode to how messy love and community can be, and how worthwhile it is to get over ourselves--to truly learn to embrace life in all its uncertainty.

The only reason The Lost and Found Family ended up in my DVD-player at all is because of my friendship with Ellen Bry. The film is actually inconsistent with my general watching habits. It is a "heartwarming and inspirational family drama," which is code for being Christian. Because I love Ellen, I gave it not one, but two watches with my mom. And as I said before, while I liked it well enough the first time around, the second viewing really gave me an appreciation for the film.

The story is simple. When Ester Hobbes, played by Ellen Bry, loses her universe-of-one and man of her dreams to a sudden and unexpected heart attack, she receives an inheritance unbefitting her position in Chicago society. Unbeknownst to Ester, her husband had made some terrible investments. Although he was about to turn the corner back to success, he was pretty much broke when he passed, leaving his wife destitute -- almost.

What Ester's husband had done, however, was buy a shabby boarding house in Jackson, Georgia, in her name. The property would require her to obtain residency before being able to force the boarders out and sell the house for a pretty penny. So even before she packs up and heads to Georgia, Ester puts the building up for sale. When she arrives with some luggage and a duffel of dolls, the widow is not only shunned but blamed by nearly everyone with such verbal abuse that even I was appalled.

I really have to hand it to actors Lucas Till and Jessica Luza for being such brats as the two insufferable teenagers, Justin and Teri -- they really got under my skin. I personally wanted to wash their mouths out with soap. Ester handled the teen terrors a lot better than I would have, that's for sure. She really made her mark against a house full of actors who did an excellent job at being both hateful and hate-able.

Well everybody eventually finds themselves in the same boat, so what will they do? This is when the movie starts getting good!

My mother Barbara, 72, explained why she liked the movie the second time. "The first time around, I was so shaken by the situation and by how rude everyone was to each other in the first twenty-minutes that I never recovered," she said. "The second time, I knew that everything was going to turn out alright so I let myself enjoy the sophisticated details of the movie."

Once we waded through all of the slow and rough bits, the movie unfolded into quite a spiritually-sophisticated production. Even with mentioning the Bible in a couple of scenes, it still spent more time modeling moral and right behavior than preaching it. In my humble estimation, the moral of the tale is that the Bible is only words until we make it come alive in our mission and ministry and that what we say has a lot less to do with our happiness, love and family than what we do (for ourselves, for our family, for others and for our community.)

This sort of engaged compassion is hard, doubly so when you're not related, trebly so when you're under duress. What The Lost and Found Family also shows is that even a deep knowledge of the Bible and an overwhelming faith in God is not enough unless you're willing to slog through the messiness of hurt, fear and insecurity, discover who's kin and who's not, and then reach a place where everyone lowers their guns and reflects on God's creation.

While this isn't a preachy movie it does espouse authentic Christian values: turning the other cheek, responding to hate with love, loving your enemy. While these obnoxious kids are certainly not lepers, they have been banished into the less desirable part of town into a boarding home. The two overwrought foster parents lost sight of why they started a boarding house and even became foster parents at all, before Ester arrives and reminds them of what's important.

In terms of story-telling and the reliability of the narrator, I noticed that the point of view of the film is very subjective -- all from Ester's fancy Chicago upper-crust perspective. This includes her neat, contained life where her remaining "children" are - literally - dolls (she lost a son, something she reveals later).

From her privileged life she is dropped into a "squalid" and wild flop house, which is, according to Ester, full of lives as chaotic and dismal as any she could imagine-- rife with rat traps and paper plates. Through her eyes, you see something completely broken and abandoned, completely worth killing, worth letting die. But what Ester doesn't see, is the love. She can't recognize it through its disguise of dysfunction.

None of this would work without Ellen Bry, who acts as the glue of this crazy little story. She could have played Ester like Mary Poppins or like Deborah Kerr in The King And I, but like everyone else in that household, they were all so tired, worn out, and just in need of some understanding. Even though I may be biased, Ellen's portrayal of Ester as calm and imbued with grace is the right way -- and only Ellen could have pulled it off.

The Lost and Found Family is ultimately a film about compassion and acceptance: putting down your shield, your armor and your broad sword. It is about taking a leap of faith. The two sides, Ester and the family, both profess having faith. The family claims to be a family of faith, but they realize how this faith has waned because of becoming too embroiled in everyday life to remember why they began on their journey in the first place.