Formula One Movie Discussion Guide
Before You Start....
This message was written for the person who walked in searching, and it ends with a direct invitation to follow Jesus. Most of the people at your table said yes to that years ago, which changes your job this week without making the message irrelevant to them. The restlessness Solomon describes does not disappear at conversion. Plenty of committed Christians are still chasing something, still moving, still convinced the next thing will finally settle them. Ask about that restlessness as it exists now, not as a testimony about who they used to be.
Watch for the room to go quiet on question four.
That question asks about succeeding at work while missing the thing that matters most at home, and in most groups somebody is living it right now. Do not rush past the silence. Go first if nobody else will. Naming your own version of the chase gives everyone else permission to be honest about theirs.
If someone at your table is new, or is still searching the way this weekend described, ask them directly whether they have ever said yes to Jesus. Do not assume. And leave room near the end for people to name others who are still searching, because the closing prayer is as much for those people as for anyone in the circle.
You will not get through all six questions, and you are not meant to. Choose the ones your group needs and take them in whatever order serves the conversation.
Chasing The Wind
Sonny Hayes
played by actor
Brad Pitt
THE MESSAGE
Sonny Hayes has every reason to be satisfied and cannot stay anywhere long enough to be. Three marriages, countless friendships, a bankruptcy, all of it left behind in the rearview of a van that keeps moving toward the next race. Solomon wrote the same story three thousand years earlier and had a word for it. Hevel. Smoke, vapor, fog that looks solid until you reach for it. He denied himself nothing his eyes desired, and none of it held. The turn this weekend made matters for your group: the longing that no achievement satisfies is not a defect in you, it is evidence you were made for more than this world holds. The people in your living room know that restlessness. Some of them have not stopped searching.
ice breaker
Before we go anywhere else: what did you think of the movie? If you saw F1, what stayed with you after the movie ended and did Sonny’s life look appealing to you or exhausting?
Discussion Questions
Start where the room is. These four move from the screen to the table, and the last one is the one most likely to get personal.
1 Sonny leaves behind three marriages, countless friendships, a bankruptcy, and a rookie teammate he was supposed to be mentoring instead of racing. He is not written as a villain. He is just never willing to stay. How many of us have been Sonny Hayes in some smaller way, and what did our version of leaving cost somebody else?
Most people will reach for a story about someone else first. Bring it gently back to their own name.
Ecclesiastes 2:10-11 · Ecclesiastes 2:22-23
2 Hevel is the Hebrew word behind meaningless. It means smoke, or vapor. Fog that looks solid until you reach for it, thick enough some mornings that you cannot see the road in front of you, and gone thirty minutes later. Name something you chased, actually got, and then watched slip through your fingers exactly like that.
Your Bible may read vanity or futility instead of meaningless. Point that out rather than smoothing over it, since the Hebrew has no clean English equivalent.
3 The weekend put a question behind everything we do: what is the why? Why you show up at your job, why you work as hard as you do, why you came to church this weekend. Pick one thing you give most of your life to and say out loud what the why underneath it actually is.
Expect the respectable answer first. Ask one follow-up and the real one usually shows up.
4 One of the strange ironies named this weekend is that a person can be genuinely successful at work while missing the most important thing in their life. Where is that true of you right now, and who is paying for it?
Go first here. Answer it about yourself before you ask anyone else to, and keep your answer specific rather than general.
Go Deeper
The first is for the people who want to get into the text. The second asks the group to decide something.
Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 · Ecclesiastes 3:11
GD1 Read the opening of Ecclesiastes, then chapter 3 verse 11. The writer surveys everything under the sun and calls it vapor, and then says God has set eternity in the human heart. How do those two claims sit together, and what does holding both of them change about how you read the rest of the book?
Worth knowing before somebody looks it up mid-conversation: Ecclesiastes never names Solomon. The book calls its author Qoheleth, usually translated the Teacher, and identifies him as son of David, king in Jerusalem. Connecting that figure to Solomon is a long-standing tradition, but many scholars date the book’s Hebrew centuries later and read the royal framing as a literary device. You do not have to settle it at the table, but you do want to be able to say the identification is traditional rather than stated in the text.
GD2 Jesus said the reason he came was to seek and to save the lost. Who is one person you know by name who is still searching the way Sonny was, and what is one specific thing you will do for them before we meet again?
Ask for a name and a day, write both down, and bring them up when you meet next.
WRAP UP & PRAYER
“That ache is not a flaw. It is a clue. I was made by God, and I was made for more.”
Read the line out loud, then have the group pray it back in first person. Then turn the prayer outward. Ask everyone to say the name they gave in the last question and pray for those people by name. If somebody is not ready to pray out loud, let them say the name and let someone else carry it.
Close by praying for each other, with each person naming one thing they have been chasing and asking God to settle it.