Phil Connors started February 2 as a jerk, despised by everyone who knew him, and he ended the day universally beloved, a town hero. What lessons can we learn from the transformation of this local weatherman?

1. Attitude

One of the ideas illustrated clearly in the movie Groundhog Day is that nothing is inevitable about your day. You have decisions to make. You take the same day over and over … and the only difference is your attitude … and that day can turn out any number of ways.

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The only difference is your attitude. It is otherwise precisely the same day. The only difference is your attitude. And that day turns out completely differently. The only difference is your attitude. You wake at the same time, in the same spot, after the same night of sleep. The only difference is your attitude. You encounter all the same people throughout the day. The only difference is your attitude. Today might be monumentally craptastic or unbelievably wonderful. The only difference is your attitude.

That lesson might take a while to learn. Practice makes perfect, and sometimes we need a lot of practice.

2. Purpose

What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?

One thing you would probably do is stop trying to climb the corporate ladder. In Groundhog Day, there is no corporate ladder. Near the beginning of the movie, Phil announces in his studio in Pittsburgh that “there is a major network interested in me.” He considers himself already a celebrity approaching a career breakthrough when people finally recognize his immense talent. But all of that is out when you’re stuck in Punxsutawney repeating the same day. It makes little sense to focus on your career when there is no opportunity for advancement. Groundhog Day is an ambition-killer.

Without a viable career path, what is the point of life? Eventually Phil figures out that he is able to make his life matter, even in this endless cycle of the same day, by pouring himself out into other people.

The only difference is attitude, and one aspect of that attitude is our focus: career vs. others. The option that comports with the Greatest Commands as articulated by Jesus is the one that we should pursue.

That’s not to say that vocation is unimportant. It can and should be very important, since it is what we spend most of our time doing. And, to be sure, the local weatherman performs an important function in helping people live with joy and security. While your job is certainly about providing income to yourself and your family, it should not be about self-aggrandizement but about fulfilling the Abrahamic commission to bring blessing to the world. A Christian in whatever profession should see his or her employment as a means of serving others and so fulfilling the law of Christ.

This is the second lesson: love your neighbor as yourself.

3. Gratefulness

It is in Punxsutawney that Phil Connors discovers gratefulness. The place on earth that made him the most miserable, he now realizes is the place that could make him the most happy. He has come to know these people, and he loves them. He is grateful for their presence in his life.

The only difference is attitude, and one aspect of that attitude is whether we are miserable or grateful for the events and personalities in our life. We can choose. This is the third lesson.

4. Kindness

In her book Where Goodness Still Grows, Amy Peterson opens her chapter on kindness (ch. 2) by talking about how she doesn’t like the word, because it seems weak, unobtrusive. It takes her a while to come to the point of finding value in this fruit of the Spirit.

A major turning point in Groundhog Day comes in Phase 4 when Phil whispers to Rita that she is the kindest person he’s ever known, and he is in awe of her kindness, as if he is only realizing now that it is a quality to be admired rather than despised.

The only difference is attitude, and one aspect of that attitude is whether we cultivate a basic posture of kindness toward others. Am I repeating myself? As Groundhog Day teaches us, some things need to be repeated.

This is the fourth lesson: cultivate a posture of kindness.

5. Service

We must not overlook that the day in which he befriends Rita is not the day that ends the cycle. Romance is not the goal of this time-warp, though romance does happen. The perfect day is the one in which he focuses neither on himself nor on Rita. That is the day in which he receives everything: the whole town becomes his. At the beginning of the movie, he wants to be adored. At the end of the movie, he no longer seeks adoration, and everyone adores him. He empties himself, taking the form of a servant, and it is for this reason that he is highly exalted. Seeking to be the slave of all, he finds himself in first place.

He decides to invest in other people without knowing whether he will derive any benefit. He does not know what will break the cycle. He doesn’t know if it can be broken. So, he reasons, if he is going to be stuck in a single day for all of eternity, he would enjoy not focusing on himself for all of eternity, but trying something new. This is most clear in his interactions with the homeless man. Without Phil’s help, this man is dead by the end of the day—but, like everything else that happens on that day, the death of this man is not permanent. He will be back the next day, and every day, begging for funds as Phil walks to Gobbler’s Knob. If ever a death did not matter, this man’ s death does not matter. It will last for only a few hours. But Phil makes it his mission to keep this man alive. In one of the early sequences in which Phil pays attention to this man, the man dies in a hospital bed, and the nurse tells him that there was no particular cause of death; sometimes people just die. Phil refuses to accept that fact: “Not today.”

This aspect of the film suggests that, instead of looking for the greener pastures elsewhere, what we might need to say is, “This place where I am is my place. These people that I see daily are the people I will continue seeing everyday.” For Phil Connors, no amount of ambition could take him out of Punxsutawney. (I almost said Bedford Falls.) He had always been looking for bigger and better opportunities, but those opportunities are now definitively denied him. Eventually, in Phase 5, he determined that he would invest in this community, which he came to accept as his community, his people.

Let me pause just a moment to reflect on the culture of church hopping. In many cases—and probably in your case, and in mine—changing churches without changing the city we inhabit constitutes a betrayal of Christ and his body. I know: people are annoying and stupid, and they’re hypocrites, and they are so very sinful. It’s obvious, isn’t it, that I’m describing all of us. But even if not, even if somehow in this instance I’ve got merely a speck in my eye and the plank really is in my brother’s eye, what should I do? What would Jesus do?

Or, to come at it another way: in Paul’s first letter to the Christians in Corinth, what did the Apostle say were the signs that it was the right time to find another congregation?

Again, church hopping is often—not always—a betrayal of Christ and his body. Fortunately for us, there is repentance and the promise of forgiveness.

The only difference is attitude, and one aspect of that attitude is whether our desires or the needs of others carry the most weight in our minds. “Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.”

This is the fifth lesson: let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.

6. Grace

What about God?

Is there any mention of God? Well, there is, yes. It’s in Phase 4, when Phil—for at least one day—imagines himself a god. He guesses that he is not the chief God, just a lower deity. It’s not an altogether unreasonable hypothesis. The way we define a god usually has something to do with immortality, and Phil through hard experience has proven to himself that he is not subject to death. In this conclusion, he is wrong, and I believe my evaluation coheres with the rules of the movie. Phil Connors has, for some reason, been granted a temporary reprieve from death while he endures a seemingly endless loop of Groundhog Day, which turns out to be for his moral improvement. Phil Connors is not, in fact, the God or a god or even immortal. He is just a man, granted the immense grace of repeating a day that he repeatedly refuses to get right.

I reiterate: this is grace. The best thing that could have happened to Phil Connors is that he be stuck in Punxsutawney, forced to experience the same 24-hour period until he stops screwing it up. How many times do we go through a day and completely mess it up? I don’t mean that the events that occur that day make it difficult or bad—a car wreck or a diagnosis or whatever. Usually our bad days do not involve anything nearly so catastrophic as a wreck or a diagnosis; they’re more like what Phil Connors endures in Punxsutawney. Rather, we botch our response to these events, mishandle our interactions with people—our kids, or spouses, or friends, or coworkers—and we wish we had a do-over. Of course, there’s no guarantee that we’d get the day right on the second try. We might need to repeat it again and again. What a blessing it would be for the mistakes we made that day, the people we insulted or ignored, the anger and resentment we caused—what a blessing it would be for all of that to have no permanent effect, to be completely forgotten the next day. Wouldn’t it be great if our sin didn’t follow us?

I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news first: we don’t get second chances like that. When I make a flippant comment at someone else’s expense, they remember it. I can and should apologize, but there are no take-backs. The things we do each day have consequences.

Now the good news: what is impossible with men is possible with God. Wouldn’t it be great if our sin didn’t follow us? Hear the words of the prophet: “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34).

This is the sixth lesson: grace.

7. Beauty

Phil Connors’ life becomes beautiful as he recognizes the beauty around him. Great storytelling helps to make the beauty of the spiritual life vibrant and stark. Think about Narnia, and how much we readers long to walk through that wardrobe—and much more than that, how much we long to behold that beautiful, fiercesome, good lion, to hear his voice, to wrap our arms around his neck so that our face is buried in his mane. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead provides a striking example; the entire novel is beautiful, but near the end there is a scene of such overwhelming beauty that it makes my eyes water each time I read it. Groundhog Day accomplishes something similar, depicting the blessed life as so obviously superior to the selfish life that it inspires us to be better ourselves.

In a world in which teens overwhelmingly affirm that they’d rather be famous than happy, we need more depictions of people who flip that script. Phil Connors went from miserably pursuing fame to happily unconcerned about it.

And it was only then that his eyes were opened and he could see the beauty around him. One of the last lines of the movie is when Phil looks out at the snow-covered streets of this despised town of Punxsutawney and proclaims, “Isn’t it beautiful!” Phil has learned to see beauty, and we see in him a beautiful life.

Beauty—this is lesson #7, and our lessons are complete. Phil Connors teaches us about Attitude, Purpose, Gratefulness, Kindness, Service, Grace, and Beauty.

Phil has now taken on the character of Jesus, interested only in self-emptying, ambitious to invest in others. When he realizes that the cycle has been broken, he does not return to his selfish ways. Instead he asks Rita: “what can I do for you today?” And he has never experienced more joy.

We could do worse than learn spirituality from Phil Connors.

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