Zac Johnson, Cofounder, Truthly · October 2, 2026
In July 2025, tickets went on sale to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm. Within an hour, ninety-five percent of the tickets were sold. The film wouldn’t open for another year.
The Odyssey is the first feature film shot entirely on IMAX film, a format prized for its image quality. The film stock alone cost about $500 a minute. Only twenty-five screens in the U.S. could show The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm, and some resale tickets for those screenings were priced at over a thousand dollars. People rearranged their calendars a year out to sit in the dark for nearly three hours and watch a man try to get home.
I don’t think that’s silly. I think it’s evidence.
Something in us hungers for the long journey, the hard road, the mission worth suffering for. We were made in the image of a Creator and set over a world we were told to work and keep. We were made to build, and be built.
The great stories often follow the same pattern, and Homer’s is one of the oldest we have. You leave the familiar. You cross a threshold into the unknown and encounter something larger than yourself. You return changed — maybe scarred — carrying something your people need.
That pattern is stamped into you, and when your life doesn’t move through it, something stays restless no matter how comfortable you get. The itch under the scroll is the adventure you never left for.
It’s why millions line up for quarter-billion-dollar adventure movies on screens several stories tall. Nobody’s buying a ticket to a film. They’re buying a few hours inside a story that matters. We keep building bigger windows because we’re desperate to be on the other side of the glass.
In Centesimus Annus, St. John Paul II warned against treating life as “a series of sensations to be experienced rather than as a work to be accomplished.” A series of sensations. That’s a description of an audience member, and most of us have become audience members of our own lives.
St. John Henry Newman put the alternative this way: “God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission — I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.”
Notice that last clause. You don’t get the audience’s view of your life. You get the next step. And the next step usually begins with a question.
We built Truthly for people with questions, for anyone who’d rather be in the story than in the audience. It isn’t meant to be another screen competing for your attention. The test I hold it to is whether it sends you off the screen and into the life God made you for.
Here’s where I’d start: What step can I take to discover what God is asking of me right now?
You can ask it here.