Traveling the world, man finds big, little miracles even in darkest places

Darren Wilson knew he was sitting on a powder keg.

He was already getting dramatic feedback from audiences who watched his new film, "Furious Love," and the film wasn't even out yet. Pastors and others who previewed the movie, which takes viewers from a sex trade district in Thailand to a "demon tent" in Tanzania to occult hot spots near and far, were already saying the film was life-changing.

And that was before Feb. 14, when everything exploded. On Sunday, Valentine's Day, "Furious Love" premiered in more than 500 churches in 19 countries around the globe. An estimated 100,000 people -- 1,000 at a single location in Aurora -- turned out to see Wilson's documentary about the extravagant love of God that reaches even to where evil thrives.

"The testimonies are beginning to pour in," Wilson wrote the next day in his blog. "All around the world, people are waking up to the reality of God's ferocious love for them, for those around them - Many churches are scrambling to set up more showings."

Two years in the making, "Furious Love" is a film that came out of Elgin, where Wilson's studio, Wanderlust Productions, is located on the campus of Judson University. Formerly an assistant professor, Wilson's new title at Judson is artist-in-residence.

Matt Bilen, who lives next door to the Wilsons in Pingree Grove, served as creative media director for "Furious Love," and Braden Heckman of Lake Zurich was the technical director. The three men traveled together for filming, but it was Wilson who holed up alone in his studio to edit more than 200 hours of footage.

"It was a stretching time for me," he said. "I cried every day. I was overwhelmed."

In Tanzania, he had seen a young girl and others delivered from the devastation of demon possession. In Thailand, he filmed a bartender in the sex district who was healed of shoulder and stomach pain and interviewed Christians who are reaching out to people victimized by trafficking.

He traveled to Spain, where heroin addicts have taken over the Madrid city dump - "the worst place I'd ever been" - and where former addicts, changed by the love of Christ, come every day to bring food and offer prayer for those still held in heroin's grip.

At an event for witches and pagans in Salem, Mass., Wilson saw people receive physical healing after a Christian man prayed for them openly.

"Was God really showing up at a witchcraft festival?" Wilson asks in the film. "I mean, these guys didn't even believe in God. But then I remembered that God isn't limited by our unbelief."

He went to India, where thousands of Christians have been killed by Hindu extremists in Orissa, including 18 pastors in one night. And to a young man in the Netherlands, who before making a narrow escape had recorded poignant worship by Congolese Christians, singing despite ongoing violence and rape in their homeland.

"I wanted to see if God's love exists even in the darkest of places," Wilson said. In all, he and his crew visited 14 countries and often were shocked by the depths of evil they encountered. Wilson has described the making of "Furious Love" as the hardest spiritual journey he's ever gone through.

"It was, obviously, first of all, just the places where we went," he said. "These were not vacation spots. I knew the Lord had commissioned me to do this, so I knew we were safe. But we were walking into the devil's living room and turning on the camera."

Wilson narrates the documentary himself, telling viewers in down-to-earth fashion what he was really thinking as dramatic events unfolded in front of him.

"One of the traps that Christian filmmakers will fall into is they'll become a slave to their message," he said, "and I always tell my students this. You can't say, 'I have to preach this particular thing,' because then the story has to bend to your will and it becomes propaganda. I'm interested in the truth."

Not only did Wilson find the darkness astonishing, but he also was blown away by the healing and deliverance he witnessed firsthand. In fact, having been raised in a "straight-laced, evangelical" family, he hasn't always believed in the supernatural but rather in a God he assumed to be "normal."

"I started out very much as a skeptic of the miraculous," Wilson says in the film. "I'm not a skeptic anymore."

His perspective changed when he was making his first movie, "Finger of God," a 2007 documentary of healing miracles and other evidence of the divine that he shot all over the world.

"Finger of God" was a $20,000, one-man project made in Wilson's living room that sold over 60,000 DVDs online merely through word-of-mouth. With an upgraded budget of $300,000, "Furious Love" is the second film in what Wilson intends to become a trilogy.

Charisma magazine, a monthly publication with an international readership, will name Wilson one of 21 emerging Christian leaders in its April issue, he said. He recently was profiled by Christian Broadcasting Network on "The 700 Club."

"('Furious Love' is) going to be the film that defines my life," Wilson says in the CBN piece. "It's the film I was put on this earth to make."

But he tries to take all the attention in stride.

"I'm just a donkey that the Lord rode in on," Wilson said, "and (at the film's premiere) he dismounted and he spoke.

"The fact that he used me, I'm the luckiest donkey in the world."

"Furious Love" will be shown at 7 p.m. Saturday, March 13, at the Christian Youth Theater warehouse, 755 Industrial Drive, Cary, and 7 p.m. Monday, March 22, at Vineyard Christian Fellowship of DeKalb, 215 N. Fourth St.

The public is welcome to attend either showing, and tickets for both are $5 at the door. Wilson said the film may not be appropriate for children under 12.