A Christian reflection on Of Mice and Men

Dreaming. Two men. A little piece of land. Some rabbits. And a dream that kept them going through every miserable day of migrant labor in Depression-era California.

John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men is one of the saddest stories in American literature. And if you’ve ever put all your hope in something or in a dream, that ultimately couldn’t hold the weight of it, you already know why.

George and Lennie’s dream wasn’t wrong. It was just too small to save them.

The Dream Was Their God

George tells the story of the farm over and over — almost like a prayer. A little house, a garden, rabbits for Lennie to tend. It’s the thing that gets them out of bed. The thing that makes the hard days bearable. The thing they return to whenever the world feels like too much.

Sound familiar?

We all have a version of the farm. The relationship that will finally make us feel whole. The financial milestone that will finally make us feel secure. The achievement that will finally make us feel like enough.

There’s nothing wrong with dreams. God wired us to hope. But when a dream becomes the thing we’re living for — the source of our meaning, our identity, our reason to keep going — we’ve handed it a job it was never meant to do.

Psalm 20:7 says some trust in chariots and some in horses. George and Lennie trusted in a farm. What are you trusting in?

The Farm vs. The Lord

Lennie and the Weight of Our Brokenness

Lennie Small is one of literature’s most heartbreaking figures — a man with the strength of an ox and the impulses of a child, who genuinely never means to hurt anyone and keeps doing so anyway.

He can’t help it. He doesn’t understand his own power. And the people around him pay the price.

That’s a picture of human brokenness that should feel uncomfortably close to home. Not because we’re dangerous in the way Lennie is, but because all of us carry something — a temper, a pattern, a wound — that we can’t seem to control, no matter how hard we try.

Paul describes exactly this feeling in Romans 7:19 — doing the things he doesn’t want to do, failing to do the things he knows are right. Lennie’s tragedy is a vivid, physical picture of what it feels like to be human, broken, and unable to fix yourself.

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

Romans 7:19 (KJV)

The difference, for believers, is that the story doesn’t have to end there.

George and the Loneliness of Carrying Others

George could have walked away from Lennie at any point. Life would have been easier. Simpler. Less complicated.

However, he stayed — not out of obligation exactly, but out of something deeper. A commitment that had grown into love, even when that love was exhausting.

There’s something quietly Christlike in George’s faithfulness to Lennie. Not perfect. Not without frustration. But present. Showing up. Refusing to let Lennie face the world alone.

Galatians 6:2 calls us to bear one another’s burdens. That’s not a light request. Some people’s burdens are very heavy. Some people require more patience than we think we have. George’s story is a reminder that bearing someone else’s weight costs something — and that it matters anyway.

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.

Galatians 6:2 (KJV)

When Dreams Die

The farm never happens. And the way it doesn’t happen is devastating.

Steinbeck doesn’t let his characters fail through laziness or selfishness. They fail because the world is broken and cruel, and sometimes the best people with the best intentions still end up with nothing.

For readers without faith, that’s just tragedy. For Christians, it raises a harder question — one we don’t always want to sit with: What do you do when the thing you hoped for doesn’t come?

The Bible doesn’t promise that our earthly dreams will be fulfilled. It promises something better and harder to hold onto — that God is working all things together for good, even when all things look like a field that will never be yours.

Romans 8:28 isn’t a bumper sticker. It’s a lifeline for the moments when the dream dies and you have to decide whether you still trust the Dreamer.

The Takeaway

Of Mice and Men is a story about how fragile our hopes can be when we build them on things that can be taken away.

George and Lennie needed more than a farm. They needed what we all need — a hope that can’t be killed by circumstance, a belonging that can’t be destroyed by one terrible moment, a future that doesn’t depend on everything going right.

The question their story leaves us with is painfully simple:

What are you building your hope on — and will it hold?

“Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” — Psalm 20:7

God bless.

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