Give Me a Sign: Difference between revisions

 

== [[Film]] ==

* Happens in ''[[Monty Python and The Holy Grail]]'': "Oh, don't grovel!"

* In ''[[Bruce Almighty]]'', this happens a couple of times. While he's driving, he asks God for some sort of sign, and then immediately passes by a road sign that reads, "Caution Ahead." He ''again'' asks for a sign from God, and a literal truckload of warning signs immediately passes by his car. Also, when Bruce is shouting his insults at God, his cell phone rings. Even after it gets smashed. Bruce himself tries to engineer these sorts of signs so Grace would come back to him, but they all fail.

* ''The Messenger''. Joan finds a sword in a field and decides that it's a message from God. Her anthropomorphized sense of conscience questions her on how she could know that it didn't end up there [[Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane|simply by chance]].

* In ''[[The Final]]'', the outcasts demand a sign from God telling them not to carry out their plan. They take the lack of such a sign as proof that God has sanctioned the torture and mutilation that they will inflict on their classmates.

* ''[[The Blues Brothers]]'': "The band... ''the band!''"

{{quote| '''Jerry Landers:''' "How about a little rain?"<br />

'''God:''' "One small shower, coming up." (rain begins falling)<br />

'''God:''' "Why should I spoil everybody's day?" }}

** In one of the sequels, Bobby Shelton, a struggling musician who sold his soul to the devil, prays to God that He would give him a sign. He receives it in the form of a rainbow that appears bright in the sky at night.

* ''[[The Grey]]'': After {{spoiler|losing all the members in his party of plane-crash survivors}}, Ottway screams at the heavens for a sign in a "now or never" fashion. A few minutes later, he realizes {{spoiler|he's totally fucked, as he's [[Downer Ending|in the middle of wolves' den]]}}.

* The main character of ''[[Miss Nobody]]'' sees St. George as her guardian angel. After one of her rivals at work is sort of accidentally killed by her, she immediately spots a homeless man with a sign saying, "Call me George," and assumes this is a sign that St. George has her back. However, after noticing her other rivals giving her the stink eye at the funeral, she prays to St. George asking for another sign, just in case the homeless guy was a coincidence. Cue her mother's new boarder arriving, who is the spitting image of St. George...and a detective. Later, when she worries the detective may be on to her, she prays for another sign, and it begins to rain outside. She interprets this as meaning she needs a [[Fall Guy]].

== [[Literature]] ==

* In Douglas Adams ''[[Hitch Hikers Guide to The Galaxy|So Long And Thanks For All The Fish]]'', God left his final message to his creation (in fifty foot-tall letters of fire) on the side of a mountain. It reads {{spoiler|"'''WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.'''"}} Marvin got to see it before he died. [[Tear Jerker|It made him feel a little better.]]

{{quote| ''What I really said was, "Should I go through with this? Lord, give me a sign." At that moment I stop for a stop sign, and overhead a bird electrocutes itself on the high-tension lines and drops dead on the front hood of my car. So I sit there at the stop sign awhile shivering, tilt my head back and real soft I say, "You didn't have to shout."''}}

{{quote| ''"Men are fools, as always," grunted Conan. "If the plague struck all who sinned, then by Crom there wouldn't be enough left to count the living! Why should the gods--who the priests tell me are just--slay five hundred peasants and merchants and nobles before they slew the king, if the whole pestilence were aimed at him? Were the gods smiting blindly, like swordsmen in a fog? By Mitra, if I aimed my strokes no straighter, Aquilonia would have had a new king long ago.''}}

* Played very seriously in ''[[The Emigrants]]''. Kristina who has been very religious her entire life begins to doubt the existence of God after all the hardships she's had to endure and begs God to exist and to give her a sign that he does.

* On ''[[Cheers]]'', Diane has taken to a convent after breaking her engagement to Frasier, realizing she loves Sam. After Sam comes to visit her, she asks God for a sign. Sam returns and asks where the men's room is. Says Diane, "Well, that's not exactly the parting of the Red Sea..."

* [[Fringe]] had an example with a white tulip. {{spoiler|Subverted, as it was actually given to Walter by a time traveller.}}

 

== Music ==

 

== [[Theater]] ==

* In French works, often played for laughs by having a swan appear for no good reason (in French, the words for "swan" and "sign" being homonyms).

* In ''Shrek [[The Musical]]'', from "Travel Song":