Movies...Journal 4

I love movies…I just wish I could actually afford to go to the theater to see one. However, living overseas for a year movies were one of the few American influences I encountered in mass quantity. I think I like movies because they're like books except that they take only a few hours to consume where as books take me a lot longer. For me the movies I love most often feel like sitting down with a good book, for example “A River Runs Through It." I think I love movies because it is essentially storytelling for our fast paced lives and I love a good story. Sometimes the stories are told well and other times they aren’t, but that seems to be the same as books, and really it is in the eye of the beholder.

Movies like music, have been a way in which God has spoken to me. Movies like “The Motorcycle Diaries” have helped me to make sense to what God is teaching me. In recent months as I’ve watched the news and read the newspapers I kept seeing Christians saying absolutely hateful things on T.V. directed at homosexuals in the Seattle area. The firestorm it started in my heart led me to question Sin. How do we deal with sin? How to love and accept someone who we know is sinning? How do we love someone without saying your sin is okay? As I struggled with these questions I focus shifted quickly from homosexuality to all sin. My sin, my friend’s sin, and my neighbor’s sin—how do I respond to world around me? It was during this time of internal conflict that I saw “The Motorcycle Diaries.” There was a scene at the end of the movie in which one of the two men asked the question of why they needed a river to separate the healthy from the sick. After asking that question, either out frustration or love or both, he left the world of the healthy and swam across river to be with the sick. That moment of grace and beauty gave a visual of what Christ did for us, and what maybe we as the so called “healthy” need to do reach out to the “sick.” That scene spoke volumes into the conflicts of my heart.

As for what now, I am not really sure. In the weeks between now and class I have watched a few of the movies talked about. Some I really don’t get, and I think may need second viewing to better understand. In some of the talks I have had with friends since the class I have discovered that movies are a huge part of my life. Movies provide me with quotes or clips that do a better job of explaining ideas then sometimes I do. I think movies will continue to capture my attention, give me needed words, and tell me stories worth my time.