Friday, April 18, 2008

Lessons from a Movie

I just finished watching Saved!, which is one of my favorite movies ever.  For those of you who don't know, it's a satire on Christianity.  You should see it, if you haven't.  A lot of people here at Union probably wouldn't really enjoy it; pretty much everyone who I've shared it with here haven't liked it.  I love it, anyway, and that's what matters.  ;)  

One of the main things the movie always makes me think of is judging people.  Thinking you are better than someone because you are a Christian, or haven't made the same mistakes, or have different views about what it means to be a Christian.  Tonight while I was watching it, I picked up on something else.  

There are several events in which a character claims, "Jesus told me to!"  Of course, Jesus "told" them to do things that are sins and do not end well.  It hit me that people may use that excuse to do something drastic, something that toes or even crosses the line between moral and immoral.  Just look at the Crusades, the Inquisition.  In the movie, Mary (main character) has sex with her boyfriend, believing that Jesus told her to do it in order to "cure" her boyfriend's homosexuality.  I'm not saying that any of you would do such a thing; I'm giving an example here.  

The whole movie is basically Mary's journey to discovering what it really means to be a Christian, how knowing right and wrong does not guarantee perfection.  This comes from having made a big mistake.  

We all make mistakes (duh).  We've all made big mistakes, had times at which we thought the world had ended as we knew it.  Nothing could be done to rectify the mess we made.  How untrue!  

God uses every one of our mistakes for His purposes.  He doesn't clean it up for us; He teaches us lessons, gives others examples, reaches out to pick us up from them.  He wants us to turn to Him when everything goes south - and even when it hasn't.  

I don't think I've been very eloquent in expressing my desired message (disregarding this sentence), but I only had a small point to make.  Maybe it's one you've never thought about, or just one you've forgotten (as it was with me).  Mistakes suck:  They can hurt you and everyone around you, they can cause major complications, they can make you feel like you are the biggest idiot on the planet.  However...

If God didn't use our screw-ups, what else would He have to work with?

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