Janel's Place

I am home right now and it is only 10 p.m. I think I should write a blog. 20 minutes, we'll see what can be done in 20 minutes.

The real (?) world is sort of coming back into focus now after being held in suspension for about 2 hours while I watched the absolutely saddest movie I have ever seen and quite possibly ever will see. Americans are so protected by comedy and happy-ending-insurance (or at least I am), that watching "Dolls" turned my whole world upside-down and I don't know how it will rearrange. It was a Japanese film with English subtitles, but somewhere part way in I forgot about the subtitles (still read them but didn't notice them, and most of the movie didn't have words anyway). It was about... what can I capture it with... just heartbreak. You start watching two beggars walk around with a red rope connecting them, a guy leading a girl, both with empty, sad faces. They are young and beautiful, but ragged and hopeless. Who are they? Well I'm not going to be able to describe this whole scenario adequately, so I won't attempt to, but in a short amount of time you fall in love with both of them, and you cry with the boy who made a bad decision and spent the rest of his life seeking forgiveness but barred from finding it. Along the way they pass other people with their own stories of twisted love and sad endings, and the gravity of every sad soul just grabs you in a way only a Japanese film could. Through bunraku you start to see a depth of culture, story-telling and life that you can't get just by learning about bunraku. You have to see the tragedy underneath the mournful voice, played out stage by stage. I guess what you come away with is a feeling of increasing and unstoppable despair, as mistakes don't fix themselves and people actually live every single day with the consequences that vivid memories make all the more painful. Ouch. I think the world is a little bit different to me at the moment, and honestly I want it to stay that way. The human condition is really the only thing that does matter, and the more I can remember that, the more I can get to a place where God's compassion for people can get past the shallow part of me that is always more ready to judge than to love.

But now it's 10:30 and I have to prepare to meet Wednesday. My other thoughts of the week (or month) seemed cleverer before the movie, but I'll spit them down anyway. In contemplating God's sovereignty this week, and my peeve with that statement even though I know it is true, I thought that perhaps the proper perspective is to state that God is sovereign, but then explain the two possible followings from that statement that are also true. God is sovereign and His purpose will be accomplished, but we can either fight with Him to accomplish His purpose or we can drop the sword. If we didn't have those choices then God would not consistently use "if" in just about every statement He made to man. Perhaps predestination and free will have splattered brains on the walls of times past and they will continue to do so until the end of time, but it seems quite clear that the only hard thing to do is realize that sitting and thinking about everything is no substitute for choosing a course of action based on what you do know: you have the choice to sit while someone else (i.e. person, church, nation...) plays the game, or play the game yourself. The gravity of the choice is a little unclear, but then again future consequences for our choices are never clear. If they were, I know two bound beggars who would never have existed, and two girls in the audience who would not have lost a lot of tears as the impression of real pain and consequence resonated in their own souls.