Crash

Yesterday was indeed a beautiful day. The weather was nice (minus the insane wind, and said wind blowing me over after exiting Starbucks), I had no obligations, and I got to relax at home.

I woke up at 7:15 on my own free will, not because I was obligated to go anywhere, but because I wanted to see my high school band perform at the OBA music festival. It was partially why I wanted to come home early (and skip my first lecture :( *tear*). WOW. I was extremely tired since I didn't get enough sleep, but I was determined to make it on time. I made it just in time for 8 am when they started playing. And I'm so glad I went, because it was so nice hearing them and seeing my conductors again. The UHS Wind Ensemble made me very proud. :) And a lot of people, especially my conductors, were happy and thankful that I came to support. A simple act of love goes a long way, even when you don't intend it to be an act of love in the first place.

It occured to me that I'm struggling with loving my spiritual family back home. With some people I am still tight with, with others I am a complete stranger. I started to fall out of touch perhaps before the summer even began, and more so after softball season ended and I moved to Waterloo. I decided not to go to retreat in the coming weekend because of many reasons, even though a few of my close friends are going. I think I'm going to continue to spend some time alone and just focus on loving God, my family and even myself. But I definitely need to work on loving these friends again. At times I feel like I just don't care anymore. At times I don't want to make any efforts to ask them how they are. Sometimes I wonder why I started to grow apart from them in the first place, but I certainly trust that God does this kind of stuff for a reason. And he's going to reveal to me his reasons in his own time. For now, my job is to work on my attitude toward this entire situation.

Anyway, the main point of this post was to discuss my thoughts on the 2005 (2004?) movie, Crash. We are supposed to watch it for SOC 101 because the DVD player was being stupid last Monday and we didn't get to view it in class. Movie for homework? Sweeeeet. Crash was nominated for and won several Oscars, including Best Picture, over the critic-favoured Brokeback Mountain. It's all about racial inequities and power shifts. I enjoyed the film a lot, and I highly recommend you watch it.

For homework, our task is to write down all the instances of racial inequities and power shifts we view in the film. I was appalled at how much hate, despair, sorrow and sin there was in this movie, but also at how much truth of today's reality resonates from it, too. The things portrayed were dramatic, but, parallels and similarities actually happen in our world. In our communities. It made a huge impact on me - more than I thought it would. Won't lie, I had like three heart attacks and I almost cried twice (and I kept yelling at my laptop screen during the climatic parts). It made me SO sad. There is such an enormous lack of love in our world. The world needs Christ's love. It needs us to pour out Jesus' love.

And that itself is a massive challenge. If I can't bring myself to fully love my fellow brothers and sisters, how can I bring myself to love the world whom I don't know at all?