so you are probably wondering about the title. Well I've been on duty tonight and that is always boring. I have a paper due on Sin and God's provision of Atonement for Systematic on tuesday, i haven't started it yet. So like usual when I have something due I do something else. So I strolled over and borrowed American History X from my friend Bruce. I really didn't know what to expect, I knew it was violent, I knew it had alot of things I really didn't know if I wanted to watch. But I knew what the story was about and I felt compelled to watch. The story is about Edward Norton's character Derek and his brother Daniel. The main story is about Derek and his journey through life. He becomes a skin head, kills two black men, goes to prison, is befriended by a black man and that changes his life. The story is incredible, one of the best of any movie about the struggle of character. I would place this up with the Shawshank Redemption as far as story goes.

What got me the most about this movie was several things, I going to use a list for this because that seems like the popular thing lately.

These things make this movie:

1. In the scene where he brutally kills the men he is spouting off hate rhetoric and when he is arrested he literally looks happy, honestly he looks like he's so full of hate and evil (an incredible acting job by Norton I must say)
2. When he goes to prison and is befriended by the black gentleman and how that guy basically saves his life is powerful. The black guy didn't pull any punches, he probably knew the guy he was talking to had a swastika across his chest and didn't care, he treated him like a human being. And when Derek leaves prison that encounter changed him.
3. The scene toward the end of the movie where Derek is standing in front of the mirror looking at the swastika tattoo on his chest and he just stares at it and then covers it with his hand. Powerful stuff because you see that he hates it, he hates who he was and you see it in his love and desire to save his brother from following in his footsteps.
4. I wondered why their mom wouldn't ever sleep in her two boys rooms and instead slept on the couch. And I know why, the walls were covered in Nazi propaganda and one big Nazi flag. After Derek goes and basically tells the leader of the skin heads he was done, he tells his brother why he did that. Derek explains to him he was tired of hating that it didn't improve his life and that he didn't want that life for his brother. So after all that they are standing in their room looking at this big Nazi flag, and then they begin to take it all down, picture by picture. The last thing they take down is the flag, and then they just stand there and look at the emptyness.
5. Don't read this if you haven't seen the movie and plan to now. When Daniel is shot at school you see the same look in the guys eyes that kills Daniel as you saw in Derek's when he killed the two guys at the beginning. That scene made me think about something too.

The guy is standing there with blood on his face after he's killed Daniel with no remorse. And here is where sin comes into this discussion.

Alot of this movie was about choice and choices. We are all stuck, we are all fallen creatures. We all choose things and sometimes those choices are bad. Derek mades some horrible choices but realized them and changed his life. But what about the guy who killed his brother, we never see his story. Does he ever change or does he stay in the cycle of hate?

Thats the thing I'm starting to realize about Sin, its nothing but a big circle. And unless something steps in and takes us out of it we just keep going around like laundry in the dryer. So Jesus jams his cross into the circle and pulls us out, but it still our choice to walk away from it and follow him or run back to it and for some reason our tendency is to run back. And I honestly don't get that, to quote Derek "nothing I have done was making my life better...and I just got tired of it....it just made me feel more lost." I feel thats how sin is, for me anyway. When we do something wrong and we don't want to read scripture cause we're going to feel convicted and nobody wants to feel bad. And thats how Sin gets us, not because we actually like it but because we are stuck. We are stuck not wanting to be hurt because we failed and stuck because we don't want to do it again either. I think this is how I know that sin is something that wasn't part of God's plan. Alot of people could say well If not for sin we won't be free to choose God. But honestly if Adam and Eve hadn't had taken the fruit would we have ever really want to know anything else but God? I mean we had to be tricked in the first place. I mean sure we knew about the tree but we hadn't eaten of it. It took the serpent and his trick to get us to take and eat. And I know he knew that this would be the undoing of God's creation.

Sadly it is our undoing, because now we suffer and die. We are stuck in a world where hate is such an evident thing and death happens everyday, movies like this show us what has happened to God's creation since our fall. And honestly I'm not content with this world, I'm not happy with it, it doesn't make sense to me and some where deep down inside of me, I know this isn't how it is supposed to be. I feel that in my gut and it bothers me.

anyway I'm tired and going to bed. That should be enough to read for now
peace