Announcement: My wife is starting up her own blog to try to get some more routine into her life. I'd love it if you popped over there and gave her some encouragement as she gets going <smile>.
Thanks!
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I don't know about you, but sometimes I'm going along in my day thinking about the wonderful topics I could post about and then suddenly my mind gets stuck on some topic and I just can't shake it.
That just happened to me.
Take a minute and think about this music video (if you didn't on Friday).
I had no idea this song is actually a "Christmas standard" ... I'm so ignorant.
And while I can see this song/video as an anti-war bit, I found the (perceived?/implied?/assumed?/intended?) message to be rather negative toward Christianity. Especially with a quote supposedly from Gandhi: An eye for an eye will make us all blind.
But as I watched the video I felt a certain... exuberance and sorrow. Christmas--God coming to dwell among us to later sacrifice Himself for us--is the only solution to the problems so graphically recorded in the video. So for me, any kind of "just choose not to fight" ideologies that may have been intended by the filmmaker are shown to be futile. Christ is the only solution to these problems, and just because peace may be something we want, that does not mean that we can simply have it by wanting it. Evil continues, even--especially?--if we stand back.
And the quote is horribly wrong. We would only all be blind if we allowed evil men to poke out everyone's eye and only then decided to exact justice. And that's often why we fight wars: With the hope of eradicating injustice (or at least tipping it in our favor). I don't go around poking people's eyes out, so assuming nobody came to do it to me, I, at least, could be king in the land of the blind. I think the point of the quote is closer to the heart of another quote: If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. But that is not the entirety of wisdom surrounding how to respond to evil.
War is a gruesome thing. People are evil.
We can't stop that simply by wishing everyone a merry Christmas, even if your name is John Lennon.
But Christmas is a reminder of what ultimately will end war... right after a last great big one.
~Luke Holzmann
Filmmaker, Writer, Expectant Father
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