Slingblade

I live in Arkansas and that may be why ever so many people told me this movie Slingblade had been filmed not far from my current hometown. After about the tenth person who said, "You ought to watch it sometime." I finally did, sort of . I did but with the remote ready to mute at any given time I felt like it.
I don't like filthy talk. I don't like filthy jokes. I don't like people to be degraded by words.
So I had to push mute a lot.
But watching that movie will forever be a blessing to me. I enjoy visual aids. I always "get it" better when there is a picture.
Of course this picture was what you do not want to happen.
There was just enough there for me to identify with. I seem to be able to grasp a picture others don't, the few I have shared my insights with .
Perhaps it is because I have viewed my world from a whole different point of view.
This requires my stating this view, so that you the reader at least have a better chance of understanding my insight. If you have not even watched the movie ,you may wish to not even go on reading this blog, because I can not adequately re-tell the whole story.
My view of this world : I have a fallen nature, inherited from Adam. I have an opportunity to receive a new nature, inherited from Jesus.
I have to choose daily to receive the new nature and deliberately choose not to follow the desires of the old nature. However, that old nature seems to be able to trick me, and somehow a repeated behaviour of sins manifest themselves.

Repeated behaviour are the key words here. If you have not ever noticed any repeated behaviour in your life you might as well not read this either. By repeated behaviour I am talking about behaviour that surely if you could have given the whole idea some forethought you would not have done it. Surely if you could learn anything from history, you could learn not to do this.

Now back to the movie.
The star of the movie surely had the markings of repeated behaviour.
He sat there in that institution with nothing to do but think about what had happened to him.
Did anyone encourage him or even suggest that he should or could forgive anyone of his persecutors ? I suppose not.
He had been imprisoned for so long he felt uncomfortable to be set free.
When given a choice, he would rather live in a shed. (Same place where he'd grown up.)
When to his understanding similar circumstances presented itself into his life , he responded the same way he had the time before.
I pointed out to one listener that the fact that he killed that abusive boyfriend was not going to help that young boy at all, I wasn't believed.
Well, that is because the listener was young his-self and he did not know yet that abused women always repeat the cycle . Just setting them free does not change their repeated behaviour that seems to always get them back with another abusive partner.
Maybe an abused women who has finally recognized her repeated behaviour and wants to change. It would take a huge miracle, the kind Jesus does, in order for that to happen.
She would have to be on guard all the time, every choice she made, that she was not choosing to go back and live in the shed. Just like she had done when she was growing up.