Mercy

Warning: This post contains movie spoilers. These are merely thoughts and reflections on my recent pursuit of knowledge and understanding.

This week I finished reading Just Mercy then immediately watched the movie. I would definitely recommend the book over the movie in this case; there were a plethora of details that were excluded from the movie, but, there's only so much you can fit into 2 hours and the basic premise was the same. It was a story about freedom for an innocent man.

Then today I watched Clemency, another movie about an innocent death row inmate facing his execution. His story did not end in freedom. Most of the film, however, follows the point of view of the prison warden (played by Tulsa native Alfre Woodard, in an Oscar-worthy performance), whose years working on death row and participation in 12 executions have left her hollowed and raw.

Both movies are incredibly hard to watch (FYI-- in Clemency, they show a botched lethal injection within the first 10 minutes). Both movies require us to view just some of the realities of the criminal justice system and the people who are affected by it day by day. But I think, more than anything, both movies can cause us to look inwardly if we let them.

No matter one's political stance, I think anyone would have difficulty watching an execution in real life. Because it's death? Yes. But more than that, because we know that there is a thread that runs through all of us, making us equally as deserving of death. We know that easily could be us.

"We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.. our shared brokenness connects us."
-Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

If we don't know this, we can't move forward. If we don't understand our need for intervention into the broken parts of our lives, we can't have empathy for our neighbor. If we don't realize that the battle is not with flesh and blood, but with our own inward darkness, we will continue running in circles and we won't be able to show the world what true and godly justice, mercy, and love looks like, because we'll be so busy trying to prove that we aren't the broken ones.

I am guilty of this. I want to be better. I want to learn more and more how to love like Jesus: a completely innocent man who was executed so that we--broken people--wouldn't have to be. I want to learn how to not let the pain and brokenness of the world make me hollow. I want to respond by fighting for the gospel to be known; I want to reach into the darkness and drive it out with light. This isn't another post trying to tell you what to do or how to feel. This is me saying, "I'm learning and I want to be better."