{The Day Paige Watched “Taken” and What Came of It}
What we see as fiction a lot of people know to be reality. An everyday hell that they have to wake up and face without hope that there’s something more that they can expect out of their life, let alone pray to have.
I have run from watching the movie Taken for so long and as the action died down and the daughter said to her father “Daddy, you came for me,” I was a mess. That movie is no fairytale. Usually I spare myself the emotional turmoil that comes with said things that touch on areas of life that really tear up my heart-trafficking being one of them-but the past few days the Lord has been calling me away from the Word to just sit and think with Him.
I realized something.
Knowing God doesn’t necessarily mean you are safe from being kidnapped and forced into prostitution in a foreign country. But knowing God does ensure that you can always say that same line [with one different word choice] that the actress tells Liam Neeson.
“God, You came for me.”
Little of me will feel anything minimally. So here I am sitting outside overlooking the property’s cow grazing, the breeze blowing, and only two days left in this special space we get to call ours. The reality I live in often hits in tidal waves of comprehension and right now is no different.
Hate to be the barer of bad news, but THAT MOVIE IS REAL. Things like that actually happen and regardless of whatever controversy exists over a film like that, each day the vulnerable are tortured, the weak are taken advantage of, and money controls everything on this side of heaven.
I am in awe of how humans CANNOT be empathetic or feel compassion towards others, let alone acknowledge the humanness of another.
But here’s where I am smiling at the irony of life. Even if we never know the Lord, the true Rescuer Himself, over the course of our lives, HE KNOWS US. For you who reading this who doesn’t know the inherent ways of God: He doesn’t let those horrible things happen to us. If Taken were a real story God wouldn’t have been the one to give the OK for her to be kidnapped and face everything that she did.
God doesn’t write the pain and the killings and treachery and the downright bad into our lives. He loves us enough to have said from the beginning of time that we get free will. Attached to free will is irony. Irony in the fact that we want to make all of the decisions ourselves, we want to live exactly that way, freely, BUT we don’t want the repercussions that exist when OTHERS act out of their free will and we curse God for it. God doesn’t deserve that but He willingly takes it as He cries alongside us and He does everything in His power to exist amongst the detriment and He continues to be sovereign in the damage too.
So whereas I want to be crying and rallying people to go into those dark places and bring light and healing, right now I cannot. I want to stop trafficking in this world, stop the sex trade, and bring an end to things that were never originally written into being when God made us all GOOD. But, God had purpose in allowing me to pour myself over that movie, in a sauna-like room in Cambodia, and to FEEL it all. Those emotions will fuel my prayers aiding the Lord in stopping the evil that exists.
If you got anything out of this, let it be that there’s always more to a story, God is forever good, and HE WILL rescue you from anything.
