July 23, 2015 (Thursday)
When I was a kid I used to go to a neighborhood theater alone and enjoy the movies. One day I saw a George Raft movie that upset me because it graphically portrayed him drowning. He sat on the floor of the sinking ship’s stateroom and the water rose past his chest to his neck and then covered his face. I was not prepared for something that depressing. I was sad for days. I suppose I had never thought much about death, and the scene made it real for me.
Thanks to Turner Classic Movies, I saw the movie again a few weeks ago. I didn’t recognize the name of the movie, but I soon remembered some of the scenes and I braced myself for the sinking of the ship and the drowning scene. I wanted to find out if it could upset an 83-year-old man as it did a 10-year-old child. When the scene opened, I braced myself. But, lo and behold, the scene was now edited so that the “bad part” was missing. The editing skipped the actual death and left it to our imagination.
Movies today–and even some TV shows–leave very little, if anything, to the imagination. The scene I described in the old movie was nothing in comparison to what is being shown these days. If that little scene affected my thinking as a 10-year-old, what is going on in the minds of children these days as they are exposed to blood, gore and death on a regular basis?
Since the worst part of the old scene was edited out, I’ll never know if I would have reacted differently to it at my present age. I think my feelings would have been much different. I first saw the movie when I was a child who knew nothing about God, salvation, eternal life or anything like those things and the thought of dying upset me terribly. I don’t think that would happen today. I like to think of myself as standing beside Paul the Apostle as he taunts death, which has lost its power over the child of God. I want to say with him, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55 NIV).
The presence of Jesus Christ in our hearts and lives makes all the difference in the world as to how we view both life and death. We can say with the great apostle, “To me to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21 NIV).