Balancing Kiwis

I watched The Guardian yesterday. 

It’s awash with Kevin Costner’s aging heroic wisdom and Ashton Kutcher’s wisecracks, and it follows every cliche you could think of it. And yet it works. For me, at least.

I think it’s because it’s real.  There really are coastguards; they really are almost invisible (when was the last time you thought of one or saw them on the news?); they really do rescue people in trouble; they really do risk their lives for others.  They swim, they train, they live, they die.  The film may have been a predictable drama, but I have a feeling the lives of these heroes are also predictably dramatic  - In other words I guess they can pretty much predict their lives will regularly involve risking everything to save others.

Why it impacted me?  Are we not called to the same devotion to the pledge “so others may live”?  Should that not be the imprint on our lives?  When so many in the world are dying of AIDS, poverty, hunger, abuse and oppression do we not have to be the ones who will risk everything to “save as many as we can”?  Just as the people drowning were isolated and unknown by the world, so many on our spinning planet drown in injustice mostly unnoticed.  We know that we can never solve all the problems, but we can (as Randall puts it) “try to save the weakest and most desperate first”. 

 

Is it not in doing this that we become more fully human?  So let us accept our mission and step out into the waves . . . so others may live.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 11:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.