Shoutout to a great film.

I watched the new batman movie. I about poo-ed myself out of excitement. It was an AMAZING FILM!!!!!! Seriously. It was good. You should watch it. I might spill details in this post, so read at your own risk.

The joker was an impressively evil character. While Heath Ledger played a really good role, I found out to my disappointment that he is a method actor. That means that to get into his character he had to spend lots of time becoming his character. Thus in order to play an wicked scary joker…he had to become that. The word on the street is that he spent so much time becoming the joker that he got depressed and either on purpose or did something bad with prescription drugs and died.

The joker was well played. It was the scariest, most well played joker I’ve ever seen. Still, it makes me wonder about his sacrifice. Was it worth it? He played an incredible role and had some fantastically written dialogue. Yet, he’s dead. He put more or less everything he was into becoming “an unstoppable force” that resulted in a great film, but now he doesn’t exist anymore. I have a rough time seeing that sacrifice as worthwhile. I applaud his acting, but…at the end of the day it made him take his own life. Maybe I don’t applaud his acting for this reason.

Apart from that, the way he played his role made me think. The joker was incredibly focused on doing evil. To a degree that I’ve never even heard of. He was willing to do whatever was necessary to make his schemes come through at whatever cost of human life. I’m sure that people like that exist in the world somewhere. What are we (as christians) to do with them? Do we kill them to stop them from killing others? Do we allow ourselves to be killed? Do we allow others to be killed? It’s a hard question. I was trying to hammer this out with some friends of mine hereabouts last night. I came to the conclusion that I don’t think that killing him to stop him from killing other people is the right choice (neither did batman, neither did Jesus). I would let the joker kill me before I kill him first. Still, that’s a hard road to hoe. Death and eternity with Christ rather than standing in the way of someone else’s ability to share in that relationship…regardless of what it costs. I think that this is what being a Christian means in a world where evil happens. Christ suffered and died to bring us into relationship with the Father instead of bringing the hurt via angelic armies to crush the oppressors. If that was God’s choice how can we do anything different?

The people I was talking with seemed to agree with my position, but stated that they would not act according to what they knew Christ was asking them to do in such a hypothetical situation. Why? I suppose I understand what it means to know what’s right and do the opposite because of my human sinfulness, but I don’t see how the choice can be so easy when it means taking another human being’s life. It seems to me that Jesus would say they were wrong to kill to stop killing, and it also seems like batman would agree with Jesus (watch the movie). That whole “fight fire with fire” mentality seems to only work in regards to forest fires. I don’t think it works in most things. Especially when Paul says “don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

That’s reflection time for now. Camp life carries on. We seemed to have passed our American Camping Association certification process. Once every three years we have to do that. Sigh. It’s obnoxious. For real. I played awkward question games with my friend Erin on the boat as she was my shotgun this morning. She asked a question which had an answer that was too much for her to handle. I won’t tell you what it was, but I’ll tell you that I wasn’t awkward. I beat her at her own game.

We’re mostly half-way through the summer. It’s a bit strange. It’s all gone by so fast. I’m going to miss these people like crazy when I leave in a couple weeks…There’s another thing I haven’t really thought out. Costa Rica. I’m going there. Hasn’t set in yet.

We played a run around game this week. If they got tagged they were in jail. I was in charge of the jail and I made it my goal to have kids to silly things to get out of jail. I made some kids put on fake mustaches and march around saying “I’m in the king’s army!” repeatedly. Another time the kids were required to sit on the wet ground and say “This ground is wet and cold. I regret sitting here now.” tee hee. It was fun. I think the kids had fun too. I’d like to believe that the jail was the best part of that game. Maybe I’m right. You never know.