Graceful?

If any of you have not seen the movie "Seven Pounds" with Will Smith and would like to, you should stop reading now. Unless you want to know all about it before you watch it.

The premise is this guy who's carrying around a load of guilt for killing 7 people in a car wreck that was his fault. He then proceeds to live out the rest of his life doing penance in the form of donating parts of his body to others who need them.

The main character is driven by this guilt for the entire movie. It is his motivation for donating bone marrow to a child who suffers from cancer, a kidney to an older gentleman, part of his lungs to another, and even his beach house to a single mother needing to escape a bad situation.

There is absolutely no redeeming value in this movie. And I mean that as literally as it can be taken. The man drowns in his guilt, eventually committing suicide when he finally has found a woman deserving of his heart (also meant literally). He also donates through his death, his eyes to a blind man.

So on the one hand we have the possible reaction of, "Wow, what an awesome act of unselfishness and love to those people! He loved them more than his own life!" And on the other, "Wow, this man needed major help to find the grace of the Lord and thus overcome the guilt eating him alive." I tended to go with the latter.

How sad that his guilt completely consumes him! To the death.

And beyond that, he showed no grace in how he chose these individuals to receive the blessing of what he had to give. They needed to fit his criteria of a decent human being. Not a man easily angered. Someone who treats others with respect and decency. If he discovered that they were not that kind - off the list they went!

I'm glad Jesus isn't like that! Jesus would look for the man most undeserving of a second chance at life. He would seek that person out. He would offer him that second chance. That person could refuse him. Or that person could accept God's Spirit within him and change radically into the person God intended him to be. Jesus does do that. All the time.

What a different feeling this movie would have given if the main character could have reached out to those undeserving characters with a gift of a second chance and through that show of love, those lives could have been redeemed. It'd be like watching the visual Bible. I'm glad He chose me, placing His Spirit within me, even though I didn't deserve it.