"The Box"

My wife and I had the rare opportunity tonight to go on a date, and it was our intention to see The Blind Side together. However, since they couldn't seat us together, and the last time I checked, a date required such arrangements, we decided to give The Box a chance.

Based upon Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button," The Box raises the question of what fateful consequences await the choices we make. What a tangled web we weave, it seems, when we make personal decisions that "won't harm anybody" (at least, anybody we know, in this scenario). Some may call it "karma," others "reaping what you sow." I call it simply "reality." Every cause has an effect, and the underlying ethics of our decisions are inescapable, however well we might justify them or rationalize them away.

This "reality" holds true for believer and nonbeliever alike. "All have sinned," certainly, and so it goes without saying that the consequences for those who do not believe in Christ are dire. However, I know so many presumed "Christians" who think that because they have "confessed with their mouth (though not with their lives) that 'Jesus is Lord,' that they are somehow immune to the consequences of their actions. They persist in "respectable sins" like jealousy, pride, and lust, thinking somehow that they "won't harm anybody," except, of course, the holy God who, it had seemed, had freed them from such vices.

Though the movie left us relatively unsatisfied, it did allow us the occasion to share Christ with the one other couple in the theater. The woman we spoke with evidenced a very similar thought pattern to these professing Christians, in that she was staking her soul upon "what worked for her," when the universe evidences that we, in fact, are not in charge. My prayer for her, and the "christians" like her, is that He will open their eyes to their need of Him, and His prerogatives, which far outweigh their own in wisdom, benefit, joy, and every other desirous category.