The Blind Side

  I finally watched The Blind Side when Rachel's parents were in town.  Everyone I know had watched it, and they had all said it was amazing--we were simply waiting until it came out on Netflix.  It's hard for me to go to movie theaters and shell out $10 for a movie, especially when we're already paying for Netflix.  So we wait...

  It was amazing, just like I thought it would be.  The story of Michael Oher and the Tuohy family, with a lot of football thrown in.  Michael was the homeless, poor African American, the one who seemed to have been abandoned by most of the world and forgotten by much of the rest.  He was sleeping on a couch of a friend when a football coach noticed his athletic ability and got him admitted to a private Christian all white school.  The Tuohys figure out that he has nowhere to live and take him in, in the process being stretched in many different directions at once.

  I struggled with this movie for so many different reasons.  It's a great movie, one filled with sentimental moments and lines, all pieced into a great story about a young man overcoming adversity and becoming successful.  It's a great story about how the Tuohy family is stretched and confronts a world they didn't know.  And it forces us to ask a lot of questions about ourselves and society, some that, perhaps, we don't want to ask.

  What would have happened to Michael if he couldn't have played football?  Would he have been completely forgotten by the world, his talents wasted because he couldn't block?  Would anyone have noticed him?  What about all the kids like Michael who have somehow slipped through the cracks?  How are we failing them?  And how is our society still so divided between rich and poor?  Why are we not doing more to reach across these lines, to enrich all of our lives, to ensure that we all have the same hope?

  Is this movie going to cure the world's problems?  No.  But it's a touching story about how people can grow.  And hopefully it forces us to think about areas where we are sheltered and how we can grow in those directions.  Are we truly living the faith we proclaim?  And, if not, how can we grow?