TAKEN...

                                                              

Recently I have been too tired to watch any movie, I even had to struggle with the Avengers, which I am sure beggars belief. In spite of my fatigue, I had to take out time to see “Taken” since everyone seemed to be talking about it with the intensity of surf crashing on a beach and the constancy of the droning of worker bees.

It was a great movie!!!

Liam Neeson is quite the actor. In the last few years, the movies he has been in have been absolutely magnificent. He has pure vintage class. As he gets older, the man is getting better. Like rich Merlot, Mr. Neeson saturates the buds of our creative senses with a flavor that is akin to that of the grapes grown in the vinery of Bacchus himself.

I loved “Taken” for a number of reasons. One it was revelatory; I haven’t been able to get past the horror of Albanians kidnapping pretty tourist ladies and flooding their systems with drugs for prostitution rings. The depravity of the human heart especially when it comes to pecuniary gains is absolutely astounding. The heart of man is indeed desperately wicked. What gets me most about the film is that it is a story of redemption.

It is just in the human nature for us to gambol away out of the reach of our Father like errant lambs. We flaunt his orders with reckless abandon in the name of having fun and escaping the boring reaches of His “Stultifying” presence. He says “go this way”, but we prefer the other and by doing so we do not hear when He calls until things get out of hand, then we are taken. It is just our way, we have been like this since the earliest days of Eden.

Getting out of His radar, we end up being taken by the Albanians of drugs, alcohol, divorce, poverty, prostitution, depression, suicidal tendencies, afflictions, diseases, an inexhaustible list of problems, even death sometimes. By the time we start shouting and screaming for Dad, things have usually gone out of hand.

You would expect Dad to leave us to ourselves and our issues since they were self afflicted through our self destructive tendencies but He does not usually. He puts everything on the line to save us, even His very life. He sacrifices everything, battles the hordes of hell, death and the grave to set us free. He loses blood, takes unbearable punishment and suffering to emancipate us from the evil ones who have taken us.  Whipped and lacerated with gun butts and garrotes, He takes the bullets of our tormentors in his hands and feet, but His love never lets up. SUCH LOVE LIKE HIS IS AMAZING! His affection is for us is incredibly unimaginable. He never walks away. He will follow through thick and thin to be with us again, go through every maze, look for us in any nook and cranny, would do anything it takes for us to have our freedom again.

One important thing though, for His salvation mission to be achieved, we have to listen to him and listen good! We would need to recognize His Lordship and obey his instructions to the letter. This is what would give Him the vital lead that would help guide Him to where we are being held captive. Without this, waterloo might just be ahead like it happened for Amanda, Kim’s pal. It was a vital lead that saved Kim.

When The Father finally battles through to us, we are shocked and ask with stupefying incredulity like Kim did. “You came for me” she said and with all the love in the world filling his eyes like all the oceans in our hemisphere together, he tells us “I told you, I would”.

At the very end of it all, He reiterates, “I LOVE YOU” when we express our love to him, then He sets us on a path of purpose like Bryan did his daughter when he took her to meet Sheerah who was to show her the ropes of becoming a musical star.

FOR GOD COMMENDETH HIS LOVE TOWARDS US IN THAT WHILE WE WERE YET WITHOUT STRENGTH, CHRIST DIED FOR US………….