The Hurt Locker

nominated for 9 academy awards...

won 6, including Best Picture & Best Director...(a 1st for a woman Kathryn Bigelow)


Opening Quote by Chris Hedges:"The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug."


1.  In chapter 7 Purgatory, Specialist Owen Eldridge is counseled by John Cambridge the base psychiatrist in the attempts to help the specialist through a rough patch in dealing w/the loss of SSG Thompson.  Lieutenant Colonel Cambridge seems oblivious to the pressures of Eldridge's duties as he's a book smart Yale grad that lacks the common sense & ability to connect w/those he's trying to help.  He's quite the polar opposite from our own savior, who clothed himself w/our very flesh & experienced our realities to readily identify w/us.  Living the life that we weren't able & dying the death that we should have, just to bring us to him.

The High Priest Who Cried Out in Pain

 ^14-16Now that we know what we have—Jesus, this great High Priest with ready access to God—let's not let it slip through our fingers. We don't have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. He's been through weakness and testing, experienced it all—all but the sin. So let's walk right up to him and get what he is so ready to give. Take the mercy, accept the help.


2.  In chapter 17, I Want a Son, Sergeant J. T. Sanborn confesses to Sergeant First Class William James that he's not ready to die & wants to have a son.  SFC James understands & is very cognizant of the risks they daily undertake, but very wrongly links his identity w/the dangerous job that he does.  He uses it to escape the boredom of 'normal life' & the lack of self worth he doesn't find in it.  Rather than rightly identifying w/Christ & his supreme worth & living to his glory & James' joy, he sadly retreats back into combat instead of fulfilling his 1st calling in shepherding his own family.  

Galatians 2:18-20 (The Message)

 ^17-18Have some of you noticed that we are not yet perfect? (No great surprise, right?) And are you ready to make the accusation that since people like me, who go through Christ in order to get things right with God, aren't perfectly virtuous, Christ must therefore be an accessory to sin? The accusation is frivolous. If I was "trying to be good," I would be rebuilding the same old barn that I tore down. I would be acting as a charlatan.
 ^19-21What actually took place is this: I tried keeping rules and working my head off to please God, and it didn't work. So I quit being a "law man" so that I could be God's man. Christ's life showed me how, and enabled me to do it. I identified myself completely with him. Indeed, I have been crucified with Christ. My ego is no longer central. It is no longer important that I appear righteous before you or have your good opinion, and I am no longer driven to impress God. Christ lives in me. The life you see me living is not "mine," but it is lived by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I am not going to go back on that.
   Is it not clear to you that to go back to that old rule-keeping, peer-pleasing religion would be an abandonment of everything personal and free in my relationship with God? I refuse to do that, to repudiate God's grace. If a living relationship with God could come by rule-keeping, then Christ died unnecessarily.