Today I sat around and did nothing. But I did watch a very fascinating movie today that I would recommend that everyone watch. A movie called "Unstoppable", featuring Denzel Washington, which is usually a clear sign that the movie is going to be good, and it was. I warn anyone who reads this that, if you haven't seen the movie yet, you should stop reading now. SPOILER ALERT. Don't say I didn't warn you.
The progress of the movie made me begin to think deeper into the meaning of the movie title. The film is about a train that becomes, through extreme error, an unmanned runaway and two men, a newly hired conductor and a veteran engineer, who are on a collision course with the runaway train. However, once they avoid the collision, they make the decision to travel backwards in pursuit of the runaway to attach their train to the back and slow it down and prevent the dangerous gases the train is transporting from being exposed to the general public and killing thousands.
The movie, however exaggerated from the true story, tugged at my heart more than I thought it would. I watched two men with everything in the world to lose chase after a missile on metallic wheels to save thousands of people who they had never met and had no connections to. The runaway train seemed like a beast on wheels that couldn't possibly be stopped by any mortal means, but a rookie under the watch of a veteran made a decision to pursue a hulk, a metal Hercules with the explosive power of a small nuke.
After an eternity and miles of accelerating, they caught up to the train and made an attempt to lock the two trains together. Will Colson, the rookie conductor, is forced to leave the control room of his train to secure the non-functioning lock mechanism that would hold the trains together and shatters his foot and almost falls between the two trains in the process of kicking the lock into place. Once he hobbles back inside his own train, his overseer begins the process of putting on the brakes to slow both trains to keep the runaway from derailing into an oil fuel containment field off the side of a large S-curve in a largely populated city. Denzel Washington, or Frank Barnes, and Will realize they will need to do more to slow the train and Frank soon leaves the train and begins to put on the manuel hand brakes of each individual train car, running atop each car to do so at over seventy miles an hour.
It was at this point in the movie that I thought back to every event from the begining until the moment in the film where Frank starts running on top of the moving bomb to stop it in its tracks. It was then that I realized that the title of the movie didn't just describe the runaway train, but the will power and determination of two regular men who took on a challenge that they saw as their own duty. They themselves proved to be "Unstoppable", even after sustaining injuries and risking their lives and knowing the possibility of never seeing their loved ones again.
A man once said that the man who succeeds is not always the one who is stronger, smarter, or faster, but the man who believes that he can. Will "we" be able to become Unstoppable when the situations in our lives call us to do so?
A question for the ages. I suppose it's important to thing about, but it may never be answered until the "hell on wheels" tries to wreck our lives or those around us. Of course, you could take this religiously and take it into our daily lives because it's the small daily things that we do or don't do for God that also matter in the war between good and evil. Hmm. I can say that I've always had an old worry that there's something that I could be doing (or not doing) that is injuring people for the cause of Christ. I mean, there are souls in the balance. That thought has literally kept me awake at night, tossing and turning. Maybe it shouldn't -- Bible says Jesus LIFTS our burdens from us and God's yoke is easy. But sometimes, it still gets me.
ReplyDelete