Are People More Interested In Forgiveness Or Vengeance?

Laura had an annual girl’s weekend over the weekend in Victoria with her Mom, Helen, and Cousins Michelle and Teresa, who came up from Seattle.

Shadow and I had a boy’s weekend mixed with a walk in the wilderness, emptying my mind/updating my project list, extra sleep, home chores and watching movies. I was happy to get some rest as we have had two Saturday travel days returning from Minneapolis and Nashville.

I don’t know about you, it’s hard to find movies that are not loaded with excessive violence.

After an extensive search, I came up with a couple of boy movies that Laura and I had not watched, which I had also passed on watching while on plane flights, as both of them were about tragedies;

The Shack – After suffering a family tragedy, Mack Phillips spirals into a deep depression that causes him to question his innermost beliefs. Facing a crisis of faith, he receives a mysterious letter urging him to an abandoned shack in the Oregon wilderness. Despite his doubts, Mack journeys to the shack and encounters an enigmatic trio of strangers led by a woman named Papa. Through this meeting, Mack finds important truths that will transform his understanding of his tragedy and change his life forever.
Wind River – Cory Lambert is a wildlife officer who finds the body of an 18-year-old woman on an American Indian reservation in snowy Wyoming. When the autopsy reveals that she was raped, FBI agent Jane Banner arrives to investigate. Teaming up with Lambert as a guide, the duo soon find that their lives are in danger while trying to solve the mystery of the teen’s death.

I found both of these movies to be excellent in their own way both having an abundance of messages within them and here are a couple of brief notes that I made from the movies;

You have to feel pain to release pain, even if you have to feel it one thousand times. The only way out is through it.
The pain inside is devouring you, robbing you and crippling your capacity to love. You are not stuck because you can’t love, you are stuck because you won’t love.

Aside from some Canadiana, that Graham Green, a Canadian First Nations actor being in both of these movies, I found it interesting that while both of these movies included content on both forgiveness and vengeance, The Shack which had more content on forgiveness, rated low on Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and Wind River which had more content on vengeance rated high on Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer.