In that Gideon’s Bible, there’s blood spilled on every page. – Bill Mallonee, Vigilantes of Love

Helen Mirren, 2007 Academy Award winner for best female actor in a lead role, had a short presentation speech in the next year’s Academy Awards ceremony in which she began by rattling off words from the dark side of human experience such as greed, vengeance, jealousy, and rage, and gradually made her way into more positive aspects of humanity such as hope, love, and kindness. Her point was to show how movies covered them all, because they are all part of the human experience.

It occurred to me that you could say the same thing about the Bible. Greed, vengeance, jealousy, rage, hope, love, kindness… it’s all there just like in the movies. But so is Christ. This is what it means that Christ Jesus came in the flesh: the truth was laid into the human fabric. Life goes on in all its human drama, but the light came, and shines into and out of that darkness.

So bring it all on – the blood, the sweat and the tears. Christ does not meet us only in the sweet by and by. He meets us here, in the middle, through the full range of human emotions and experiences. That’s why He was a man – flesh and blood man. True grit. Just like in the movies.