Movie Review: Sometimes in April

A month or two ago I couldn't sleep one night and so I was organizing my MP3's on my computer and I had the TV on. Since we only have a couple channels and most of them show infomercials at 2am, I only had PBS. This movie was on that intrigued me so I put it on my Blockbuster-online queue. So Thursday night I watched Sometimes in April and it was one of the most significant movies I've ever watched. Sometimes in April is an HBO movie about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. I could sit here and write all kinds of things about the scale of genocide (in 100 days close to a million people were slaughtered, many of them by machete), or I could inquire as to why our government is so fast-acting when it comes to a possibility of WMD's but so slow-acting when hundreds of thousands of people are being slaughtered or I could post about how I cried during the movie imaging how the heart of God breaks to see his children inflict such violence on each other (check out this song). However, I guess what I felt most strongly about was the silence of the church. The movie begins with a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr.: "In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." Why isn't the church leading the way crying out against injustice all across the world, in whatever form it takes? Shouldn't we, as the church, always be on the side of justice, on the side of the poor, on the side of goodness, and kindness and what is right? And when atrocities like Rwanda happen, shouldn't we be the first to cry out? Or, do we only care when it is to our benefit -- when it affects our pocketbooks, or our particular way of life? This is not a movie you will enjoy, but it is a movie you must watch (a lot like Schindler's List). Rant over.