Something different

I procrastinated writing the post for today because I wanted to talk about a Danish movie I watched today. In English it is called "Worlds Apart" and you can read a review here. You can find the official website here. If you have On Demand service from your cable provider you can probably see it too.

The movie is about a 17 year old JW girl from a devout family. She goes with a slightly wilder friend one night to a dance where she meets the dreaded non-JW guy. As the story progresses we find out the father had an affair, the mother has moved out he was repentant and the she wouldn't forgive him so they blamed her more and the older brother has been expelled from the congregation for reading the "wrong book." Her decisions set in motion a series of events that she struggles to control.

I expected this movie to make me angry or upset. But it was handled in a very sensitive manner. It was really very realistic of the stranglehold the religion can have on people. That girl was so very much like me at that age. That's what I'm hoping to show through my journal entries. The heartbreak of leaving everyone and everything you know and striking out for something of your own is so real in this movie. Of course, it could be any close minded group that the director chose. In some ways I almost wished he would have picked a different group so I could get my family to watch this movie.

As for how I feel, well, now I feel incredibly sad. I watched the movie while sewing the patch on my boys' Little League uniforms. There's a scene in the movie where Sara and her family are going door to door and she looks a bit wisfully at a group playing football in the park. I was sewing when that came on and I thought about how my children are growing up with freedom and unconditional love.

For the first time in a long time I felt sad about my own childhood.