Tearing up All the Wire

Posted by Jason Ibrahim

With the Golden Globes just behind us and the Oscars quickly approaching, there's no better time than now to shun modernity and find an old movie to watch on a snowy night. In fact, some of the best movies ever made are either at Penn State Altoona, or can be ordered in (both for free). (Full disclosure: most of my favorite movies were made a full generation before I was born.)

One of my all-time favorites, starring Angela Lansbury and Frank Sinatra, is 1962's Manchurian Candidate. It tells the story of a man, Raymond Shaw, who was kidnapped by the Soviets while fighting in the Korean War and brainwashed and reprogrammed into becoming a trained assassin. His handlers used a playing card, a red queen, as a trigger to do their bidding.

One of the pivotal scenes in the movie occurs when Major Ben Marco, who served with Shaw, is finally onto the Soviets' scheme. He puts a whole deck of red queens in front of Raymond's face and deprograms him by saying, "Their beautifully conditioned links are over; They're smashed as of now because we say so.... We're busting up the joint, we're tearing up all the wire."

In addition to being great cinema, I think there's a life lesson here. Any of us who has ever spoken a word in anger to someone we love, and then later regretted it, knows what it's like to be under the power of an enemy force. Even if we thought we were acting out of self-interest, upon later reflection we realize it doesn't really make us feel any better (never mind that it doesn't actually improve our situation).

When God came into my life and told me that all my old links were broken, it caught me by surprise at first. How can someone making his own decisions be under the control of another? As He began slowly tearing up all the old wire in my life, He showed it to me--where it was frayed and had caused short circuits in the past, and where it was weak, and failed to deliver the power it promised.

None of us will ever be free of these links, but we can choose who does the linking. Jesus says, "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other" (Matthew 6:24). Allowing oneself to be reprogrammed by God through His son Jesus' death is definitely a change of character, but in another way, it's also becoming more yourself than you've ever been.

For the Apostle Paul, this reprogramming process means complete transformation. He wrote, "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Corinthians 5:17) This is the best reason for hope.

Disclaimer: The views presented here do not necessarily represent those of ILoveAltoona.com, its owners, or advertisers.