My Greatest Fear

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promised you about what really and genuinely amounts to my greatest fear. The occasion for this reflection was a movie I saw, or a series I should say, made for TV and considered by some to be the best western ever made. It's called Lonesome Dove with Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Urich, Danny Glover, Rick Schroeder, Anjelica Huston. I should offer this caveat for those who might think about renting the film. There is some language, violence, "adult" themes, so I'm not recommending it without reservation--you make your own decisions. But it happened to be the thing that triggered the thoughts that I'll share with you. Maybe an apology up front. These thoughts are a little abstract, I admit, and some of you will probably be saying, "Why can't Koukl just be normal and watch the movie?" I don't have an answer for that. This is just the way I am and this is what comes out sometimes when I watch movies. There is really so much that can be said about my responses to Lonesome Dove , but I'm only going to develop two points. First, there was a particular message that seemed to keep coming through in a subtle way for me. The message seemed much more applicable in the harsh environment of frontier life, but it's no less true now. The message is this: death is sudden, it's intrusive--it's an uninvited player--and it's final. And it's finality is very disruptive because all of that particular person's unfinished business will remain forever unfinished. Characters would be introduced in this story, plot lines would seem to develop, you'd get attached to them, you'd think "I wonder where the writer's going with this...", and then they get killed. There's no warning, and there's no resolution of all of their issues. You find yourself trying to anticipate the turns of the plot. "Oh, here's a clean way for this to work out." But the intrusion of sudden death here has no
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