Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace was an amazing movie. The little old man behind me was sobbing. It was sweet. All of the people started clapping at the end of the movie. I don't understand clapping at a movie, not like the actors can hear you, but it was a good movie. It was the most real, honest Christian movie. Usually as soon as God is mentioned in a movie it becomes a big ball of sappy. But it was really good. How do I best serve God? In isolation or fighting for His people?

It is one of those ones that if I taught high school government or something like that, I would force my kids to see. We were discussing at school the other day that kids have no concept of the places of discrimination and outright cruelty in our history. There is a crop of kids who don't have an underlying understanding of what discrimination was and when you explain it to them they think it is the most stupid thing they have ever heard and half of them think it is something someone made up. Which is so promising. Not that there isn't still discrimination. But when you think about it. Most of the parents of our kids are my age or a little older. so most of the GRANDPARENTS of most of our students were KIDS when the civil rights movement was going on. So you have to go back to great grandparents to find people who lived when segregation was a forgone assumption.

It might be different in other places. Our school isn't the most "diverse" in that 70% or so of our kids are white. But it is not one of the schools either that the other 30% is all black. or hispanic. or asian or whatever. There is such a diverse mix. Quite a few native Hawaiian families, they all came out in droves for the reading night this week. Black. Hispanic. Russian. Asian. two of my 5th grade boys actually hula. One was born in Cuba and told us about his mom waiting in line for food and how that was when he was a baby during our cuban music unit. It is crazy what comes up in random discussions of where our music comes from.