A lesson in Forgiveness

We took communion in church last Sunday, and as I considered how I needed to become more like Jesus, my mind kept popping back to a YouTube video I watched earlier in the week.  I kept batting it away, like a pesky fly, thinking it was some distraction keeping me from considering weightier matters.

See, it was a video about Mel Gibson.  Wow, thinking about Mel Gibson during communion - how messed up is that? In my life before Christ, it would have been no problem for me to contemplate Mel Gibson during communion, or any other time. But after his phenomenal success with Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, in recent years Mel has made an ass of himself, with his public drunkenness, anti-Semitic tirades, marital problems, and domestic violence issues, just to name a few. Like many others, I have grown tired of his antics, and moved on.

But the thoughts wouldn't go away, so I considered what it was I was supposed to be learning from it, and whether there was a lesson in there somewhere. Because this wasn't a video OF Mel Gibson. It was an extraordinary speech by Robert Downey, Jr., about Mel Gibson.

After a promising career start in the 1980s and early '90s as part of the "Brat Pack," Robert Downey, Jr. had a terrible drug problem that peaked between 1996 and 2001. He was arrested multiple times on drug charges, did some time,  and was in and out of drug treatment programs. He stopped being considered for roles, and was even fired from a few before finding lasting sobriety in 2001.

In recent years, Robert Downey, Jr.'s career has taken off, with two very notable successes in Sherlock Holmes and Iron Man. A couple of weeks ago, he added the American Cinematheque award to his collection, and he deliberately chose Mel Gibson to present the award, so that he could make this speech. Please don't read any further until you watch this. It's only two minutes. It made me cry, and I bet you will, too.

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