In study this past Friday, we read through a passage in Nehemiah and discussed how Nehemiah prayed to God. It was great because it reminded me of how we should be intentional when we pray to God, and not just pray for things we happen to remember. It’s interesting that in his prayer, Nehemiah was bold enough to bring up past promises from God, as if God had somehow neglected or forgotten them (obviously not!). I often get bogged down in the here and now and just pray for things I need or want, and not remember to give God praise for the things He has in store for me. Hopefully I’ll be able to follow the example set by Nehemiah and remember to pray with adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (aka ACTS).

I also saw Fearless on Sat, about the life of a Chinese fighter (played by Jet Li) in China during the turn of the century. I’m someone who loves action movies, especially foreign action movies, so I pretty much just went to see the movie for the fight scenes. And I wasn’t disappointed. The choreography and action was pretty incredible, there were numerous times where I was simply amazed at what I saw. In particular, there’s a great fight scene where Jet Li’s character actually swaps weapons with his opponent mid-fight. The story was also pretty good, and not something to just glue the different fight scenes together¹. As Victoria later mentioned, the story was great because integrity, mercy and redemption plays such a central role in the plot. I think I’m gonna buy the DVD when it comes out, apparently it was originally a 150 mins movie, but it was cut down to 110 mins by the studio (grr). Hopefully they’ll do a Lord of the Rings thing and push out an extended cut on DVD.

¹ For example, any movie by that Thai fighter guy.