“Give the Man a Chance”

FYI- this is part of a series on how to live out our faith in a positive way. Click here.

I, like many people, am a huge fan of the movie Die Hard. I probably watch it twice a year. Once in December- because it’s the all time greatest Christmas movie, and then once in July because I just can’t wait to watch it again.

Die Hard was directed by John McTiernan- a guy with a very odd career (a story for another day). For a brief time, McTiernan knew how to make action thrillers better than anyone else. Another example is The Hunt for Red October, a movie about a disgruntled (yet highly decorated) Russian submarine commander (played by Sean Connery- with his native non-Russian accent) who tries to defect to the US with a brand-new, untraceable submarine filled with nuclear warheads.

The plot is complicated. But the simplified version is something like this: Connery can’t tell anyone on the American side that he’s trying to defect because word would eventually get back to his Russian higher-ups that the new sub is now in American hands- which would ignite a war. So, he has to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the CIA to follow so that they can discover that he is defecting, rather than traveling to launch nuclear warheads at New York or wherever.

Only one man in the CIA gets it: Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin). He then spends a good portion of the movie convincing his higher-ups that Connery is defecting and not starting a war.

You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you the plot of a forgotten sub movie. Well, here we go. John McTiernan liked to have a theme in mind when making movies. His theme for The Hunter for Red October is this: Give the man a chance.

Jack Ryan’s job is to convince every higher up above him to give Connery (Captain Ramius) a chance- rather than to assume he’s the threat he appears to be and to simply blow him out of the water. He begs person after person, give the man a chance.

This, to me, speaks to a very key skillset to have when it comes to trying to live our faith in a positive way. If and where you can, give people the benefit of the doubt. When our survival instincts kick in in life, they warn us of danger- even when danger isn’t there.

It’s easy to assume someone is out to get us, or trying to harm us. It’s less easy to give the man (or person) a chance.But our faith calls us to speak back into our survival instincts, to look for the good in others, and to offer the benefit of the doubt not only as an act of mercy but also as an act of imitation of Christ himself when he says, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

I believe this is Christ’s way of saying: Give the people a chance.

What helps you offer the benefit of the doubt?