Blood Brother: A Documentary That Shows How Deeds Can Preach

Blood Brother: A Documentary That Shows How Deeds Can Preach August 3, 2015

RockyBraatRocky Braat, a pretty ordinary young American man, goes to India with a friend. He goes seeking “authenticity” and “more out of life.” Rocky is a Christian and is clearly motivated by God’s love, but the film Blood Brother is secular documentary. Nothing about the film’s depiction of faith is in-your-face; rather, deeds preach far more than words. There is no explicit evangelistic message, no conversion from hell to heaven verbally articulated. Nevertheless, the power of love to cast out earth’s hell is vividly portrayed. Director Steve Hoover’s talented eye for image and texture and color gives us a film whose editing flows together like the brush strokes of a beautiful painting.

On his trip to India, Braat visits an orphanage filled with children with HIV and AIDS, planning just a quick stop so he can get back to sightseeing and soul-searching. He is initially repulsed by the children’s disease and afraid of catching it himself. Heck, he doesn’t even like kids prior to this. But after meeting the vibrant, playful, compelling group, he is forever changed. He leaves the orphanage to continue his travels, but he can’t bear being apart from the children now. He is compelled to return. Cutting his sightseeing short, he goes back to be with the children until the end of the trip.

When he returns home to the US, his affect is flat. He is bored and lonely. He no longer fits in with his old friends and family, who have all moved on with their lives. America now feels like a strange country to him. He is a foreigner in his own land and with his own people.

It is a kind of conversion that has happened to Rocky Braat. He doesn’t want his old life anymore; he wants to be in the red dirt of India, surrounded by the children with smiles as big as the whole world. He wants to be with them, even though they are sick, even though there will be suffering. Everything else seems meaningless.

Conversion is not something that we do to ourselves. It’s Saul on the Road to Damascus, struck by a vision and convinced that he is on exactly the opposite path that he should be on. Sometimes it happens in an instant and sometimes over a long period of time, like water wearing away at a rock. But it’s not something we can produce in ourselves. It happens to us. A person, people, a place … God. Conversion happens to us. It’s a lot like falling in love. It’s that which happens in you and which says, “I can do no other.”

Of course, it helps if you put yourself in a place where you are open to hearing, to seeing, to being awakened to love and truth.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
    for they will be filled.”–Matthew 5:6 NIV

“You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”–Jeremiah 29:13

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.“–Matthew 7:7

Conversion happens to you, like falling in love happens to you.

When the film opens and Braat is surrounded by beautiful Indian children with their bright smiles and playful personalities, death and suffering seem far away. For every missionary, every humanitarian, every parent, every married person,every committed friend, there is the honeymoon stage. The beautiful colors and light. The surge of happiness that is perfect and pure. The joy that “at last I have found the purpose in life and the people I’m supposed to be with!”

But after conversion, hard times come. The initial light of revelation dims in the harsh nightfall of reality. After conversion comes the cross.

The people whom you serve turn out to be stubborn and difficult to live with. The time and investment you put into doing good yields few results, temporal or spiritual. The adorable baby who lay in your arms becomes a toddler. Or a rebellious teenager. The husband or wife you fell for hurts you more than you knew you could be hurt. Coming near to real people means brokenness and sorrow. It means more suffering than you expected, no matter how much you tried to plan for it. It means having your heart broken because it is close enough to the surface for people to reach it. Coming near to real people, loving them and serving them is hard. Every person who experiences the conversion of love will also eventually experience the cross.

For Rocky, the early struggles were simple, but significant. Eating from the same dish as a child with AIDS–and yet knowing that if he didn’t, he would communicate fear and rejection. Struggling with seeing the kids’ vomit and blood and sores. Struggling with touching them and not being afraid. But later, the real crosses would come. As he began to bond with the kids, he struggled with terrible grief when some would die. Each of the children were so fragile; they might be fine one moment and shortly thereafter become deathly ill. In one desperately painful scene, he tries to rush a young girl to the hospital, only to have her die on his motorcycle. Death came to seem so close, all the time. The cross meant the conscious choice to lean into that pain, pain that would be ongoing, and choose it anyway. First it chose him–and then he chose it.

Throughout the film, we experience the children’s joy and suffering up close and personal. There were times when the graphic nature of the suffering made me feel voyeuristic. I found myself wondering what the children thought about being videotaped, if they fully understood how much intimate detail of their lives would be put on display publicly, and whether Rocky was being cast too much as the “white Savior” (despite his attempts to avoid that role by living simply with the people and living as similarly to them as he could). And then I would second-guess myself, thinking about much Rocky had committed to these children and made them his family and how little I knew of that kind of sacrificial service. I thought of how his example teaches each of us how to move past our initial fears and see the beauty in those who are suffering. Of how his example teaches us to remove the barriers between ourselves and others. Of how he counted the cost (“…this is going to be the norm for my life. I’m going to be suffering all the time”) and then still could do no other than commit to his new family for the long haul (“I don’t see an end to the mission. I don’t see an end to the need”).

I don’t know if I have the perfect answer as to whether cameras should have been allowed so close to the suffering and death of children. I also don’t have all the information in regards to this choice. It may be that in India there is more of a comfort level with seeing death and suffering publicly than there is in America. I do think the motives were good, and there is much illuminating and good and beautiful about the film. In addition, the film’s proceeds are going toward some worthy charities. Director Steve Hoover writes, “Every dollar of profit from Blood Brother is being donated.  Fifty percent is being donated directly to Red Hot Organization and Arms Around the Child.  The other half is being donated to Rocky through L.I.G.H.T. to build half-way homes for HIV positive orphans and supply vocational training to build a bridge to healthy adulthood.”

When we try to do good, we may not do it perfectly. But when love finds us, it begins to change us, to change who and what matters to us. It begins to cut down the walls between us and others. Jesus came among us and before His crucifixion and resurrection, He focused on two things: proclaiming the arrival of the Kingdom of God and demonstrating the arrival of the Kingdom of God by healing the sick and suffering. It seems to me that the evangelical Church today does a lot of proclaiming, but not as much demonstrating (which is not to say it does none, but that the speaking seems dominant). What if we did more demonstrating of our faith through actions? If someone looked at your actions and tried to guess your beliefs without you saying a word, what would they conclude? And how can we proclaim that we have Good News, that the Kingdom has come and is coming and then fail to demonstrate it in some way?

Have you seen Christians who demonstrated the Gospel through actions? What did it look like?

Have you made a commitment in your life that initially seemed exciting and beautiful, only later to experience the suffering side of commitment?

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Image Source: Blood Brother, IMDB.com.


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