I'm sitting around after a long night out with friends ... waiting to head to church in the hopes I don't pass out from just being awake for forever and a day. But I just happened to have HBO stuck on a movie, Kingdom of Heaven. Not my normal cup of tea for a movie. It's set in the 12th century and is a heavily fictionalized tale of Balian of Ibelin. Anyways, what stood out as this movie runs in the background is this exchange between the movie Balian and his accuser (cast as something of a pharisee to the more heroic Balian):

Bishop, Patriarch of Jerusalem: Who are you? Do you think you can change the World? Does making a man a knight make him a better fighter?

Balian of Ibelin: [pause, turn slowly to face Bishop] Yes.

As problematic as the movie tends to be with the historical record, it's not a poorly done movie by any means. And when those words just jumped out at me, I kinda had to stop what I was doing and think about it for a minute. Balian is basically knighting a group of run-down, bedraggled, downtrodden castaways in Jerusalem. Why did making them a knight make them a better fighter? Because it gave them confidence. Instead of seeing themselves as slaves, laborers, and beggars, they were now human ... able to live up to their potential rather than be pigeonholed by society's definition of them. There's obviously something universal in that appeal to basic human dignity, but there's also a parallel to Joel's teaching that is, to most any reader here, perhaps equally obvious.