Portions of Taken are admittedly hard to watch.

The plot of the film follows a father whose daughter is kidnapped and sold into the sex trade. With three daughters of my own, the horror of seeing the young women in the film drugged, placed in crude, dirty cubicles with beds for paying clients, and offering their bodies in exchange for another "hit" was nearly unbearable. Such injustice, such abuse on so many levels... I couldn't willingly imagine one of my own children in such a situation.

Although selling people on an auction block has been outlawed in America, slavery is still very much alive here. We just give it a different name: addiction. Drug addiction, alcohol addiction, sex addiction, porn addiction, food addiction—the fact that we have a 12-step program for almost everything in America testifies to the scope of our national slavery. If you've ever experienced any kind of addiction, you know it is much like the plot of Taken. The kidnapping often happens innocently, and the descent into total chaos happens faster than we can blink our eyes.

The father in this story (Liam Neeson) is told he has approximately 72 hours to find his daughter before she disappears forever. Since he is able to talk with her and the kidnapper before she is taken, he can piece the events together for her rescue. He warns the kidnapper that he has developed a unique set of skills to be able to find him and will pursue him unless he lets his daughter go. "Good luck," says the villain, and the hunt is on.

As I watched the father pursue his daughter, I couldn't help noticing how many layers he had to go through to find her. Almost like a video game, he would complete a level only to find that she was actually on the next one. He would have to go deeper into the rank and mire, deeper into the depravity and injustice, deeper into the "system" of the sex trade to get her. He had to get his hands dirty and dive into the black heart of the industry to recover his prized possession.

Liam Neeson does an amazing job portraying the difficult balance of this journey. The father's task requires expertise, precision, speed, and emotional detachment. And yet, as a father, his face often belies the torture of imagining his own daughter in each situation he encounters. As he searches from room to room, calling his daughter by name, leaving behind other people's daughters he can't save and pursuing his own with ever-increasing determination, the complex emotion of the rescue brings to light for me the passionate nature of God himself once again.

It's easy to slip into smug imaginings of God as simply a provider of our wants and needs or perhaps just a cosmic creator of a universe he cares nothing about. The thousands of books debating the nature of God have stolen our sense of connection to him, or more accurately, his connection to us. What happened to that guy on the cross: the one that suffered torture and death to rescue us from slavery? How did the one who dove deepest into the heart of evil for our sake become merely a topic of intellectual conversation?

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