There are very few movies that make it out of Hollywood as successfully as Crash while sporting no protagonist and a full cast of characters who perform a whole lot of bad deeds. For the first half of the movie there is hardly a character that you can view as a “good person.” Nearly everyone has actively wronged someone or stood by and allowed immoral acts to take place. While most of us aren’t carjackers or overt racists, we can all relate to these sins because we are all sinners.

The beautiful thing about Crash is the way it slips a story of personal change and repentance into a tale of corruption. Each character goes through an experience that changes his life and makes him realize what he is really living for. I won’t go into too much detail for those who haven’t seen the movie, but if you have seen it you know how each character drastically changes (most for the best) throughout the movie. These changes occur at moments when the characters are faced with the darkness of their own actions. Only after being confronted with the worst about themselves can they begin their individual metamorphosis.

Now, they may not stay transformed forever, and I’m not claiming these characters become Christians, but their struggle is incredibly similar to our own. Each of us has experienced the world of sin depicted in the movie’s rendering of Los Angeles. Only through the blood of Jesus have we been saved from this sin and redeemed. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17 NIV) The sins of our past are wiped clean.

Like a number of the characters in Crash, we have each been given a second chance. Some of us return to our evil ways, but a good number choose to embrace change. This movie ends before we can see how all of the characters will react to their experiences, but I think the example of Anthony (played by the rapper Ludacris) is representative of how most of the cast have been transformed for the better.

We can all take away something from this movie. Whether Crash makes you reconsider your view of other races or reexamine your new life in Christ, it will make you think critically about where you stand in your own metaphorical L.A. We are calloused by our sin—sometimes it takes a head on collision with Christ for us to break out of the shell of sin that surrounds us. It may seem a safe place for a time, but this shell is in actuality a cold and dark place compared with the radiant love of Jesus and the promise of true relationship he offers.

The movie’s opening line describes this human hunger for intimacy quite well: “It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.”