TV & Movies – More than Entertainment
The day after my post on banal thinking, John Piper posts this article on why he doesn’t have a TV and rarely goes to movies.
It’s interesting that Piper acknowledges that he would likely disagree with Mark Driscoll, who is currently my most-listened-to preacher. Driscoll views it almost as a duty for Christians to watch some TV and movies in order to understand the world we are trying to reach. Minutes 21 to 24 in this video contain an example of his thinking.
Piper on the other hand, does not see a connection between watching TV or movies and his effectiveness as a preacher. On the contrary, he sees it as potentially damaging. His concerns with TV in particular are “its addictive tendencies, trivialization of life, and deadening effects”, and its consumption of valuable time.
The difference between the two viewpoints is the purpose and mental discipline with which you view these shows. If your purpose is to figure out why people watch these things, you’re going to watch it differently, and be less susceptible I think, than if you are looking to be entertained, or are just “unwinding”.
I know myself though. When it comes to TV and movie watching, I’m more inclined to be a Piper than a Driscoll. And I personally believe the Driscoll-type viewers are extremely rare.
There is so much more in Piper’s short article. I urge you to read it.
Banality
I waste a lot of time watching television. I also waste a lot of time playing FreeCell on the computer, or other similar mindless games. It’s my time to unwind, to decompress, I say to myself.
Andrée Seu posted in World Magazine’s blog (Thrumming) her experience during a hospital visit where she was detained because the doctor needed to get a second set of mammograms. She was sitting, waiting for hours with nothing to do, contemplating her mortality. As she looked around at the others waiting she thought “some of us detainees in the powder-blue gowns will get bad news today perhaps.” She also notices that each woman there in the waiting room is “thrumming” through a gossip magazine.
Her conclusion? “And I am reckoning hard with a new epiphany— that one of the most un-talked about and perhaps under-the-radar devices of Satan is that he has as little to do to trip us into hell as to fill our minds with a stream of banal thoughts.”
Banal: lacking originality, freshness, or novelty; trite; insipid; vapid
One of the comments on her post was from an older gentleman who said: “there is a point where you know you have ten more years, at most. But the temptations of banal thoughts don’t go away.”
At 59 (almost), if I fall in the category of those in Psalm 90:10 who are to live seventy years, then I have 11 years left. What am I to do in those 11 years? Or 25 years? Or 6 weeks?
Three things come to mind:
1) Death is not the end. There will be more time available for eternal things, such as fellowship with Jesus and with others who worship Him.
2) I need to prepare for death. That is I need to make sure my family is taken care of and that my house is in order.
3) I need to do life, and do it abundantly. I need to do the things from now until then that matter. I need to be actively involved in God’s work. I need to identify and continuously work on my weaknesses and enhance my strengths in order to accomplish these things.
None if these are new thoughts to me. But I’ve been taken captive by banality, and it’s time to break free.
Watching TV or playing FreeCell isn’t inherently bad. I just don’t have time for it.
… ok, maybe some football.
Lake Tahoe/Reno Trip
We (my lovely wife and I) just returned from a trip to Lake Tahoe and Reno last week. The purpose of the trip was to attend the US Committee on Irrigation and Drainage (USCID) Irrigation District Specialty Conference, but we took a few days before to take in Lake Tahoe and do some sightseeing.
Strangely, the best part of the trip was the driving. We put nearly 1600 miles on the pickup during the trip and the driving conditions were perfect – good roads, sparse traffic and mostly overcast skies with occasional gentle rains. When it was clear, there were puffy white clouds casting shadows on the deserts and mountains making them seem alive. The colors were subtle, pleasing, calming. We went up on the California side along the “backside” of Yosemite where the mountains still had snow on them and returned on the Nevada side with the wide-open deserts where the surrounding mountains had eroded leaving large deltas. I expected the return trip to be long and boring, but it turned out to be glorious with glimpses of the Sierras to the west and multiple mountain ranges to the south and east that all seemed to have slightly different colors and shadows.
It also was a great time to spend with Cindy. We had hours to just chat and enjoy each other’s company. When we weren’t talking, we were entertained, encouraged and convicted by Mark Driscoll sermons that we had downloaded from his church’s site. Yep, we listened to sermons voluntarily.
Lake Tahoe was beautiful. The thing I noticed was that in addition to the blue color, there was none of the flotsam and jetsam that you normally see on other lakes. The whole area (outside of the towns) seemed cleaner than most of the other lakes I’m familiar with. It reminded me of the lakes in Glacier National Park. We took a paddleboat cruise around the lake over to Emerald Bay and took in the sights from the lake outward.
