i want to be that weird Christian girl.

“I’m tired of it.  I want to be able to turn on the TV and see something that my whole family can watch, commercials and all. I don’t want to hear about erectile dysfunction anymore. And I believe the side effects of the NuvaRing should be shared only on a need-to-know basis.  I miss Little House on the Prairie, in which the Ingalls girls were dressed in nightgowns so thick they looked as if they could double as football gear. I miss The Waltons, in which everyone said goodnight without a brawl breaking out. I miss The Jeffersons, in which a family actually moved on up without shoplifting, DUIs, and repeated visits to rehab. And as much as Mother Jefferson and Weezie hated each other, you never saw Weezie’s boobs in a catfight.” –Solomon Jones

Much of TV today isn’t the sixth art — it is trash, pure and simple.

When will we as Christians stop talking about Philippians 4:8 and start living it?  We get addicted to these really imbecilic and filthy shows, and start making excuses to support our habit. So of course there are cliffhangers and “never-before-seens” and scandals and drama.  But it leaves you with a sick feeling in your stomach, like you get when you’re little and you go to a birthday party and eat too much pinata candy and don’t have any appetite left for dinner.  This stuff is just…gross.  It really is.  There’s nothing good or beautiful or insightful or artistic or worthwhile about a show like The Bachelor.  All this is is a couple of dozen girls throwing themselves at one “perfect” guy who blithely dates, makes out with, and flatters each of them, all while professing what “amazing women” they each are and how this “journey” is teaching him so much and how he is really “falling in love.”  The guy spends months “falling” –I wanted him to fall and have it over with!  And meanwhile, each girl gets attached to him, and each one systematically gets her heart broken when he decides that, for whatever reason, she just doesn’t quite make the cut.  This isn’t reality.  This is drama, string bikinis, refrigerated roses, and a guy who doesn’t have the integrity to pursue one woman, to get to know her, to unselfishly value her feelings and her heart above his own, to commit to staying with her for the rest of his life.  Instead, we’re supposed to sympathize with a self-centered pansy who gushes empty promises and compares his dates like a food judge compares recipes.  It’s almost sickening.  And we know it.  And the producers know it.  But they keep dishing it out because we keep eating it up.

I don’t want to come up with excuses anymore, and I don’t want to waste my time, not even my spare moments.  Life is too short and too precious.  As one man once said, “Spare moments are the gold dust of time.”  I squander too much of it.

So unless something is really worthwhile, I’m not going to watch it.  And by worthwhile, I also mean pure, and holy, and excellent, and of good repute (that pesky Phil 4:8 again).  I need to stop compromising and start walking like I talk.  Christ hung on the Cross for the sins we sit on our couches entertaining ourselves with.  As I’ve written before, we call the Romans with their arena games barbaric, but are we any different?  We consumers who ramp up the gore because nothing shocks us anymore, we who traffic in human destruction?  Just because a screen separates us from pain as real as any felt in the Coliseum does not make us any less base.  Or have we forgotten that a broken heart hurts, that it hurts to be told you are ugly or strange or your life is screwed up?  We sit in judgment of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton and Miley Cyrus, but did we not contribute to making them who they are?  We feed off of their train-wrecked lives and sponsor their downfalls.  We tell a starlet she’s too fat and then we condemn her anorexia.  We worship our idols and then trample them to pieces when they fail.

Christians should stand out.  We should be the weirdos who won’t watch this kind of garbage, the oddballs who pray for hurting people instead of perusing their stories in tabloids.