You are What you Eat

When I was a kid and we would be out driving at night, my favorite thing to do was see all the houses with their lights on. I loved to imagine what other people’s worlds were like. Just a passing glimpse would give me a hint of the mysterious lives of perfect strangers. The biggest draw, however, was not to a mother pulling food out of the oven, or family gathered around the table, but it was that brilliant blue light of the TV that cast a glow over the room. It pulled from the storehouses of my covetousness, that desire to be sitting in that room, mindlessly feasting on pure entertainment. I wanted that big screen. That brilliant blue light. It was a portal.

Ravi Zacharias said that “television has been the single greatest shaper of emptiness”. What we watch, what we read, what we listen to feeds us. You can only survive on empty calories for so long. Nothing is neutral. Neutrality has been the potion peddled by swindlers since the fall of man. I tell my kids this all the time: “education is all day, not just during school hours”. We must turn on our brains when we turn on the TV. We need to be ready to teach our children to recognize truth and error. They will be taught. It is our job to not only ensure that they can discern what to take in and what to throw away (or just plain turn off), but to use that same discernment for ourselves.

I am still drawn to that blue light. I had the opportunity to turn it on recently while at a hotel, and after I settled in with my snacks and the remote control, I flipped through 150 channels and turned it off. I’m sure something interesting would have eventually filled it’s designated time slot, but I had brought The Brothers Karamazov with me. When you stop eating junk food, the real food always tastes sweeter.