Put on your subtlety hat and let your mind chase the implications.
Last night a six-pack of patrol cars gathered around a house near here. The law officers milled around outside the place until the Medical Examiner showed up. A snooping neighbor overheard a random comment about “two weeks” and “poor dog.” But a folding gurney was rolled out with a human sized body bag. It’s been warm a lot the past two weeks, so we all assume that the ratty old mobile home will be condemned as-is and destroyed in place before the debris is hauled away. The sole human resident of the place had few friends around here, and had made plenty of enemies with erratic and inebriated behavior.
In my world is a certain female person who spends most of her conscious moments with her face glued to a cellphone, tablet, TV screen or something similar. Without fail every morning in living memory she has screamed at her kids because she can’t seem to program them to respond to her unpredictable demands.
What’s the difference between the two?
As our dear Sister Wildcucumber would recognize, even a jackass can discern some things. I’m not better than either of the two mentioned above, just more fortunate. I also cannot be silent.
I’m not an empty leaky receptacle for entertainment, dissipation and boredom. My heart is bursting with joy and peace and I cannot avoid splattering everyone around me. Some don’t notice because it’s not in the form of traditional entertainment most of the time. Granted, I am a clown and quite often perform dramatic antics to help get my message across, but some people see only the entertainment portion and completely miss the content.
Sometimes I’ll watch a portion of the TV newscast, or a short video online capturing some unusual event, but I generally avoid even simple still graphics when seeking information. On my Win7 laptop I installed Cygwin just so I could use the Lynx browser for the majority of my reading online. There might be other ways to reduce the Net to mostly plain text, but this is the simplest for me. I even change the useragent string to avoid having a few sites reject the Lynx browser as some imaginary hacker threat.
When I want information, I don’t want manipulators trying to take advantage of the basic human natural response to things that entertain. We are wired to pause and gaze at anything that grabs our attention. I don’t want things grabbing my attention that way; I want to select what I give my attention to and I know how weak I am about such things. Most humans share that same weakness in varying flavors and degrees.
I don’t want to run the risk of being distracted from the mission. The mission requires that I gain some kind of summary of a certain selected range of reporting, spend an awful lot of time in prayer, and then tell the world about the joy and wonder of what my God has done in me. I want to die when the message is finished and God is ready to take me home, not sometime long before by wasting and frittering away the juices of my soul. While my path is not necessarily for you, I cannot simply silence my encounter with the Father’s glory.
None of us is exempt; the fundamental universal call to humanity is to participate in glorifying Our Creator.
