Getting a life


I have noticed something this last year that I find frightening. Since I returned to America I have noticed that not many Americans live a life of their own. The life they actually live is the life of someone else on TV. The statistic for TV watching that I found, which I think is probably a year or two old, is that Americans are watching around 4 hours of TV a day. Do your math on that and it will add up to 28 hours of TV watching each week. That means that the average American watches a little more than one full day (24 hours) of TV every week. It also means that Americans spend two full months each year in front of the box and if they live to be 65 it means that they have spent 9 years watching someone else’s life. Can this really be true? Surely someone is imagining this?

The old phrase “get a life” has all the sudden taken on new meaning for me. I am worried that Americans simply have lost their life. They spend all their free time watching other people live a life, which is not really the actors life either, it is simply a script that they act out. Is there no one living a life in America these days? Is everything we say simply scripted? I remember when my children were young we use to have to ban movie talk at the table. If we had not done that a lot of the conversation would have simply been movie lines that our children had memorized. I wonder if this is true in most American homes at supper time. Or maybe families don’t eat together anymore because there is too much to watch on TV during meal time.

At the age of 53 I find life really fascinating. I really enjoy it and it actually gets more enjoyable all the time. At my age I am thinking that I really don’t know how much I have left and I don’t want to waste it at all. Jesus said in John 10:10, “My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life”. He actually wants to give us a rich and satisfying life. The problem is that most people are not living a rich and satisfying life and don’t even know that it is there for the taking because they can’t turn the TV off long enough to listen or to read about it.