Brief Comments on Media, Movies, and Me

It is Friday evening. You can tell my life is a thriller because I have time to blog.

First, a word about thrills. I am not a thrill-seeking personality and am really quite content with the fact that pretty much nothing thrilling happened today. Nothing disastrous happened either, so I have been given the gift of one more day.

Uncle Roy is still in the hospital, having had a nasty run towards gallbladder surgery. He had the surgery yesterday, but since there was infection involved and other nasty internal symptoms, I don't think he's quite out of the woods yet. The boys are learning to not just like Uncle Roy but pray for Uncle Roy.

I began to teach Evan and Aidan about the ACTS of prayer this evening. They both looked at me dumbfounded when we talked about confessing sins. They figured that they'd done confessing a long time ago and that there was no continuing need for contrition/repentence in the life of a believer. Wow.

Tara finally watched the end of _A Prairie Home Companion_ with me tonight. I like most of the folk music and great talent that appears across its regular, real stage. In the movie version, they've created fictional sisters, Rhonda and Yolanda Johnson who sing about their Minnesota home and the love of their mother, aunts, and uncles. With these two they created a pretty effective balance of comedic and dramatic. So I sit there with the tears slaloming down my face, not bothered in the least by them because I know the themes they sing about so well: the love of the earlier generations, the joy on my mother's face when I'd play the organ for her, the realization that the earlier generations, and indeed our own generation, won't be on this earth forever. And the most tragic of all: I did not recognize those days as good days, or did not recognize what was especially good in them. We should have stockpiled more than $1.27 gasoline.

I finished reading Alan Jacobs' masterful biography of C.S. Lewis a few days ago. The book in entitled _The Narnian: the Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis_. As you may have guessed, I have read quite a bit about Lewis, his friendships, the Inklings, and his lectures, but I gained a new perspective on Lewis from Jacobs. A brilliant and unusual man, Lewis was also haunted by the same frustrations that plague all thinking people. One might not hold up all of Lewis' life as the example to follow, but I think I still rightly regard him as a hero. There is plenty to admire and imitate. Definitely a superior read... thank you, Everett. I'm always in your debt.

Scripture writers sometimes petition the Lord, "Remember not the sins of my youth." That is probably because they were gross and glaring, even to the eye of sinful man. I think the sins of middle age are much more insidious. If a sin of youth is akin to a man swinging an axe and destroying a board, a sin of middle age induced rot into the board so that it becomes soft, soggy, and just as worthless over a long period of time.

Apathy is one such sin. I can see how middle aged persons will struggle against this with all their being. I don't know if burn-out is a sin, but I see it all over myself. I have been doing the same types of work and ministry for well over a decade. I have no edge left. I'm really kind of surprised that the kids keep listening, but they do. I have to remind myself that while I may have said this 1,228 times, for at least a few out of the 155 that I taught this week, it was the first time they heard it.

It is this same resolve that keeps us preaching and living the gospel. I may have heard it thousands of times, but someone is hearing it today for the very first time. Someone today understood that sin is whatever is inconsistent with God's character. Someone received full and free forgiveness from a merciful Savior.

And Some-Glorious-One smiled, and all heaven with Him.