As I’m drawn closer to God, He gives me new eyes. There’s a current radio favorite by Brandon Heath, Give Me Your Eyes, that includes these lines in the chorus:
Give me your eyes for just one second
Give me your eyes so I can see
Everything that I keep missing
Give me your love for humanity
The obvious interpretation here is to take notice of the people we encounter in life but God has shown me another application.
While I rarely watch TV under normal circumstances, I allowed myself to get involved with a few evening dramas during my husband’s recent 15 month deployment. It just helps the evening hours pass, right girls?
I had been watching these shows long enough to get rather involved with the characters and story lines when my Mother-in-Law paid a visit. She loves to watch TV with me in the evenings, and I enjoy the company. But when I found myself explaining why she wouldn’t enjoy one of these shows, God poked me in the side asking, “Why is the absence of morality a problem for her but not you?” Ouch. He’s right, of course!
With a tremendous amount of self-control, I deleted that show from my TiVo and stopped recording it. Every now and then I wonder about the characters and the story line but I pray that God would strengthen my resolve.
In the months since, I have had numerous conversations regarding TV and morality and I’ve learned a very frightening truth. As each year passes, the industry pushes the limit just a little bit further and each year they desensitize us to how far they’ve pushed…and it’s working!
In one conversation with a practicing Catholic, I explained that I was offended when one particular show cast a practicing priest in an openly homosexual relationship, including cohabitation. Her response knocked me off of my feet. She replied, “Well, he wasn’t a Roman Catholic priest.” I was struck dumb that her focus was on the type of priest he was, as opposed to the fact that they were placing any clergyman in that role. She had been desensitized way beyond her awareness.
Now before you get all spun up over the question of homosexuality in this illustration, consider what your response would have been 25 years ago? Did you even see the word cohabitation? It wasn’t too long ago that producers weren’t even allowed to imply that married couples shared a bed much less unmarried couples. Have you, too, been desensitized without realizing it?
The truth is that the entertainment industry has, little by little, changed the lens through which we measure morality to the point that we don’t even know where the line is crossed. I pray that God would reset all of us to His default setting so that once again, we may see immorality as He sees it.
In case you’re wondering, there are plenty of options for morally correct entertainment, from TV shows, to movies, to books, and so on. In fact, I’ve found that reading Christian fiction set in the 1800′s gives me a whole new appreciation for propriety between men and women. It’s a quick way to see the extent that our society has been desensitized to immoral behavior. There’s only one definition that I’m interested in and it doesn’t come out of Hollywood.
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