the cost of tease
Can you live without TV? Can you live without cable? Can you live without constant films or shows that you are addicted to?
I have been completely fascinated by a post that my Google Reader brought to my desktop yesterday. It was a financial blog promoting the idea of getting rid of cable. According to them, you can save $60 per month, which comes to $720 a year by getting rid of cable! Save that for a few years and you can buy just about anything you want, including a car!
Or you could invest that money in something other than entertainment. Like world evangelism (half the people in the world cannot freely go to church). Feeding the poor (if you have food in the fridge and a roof over your head then you are in the top 25% of the world’s population). Or you could give more to your local charities that assist all sorts of challenged folks.
What was most amazing were people’s answers about why they could not give up their TV. Their favorite drama was the most frequently given answer. They would be bored, was the second most common answer. I find it a bit hard to comprehend either one of those answers. So when do you exercise, read, pray, study, talk, relate, learn and do if you are watching TV all the time? The cost of the being teased/entertained is high, financially and productively speaking. If only one family in each of our 2000 churches would give up cable for the year and direct those resources to the GCF, it would equal 1.44 million dollars! And think about how many books they might read as well :-)
A disclaimer is in order here . . . we have cable ourselves! Then again I don’t watch it at all (but lets remember that I do have three teenagers!) and plus it costs $7 a month. Does that make me a hypocrite?
I have been completely fascinated by a post that my Google Reader brought to my desktop yesterday. It was a financial blog promoting the idea of getting rid of cable. According to them, you can save $60 per month, which comes to $720 a year by getting rid of cable! Save that for a few years and you can buy just about anything you want, including a car!
Or you could invest that money in something other than entertainment. Like world evangelism (half the people in the world cannot freely go to church). Feeding the poor (if you have food in the fridge and a roof over your head then you are in the top 25% of the world’s population). Or you could give more to your local charities that assist all sorts of challenged folks.
What was most amazing were people’s answers about why they could not give up their TV. Their favorite drama was the most frequently given answer. They would be bored, was the second most common answer. I find it a bit hard to comprehend either one of those answers. So when do you exercise, read, pray, study, talk, relate, learn and do if you are watching TV all the time? The cost of the being teased/entertained is high, financially and productively speaking. If only one family in each of our 2000 churches would give up cable for the year and direct those resources to the GCF, it would equal 1.44 million dollars! And think about how many books they might read as well :-)
A disclaimer is in order here . . . we have cable ourselves! Then again I don’t watch it at all (but lets remember that I do have three teenagers!) and plus it costs $7 a month. Does that make me a hypocrite?