The High Definition Life Style

Something is comical about the picture in front of me. I am standing in a complicated store filled with gadgets of all sorts. There is noise in every department – low noise, happy excited noise, quiet noise and humming noise mixed with sounds from the TV sets. The back wall of the store dances with images at times and other times it glides as beautiful sale boats skim the ocean surface.

Welcome to the Future Shop noise and stimulation store. You can purchase everything you have ever needed to become a complete couch potato. Buying here will keep you plugged in, stimulated and surrounded by sounds and sites that are simply amazing.

Just across from the major selection of TVs of all sorts you can test out the latest wonders. Here is a big comfy couch. Sitting on it points you to the super large TV set with the program playing. Strategically placed and almost impossible to see is a series of very slim speakers that bring the most realistic sound that I have ever heard rushing around you. At this moment there is an amazing scene of a forest with huge trees all around you. The sunlight is beaming down in slender shafts from the high canopy above your head and then it splashes on to the lower vegetation near the base of the trees. The mist rises from the ground slowly and fills the low areas. A squirrel dances from one clump of moss to the next… Just then the faint cry of a bird high over you comes from the top of the screen. As your eyes follow the scene in front of you there is a growing sound of splashing water… there it is…. just in front of us is the small brook running from the right side of the screen. It dances and babbles and gurgles its way to more brush of to the left.

The sight and sound had stirred my senses so well that as I looked away from the screen to the floor below my feet I actually expected the squirrel to be under the couch. The shock of looking down to the hard cement flooring with the skimpy carpet on it was almost too much. The rush back to reality from my new High Definition World was shocking… I didn’t want to come back. The forest was just too wonderful. The peace and serenity of that walk through those trees was just too wonderful.

Last evening I saw a commercial on TV that wrapped the whole possible, sight and sound stimulating, High Definition experience all together… The athletic looking young man that appears on the screen is watching an outdoor program. The announcer says something like… “To complete you outdoor adventure….” Then the young fellow picks up his spray bottle from beside the couch and lets a fine mist of mountain scent fill his front room. The apparent stimulation as he completes his outdoor experience in the great indoors makes you want to rush out and buy what every mountain mist is available.

I am convinced that the next generation of TVs will have an atomizer that will disperse the perfect scent for the movie or documentary on the screen in front of you.

The slums of Nairobi’s Kiberia ought to bring a delight to the front room of any bachelor… Oh I forgot that we only want to escape to far away nice places as we grow fat on the couch being over stimulated to death.

No I am not against TV, High Definition is great, ordinary old B&W or simple colour is enough to get my senses up. What bothers me is that we rush into the Big Box stores to bring a Big Box experience right into our family rooms – never having to ever leave to test a real world.

Now what I have written is just about TV. Check out the favourite computer games – online and otherwise… You can have all the relationships without ever leaving your monitor screen. In the most unreal and weird way we are locked in a “stockade” – you know with your head and hands bound below the heavy wooden apparatus. We will never see a real world outside again.

Not far from where we live is Warkworth Institution… a CSC facility that about 600 men live in isolation from the real world outside. In each cell the men have their own TVs. They are each allowed to pay for cablevision… and almost everyone has TV in their cell. One of the men on my last visit there described his joy of a nature program that he spends most of his time watching. He told me how much he enjoys the adventures that the program takes him on.

As I have reflected on what he was saying it kind of shook me. He is in jail and will be there for life. He will never see anything but the inside of prison. He will die there. Yet every night he escapes with his TV. He lives his real world for a very unreal world and loves it.

This man’s experience with TV is no different from another friend of mine that never leaves his house. If he is not in front of the TV he is at his computer playing his latest, favourite game.

Now turn off the power and… Oh my goodness…where did that stillness come from? It happened to us recently. It was so quiet that it hurt. I couldn’t check my emails. My Facebook was unattended. My Satellite signal was zooming around outside our house hitting all over the grass and bouncing from and into my dish mounted on the roof… BUT THERE WAS NO POWER. I stared at the darkness and wondered what happened to my High Definition World. It had evaporated.

We had no power for almost an hour. Was that ever weird… You couldn’t do a thing but sit and wait. Our lives were over. We were rushed back to the nothingness of my great grandfather’s days when there was no power. Ouch!

Yesterday I loved the rain as it splashed around me. I might even be looking forward to a snow fall that could come this next week. It will be so quiet in its own special way.

Today I need to sit outside for a while escaping all that bombards me. How about you?

I have rediscovered that God still has the lights on outside. He has provided a cover of darkness as well that is still. The stars the other night were amazing as well. I have a channel just outside the back door… that… on a black and cool night the stars sing to me.
No we are not getting a new TV for Christmas. We are gong to enjoy the old one we have for a while longer. What we have decided to do is to stand outside more often and just soak in the High Definition that is so much apart of our home.

Want to go for a walk?

~ Pastor Murray Lincoln ~

Note: Forest Scene above from www.ask.com