Discipleship and media distractions…
Dan Edelen at “Cerulean Sanctum” has encouraged and challenged me again in his post “Fumbling the Torch“. He recognizes a loss of discipleship since the blossoming of the entertainment industry:
Media stole the passed torch. It distracted those who came before us from their primary duty of ensuring the wisdom of the ages survived into the next generation. Whatever that wisdom may have been, that generation preferred the dull gray light of a cathode ray tube, or the voice of a box of transistors, to passing on the only things worth saving…
I look around today and can’t help but think it’s infinitely worse. Cruise the Godblogosphere long enough and it seems like everyone’s glued to a 50″ plasma display OR an iPod OR a PS3 OR the two dozen flicks at the multiplex OR some pointless Internet distraction. Meanwhile, the next generation’s holding out their hands, dying for what little got passed on to us.
As Dan points out, there is little to nothing that we can do about what has been passed to us. (And, I realize this is a generalization. There are great disciplers today.) The question is: Do we allow this trend to continue? Can we break out of the “entertain me” mode and seek to pour our lives into others?