The other night as I looked through the TV listings, I read: "Man brushes fish's
teeth."
Ah-huh, I thought. That should rank right up there with the all-night chess match.
But angel fish have no teeth. I learned that when I scrubbed the glass of my aquarium
to get the algae off, which multiplied faster than my guppies. My angel fish sometimes
mistook my fingers for worms. (Its greedy fish lips were forever skimming for manna flakes
from heaven or whatever plopped into the water).
I bet, if I still had my fish (I put them up for adoption when the algae threatened to
ooze out of the tank and attack the children), they'd be thrilled to see a distant cousin
get its non-existent teeth brushed.
My fish actually watched television, you know. And I don't blame them. You can only
watch a plastic scuba diver dig for treasure so many times before you want to cut off its
oxygen supply.
Since the aquarium was near the TV, the fish lined up against the glass -- if they
found gaps in the algae -- and puckered at the punch-lines and pretty girls.
Most TV shows are perfect for fish brains. An evening's TV listings read like a cheap
novel:
A family gets stranded on an island on the way to Hawaii while elves and a woodland boy
save a princess from the Lord of Darkness and his goblins. A habitual matchmaker opens a
dating service, and a wife wrecks her husband's police car. A detective then investigates
the murder of a dead woman and her babbling brothers (would the murdered woman be anything
but dead? I'm not sure sure about the babbling brothers).
And to top off the evening, quote: "A novelist's vacation leads to were-wolf
terror, including her husband and an old bell (belle?) from Romania." (Did her
husband have an affair with a Communist ding-a-ling?)
They sound like the headlines of grocery story tabloids.
It's hard to believe that I and a billion other people actually watch such shows. What
possesses us to sacrifice more uplifting activities -- reading, dialoguing with spouses or
God, visiting lonely neighbors -- to spend mindless hours absorbed in nonquality
programming that neither educates us nor enhances our lives? Sympathy for the fish?
God has told us what to fill our minds with: whatever is true, honorable, just, pure,
lovely, gracious, excellent and worthy of praise (Phil. 4:8).
A few movies and TV shows fit that description. Just imagine what our lives would be
like if we viewed only those.
I think it's time we expanded our fish brains, opened wide our mouths for the true
manna from heaven, and replaced the scuba diver with a new bubble blower.
