ditching the idiot box...

We reached sort of a watershed moment in our house last week. A point that will hopefully serve as a turning point in our lives and will provide us with more purpose, more life, and more creativeness as individuals and as a family.

We got rid of our satellite TV service.

Now, before I go on, I should mention that we have not physically removed our TVs from the house. I honestly toyed with this quite a bit and decided that was slightly too radical for right now. In fact, we went ahead and bought a new digital TV converter box and hooked that up, so we'll still be receiving "over the air" broadcast signals. (And just a note here--I am really amazed at how clear the picture is, even with our old rabbit ear antenna. Almost all the major networks come in and, once we save up for and buy a multi-directional antenna, we should easily receive upwards of 30 channels very clearly, and, best of all, free of charge!) What's happened is we've now become more intentional about what we watch and how much of it we expose ourselves to. It is, honestly, a nice feeling to not "worry" about missing a show anymore. Funny how you don't really miss it when it's not there anymore.

We'd been praying and thinking about doing this for quite a while now, for two reasons: One, it's going to be nice having an extra $70 in our budget every month. Two, it's going to be even nicer to not be slave to mindless drivel nearly as much. I say that because, yes, there are a few shows we still like to watch and will plan to catch when we can (although I will definitely miss the convenience of the DVR. Turns out they used to make these things called "VCRs" that may work OK for that purpose, though!). But one of the things that bothered me about having literally hundreds of channels to choose from was I could easily, at any point, drop what I was doing, plop myself on the couch, and "channel surf" to my heart's content. And I found myself doing that often. It was way too easy to unplug from the world around me, in other words--and I'm at a point in my life where I definitely need to be plugged in and purposeful with my time. I guess I'm admitting here that I'm weak in this area, and needed to cut it from my life. And I don't mind telling you I don't have a problem with that.

Case in point: I found myself last month watching some show on MTV--you'll remember them;they used to show music videos?--and, about 10 minutes into this pathetic excuse for entertainment, I literally shook myself awake, verbally asked myself what I was doing, and clicked the "off" button. It had gotten that bad--I could no longer keep myself accountable and, therefore, couldn't justify the expense, both in money and time, that my television watching habits garnered.

So, an era ends. Personally, after just a few days, I'm loving it. I look forward to spending our time as a family finding other avenues of entertainment and growing together instead of letting mindless media dictate that for us.

At least until football season... (just kidding!)