Oops, I almost did it again

I took yesterday off, staying at home doing various chores. Since I bore easily, I listened to podcasts to stay entertained as I reorganized our bulk food storage area. Bo-ring. Yesterday's podcast choice was This American Life--my favorite radio show of all time. It pushes boundaries while upending subjects for unique and unconventional views. I'm rarely disappointed.

Except yesterday. The show was a repeat I hadn't heard; Devil on My Shoulder. The show's website description is 'Stories of people who are trying to convince you that the devil is there, whispering in your ear...and stories of people who deny he's there, against some very heavy evidence.'

The first part of the show was about a church in Texas that does a Hell House; kind of a haunted house designed to scare people into faith. Various scenes of sinful lives are presented--always ending badly. The story was done by a filmmaker who had chronicled it in his indie film. A quick line in the intro mentioned him growing up in that area as a churchgoer who seemingly wasn't anymore.

Act 2 was an interview with one of the Amish kids who were in Devil's Playground, a fascinating movie about the Amish tradition of Rumspringa where Amish kids are allowed to break away from that culture to do whatever they want for a couple of years until they decide to come back to the church---or not.

My reaction wasn't about what was captured on tape or that the host, Ira Glass, gently guided the interviewees into places where they sounded like loons--it was that some personal soft spots of mine were poked and they hurt. I wasn't left shaking my head because it's so easy to portray Christians as intolerant, whacked, weird, inflexible, naive, judgemental, stupid, etc---it IS easy to do that because we can exhibit all of that behavior so very easily. I use 'we' in the very broadest of terms---from the outside 'we' is all of us even if we want to distance ourselves from the nutjobs.

My disappointment was because the show left the impression that evil in this world at the hand of satan is a concept. I'll buy in that creating a Hell House to scare people might not be the most effective evangelism tool---I'll hop on board with the fact that like the Amish, we all have to make a declaration of faith at some point.

Ira Glass, the host I like so much, has admitted he is an atheist. Since, to him, God doesn't exist, then neither would satan. Since that fallen angel doesn't exist---his posse of other doomed angels doesn't either. Kind of destroys any thought that good and evil are created and real.

So, as I loaded dry goods back onto freshly cleaned shelves yesterday--I was even more convinced that I need to exhibit more of what Jesus really, really wanted us to do. When asked one day what the great commandment is, Jesus replied that we need to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind.

I'm still too far from that. My minor cares, worries, and distractions place me so far from where I'd like to be---I am wasting my time getting riled up about whether or not we sound like idiots on a radio show. Getting irked at Ira Glass wasn't going to solve a thing yesterday--I needed to take care of myself first and bridge that gap.

I put down another stone I was ready to throw and put a box of pasta back on the shelf.