Can you live without TV? Can you live without cable? Can you live without constant films or shows that you are addicted to?
I have been completely fascinated by a post that my Google Reader brought to my desktop yesterday. It was a financial blog promoting the idea of getting rid of cable. According to them, you can save $60 per month, which comes to $720 a year by getting rid of cable! Save that for a few years and you can buy just about anything you want, including a car!
Or you could invest that money in something other than entertainment. Like world evangelism (half the people in the world cannot freely go to church). Feeding the poor (if you have food in the fridge and a roof over your head then you are in the top 25% of the world’s population). Or you could give more to your local charities that assist all sorts of challenged folks.
What was most amazing were people’s answers about why they could not give up their TV. Their favorite drama was the most frequently given answer. They would be bored, was the second most common answer. I find it a bit hard to comprehend either one of those answers. So when do you exercise, read, pray, study, talk, relate, learn and do if you are watching TV all the time? The cost of the being teased/entertained is high, financially and productively speaking. If only one family in each of our 2000 churches would give up cable for the year and direct those resources to the GCF, it would equal 1.44 million dollars! And think about how many books they might read as well :-)
A disclaimer is in order here . . . we have cable ourselves! Then again I don’t watch it at all (but lets remember that I do have three teenagers!) and plus it costs $7 a month. Does that make me a hypocrite?
I have been completely fascinated by a post that my Google Reader brought to my desktop yesterday. It was a financial blog promoting the idea of getting rid of cable. According to them, you can save $60 per month, which comes to $720 a year by getting rid of cable! Save that for a few years and you can buy just about anything you want, including a car!
Or you could invest that money in something other than entertainment. Like world evangelism (half the people in the world cannot freely go to church). Feeding the poor (if you have food in the fridge and a roof over your head then you are in the top 25% of the world’s population). Or you could give more to your local charities that assist all sorts of challenged folks.
What was most amazing were people’s answers about why they could not give up their TV. Their favorite drama was the most frequently given answer. They would be bored, was the second most common answer. I find it a bit hard to comprehend either one of those answers. So when do you exercise, read, pray, study, talk, relate, learn and do if you are watching TV all the time? The cost of the being teased/entertained is high, financially and productively speaking. If only one family in each of our 2000 churches would give up cable for the year and direct those resources to the GCF, it would equal 1.44 million dollars! And think about how many books they might read as well :-)
A disclaimer is in order here . . . we have cable ourselves! Then again I don’t watch it at all (but lets remember that I do have three teenagers!) and plus it costs $7 a month. Does that make me a hypocrite?
3 comments:
That's pretty interesting. Tease/entertainment is a high value for most Americans that the rest of the world doesn't quite understand. Of course - we have cable here too. But again, we have teenagers and it's $3 bucks a month...
I was reading an article about US Easter Candy sales the other day. Check this out (indulge me in a little quote?):
Some local stores expect Easter candy sales to be flat or decrease this year, even as overall national holiday spending increases.
Nationwide, consumers are expected to spend $14.37 billion on Easter, up from $12.63 billion last year, according to the National Retail Federation. The average person still will spend $18.53 on candy, up slightly from $16.65 in 2006.
But the emphasis on fine chocolate goodies for Easter is gone, said Dan Flynn, co-owner of Boylan's Candies in Bloomington.
"The holiday in general just isn't what it used to be," said Flynn. "I don't think they buy candy as much or have the family Easter that they used to."
Dang- maybe we can just give up Chocolate Bunnies and fund the GCF that way? I was pretty astounded when I read that number. It took a minute to sink in ... 14.37 BILLION??? The US could fund the GCF and feed the entire world on it's easter candy budget.
Bernie, that is a little breath-taking! I wonder if our excellent CMA folks would rather give up chocolate than cable? What a twisted and warped world we live in, that 14.37 billion dollars was spent on Easter candy. This morning I passed by an old woman rummaging around in the garbage can looking for a morsel to eat . . . its gonna be hard to explain to God my big gut from my easter candy.
We gave up tv in general 8 years ago (no cable and only occasional PBS) and gave it up almost completely (the tv is moving out of our living room now) as our daughter started having seizures and the flicker of the tv made it worse.
The savings didn't buy us a car or anything although it did allow us to keep up with our bills. We are not however a typical family. We have yet to make our way out of debt despite constantly working at it--mostly due to massive doctors bills. But that is not the point. I suspect that just as many people don't realize how much they spend on takeout or candy they also don't realize how little of their church giving makes its way to the GCF. My husband and I were talking about this yesterday as our church is pretty financially stable and is always talking abou tthis homeministry or that or expanding this other bit yet do we really need a bigger church or do we just need to be more loving towards one another and share better (you know--the chldren's wig is off limits because that is all the kids stuff so the adults get stuck in certain small rooms which can't be used during other things.... trying to start a women's ministry made us jump through all kinds of crazy hoops that didn't need an "adult wing" to solve, just more willingness to share. Sorry for the rant, not weven really ranting just giving an example of where the "extra" funds go. I would rather have a smaller church with more GCF giving than a larger with more "fun stuff" and less GCF giving.
Post a Comment