Family Television

This was originally posted on my Hilldale Worship blog, http://www.hilldaleworship.blogspot.com/ but I liked it a lot and wanted my PapaLyndel readers to see it too.

I’m happy to report that I have now seen an episode of “Hannah Montana.” My granddaughter loves the Disney channel. After a week in Oklahoma I’ve actually seen many new things on TV.
We watched some show with Alton the cook on the food channel where he was in Minnesota eating nasty things like rotten fish head jelly. My son loves to watch the food network.
My daughter-in-law likes to watch “Good Morning America”, but she likes to see it around 10:00, so it’s on the TiVO schedule. Now and then they watched Fox News with me. But most of the time we watched Gibson bowl and play tennis on Wii.

It was nice, in this day of every room having its own TV, for us to be together as a family. Would I have watched Hannah or Alton or Diane if I had been home by myself? Nope. I guess I could have gone to a different room and watched what I wanted to watch all day long, but then I wouldn’t have been with my son and grandchildren and we wouldn’t have those shared – even if it was TV – experiences together.

Guess where I’m going with this: Sunday morning worship. Our congregation is blessed to have people of all ages worshipping together. How nice it is that when we gather together on a Sunday morning that we sing a great variety of music that speaks to all generations. How nice it is that grandparents, parents and children are singing God’s praises together. They may not sit together (It’s definitely not cool to sit with mom when you are 16.) but they have that same shared experience that helps make a family.

It would be quite sad for grandma to go to one service, mom and dad to another, teenage brother go to another and kid sister to a fourth service. In that situation, where is the common bond, the shared experience, the give and take of loving someone and giving up some of your own wants to meet the needs of another?

Oooo, he’s gone to preachin’. Land the plane! (If you missed yesterday’s sermon I’ll explain that one to you.)

Bottom line. I hope that when I am 70 and my grandchildren are 25, 24, 22, 21, 21 and 19 that we will go to church together. I hope that they will sing “old” songs that I like, like “How Great Is Our God” and that I will want to sing whatever “new” songs are written in 2028 and that we will worship together because we are “family!” I also hope that we’ll still be singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” which was written in 1861. It’s part of our Christian heritage and it connects us with all of the saints who have gone before us (but that is a whole other post).

Who knows, by then we may have rediscovered the grandeur of a pipe organ and how well it expresses the greatness of God and they’ll be replacing guitars and drums…