An incredibly shallow deep thought

So what's the show you can't miss each week?

It seems like hardly a day goes by where we don't spend some part of our lunch or drive to a project talking about any number of shows. 24, Alias, Lost, Prison Break, Idol, Survivor.

Really there are a number of different shows and some are incredibly popular with all--others not so much. I will admit though it got me made fun of that I like Alias. I was told it was like Teen Girl Squad only with guns. Say what you want Michael Vartan is hot.?

Anyway, I was thinking about these shows because there are a number of them I've seen or follow but most of the shows such as 24 and Alias and others Ang and I don't watch on a weekly basis. We don't watch them because we got used to watching them on DVD. It seemed like most of them happened on Sunday nights or Wednesday nights when we had church activities and we had no TIVO so we simply avoided them like an ex girlfriend in the lunchroom and then we'd rent the season and do our best to not move off the couch until the entire season was completed. In a side note I heard about a guy who watched all of Lost season 1 in basically one sitting.

Here's the deal, I've seen an episode of prison break. It was like 3 weeks ago but it gave me enough footing to talk about last weeks episode and know what the guy was saying. I didn't know all the details but I could follow the basic storyline.

I watched 24 a while back and hadn't seen any of the season but by the end of 1 hour I knew enough to follow along with the plot and had a pretty solid idea what Jack needed to do before the plane crashed.

My point is this:
I think we can treat scripture like a popular TV show.

I think we can sit down and read for 15 minutes and find some nugget of information and then leverage that in a conversation in such a way that we act as though we know what is going on.

Worse yet, I think we can summarize the basic point of scripture in the same way we summarize what is happening in a TV show at the cost of losing all of the little pieces of scripture that make it so beautiful and timely.

An example.

Would you summarize prison break with a sentence like "The are trying to break a dude's brother out of prison because he was wrongfully accused."?

Or a season of 24 like "Jack is trying to stop terrrorists who are going to drop a bomb over LA."

Yeah, that would be true, but you'd be missing so much that makes the show great.

I could summarize the Bible like "Jesus dies for our sin so that we can have eternal life." or some other completely lacking summary of scripture. And all the while I'd make no mention of the time my life was broken and I landed in the proverbs and it got me through. Or the way I can't read the word mercy and get lost. Or how the first time I saw a passage come to life, for the 4th time and how I wondered how I'd missed that point every other time I read it.

So for the sake of discussion and entertainment lets watch or read. But for the sake or really understanding it and having it change who we are, let's really get lost in it.