A month or so before I read 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess, God had been stirring something up in me. I knew I needed more, but I wasn’t sure how to get it or even what I wanted.

Then came 7.

The whole book spoke to me, but the part that really got my attention was the chapter on media.

We had always been a TV loving family, whether watching our favorite TV shows nightly, or going to the theater every weekend to see the latest movie (that was before we had kids.)

After reading the media chapter, my eyes were opened. I started asking myself these questions:

• How much time were we wasting on TV and movies?
• Was what we were watching good and beneficial?
• Who or what was first in our lives? The TV or Jesus?

These were really hard questions for me to answer, but for the first time in my life I sat down and thought about the answers. It wasn’t good. Well, it was good, but it was tough. I talked to my husband and we came to the same conclusion:

We were spending too much time in front of a screen. We were numbing our minds to what was going on around us, and we were finding that the more stuff we watched the harder it was to tell what was even “acceptable” anymore.

So we gave ourselves a timeout.

We had previously gotten rid of cable when summer started, so we got rid of the disc part of Netflix. (We still have the instant queue because of the kids, but I think this will be going soon also.) We got rid of some of our movies and TV shows. Same with books and video games. Really we just have too much stuff.

After we did this came the question of how to spend our nights. We were used to watching something when the kids went to bed. This had been our “quality” time. Honestly, we felt a little lost.

But God had a plan.

We soon found out that a group of our friends were meeting nightly for some intense prayer and worship. I was instantly excited. This is what I wanted. What I needed. More of Him.

So, Aaron and I would take turns (because someone had to stay home with the kids) going to the prayer nights. When I was home, I would fill my nights with reading, listening to music, blogging, or something else productive. And when Aaron was home he got busy editing a book that him and his dad wrote together. Talk about life changing.

Jesus moved in our lives like never before. We gave Him our time and ourselves, and He showed us who we really were in Him, and what it was like to give Him our all. We gave Him our time, He gave us His passion.

It was seriously insane. Insane good.

I’m not writing this to say TV or movies are horrible. They’re not. In fact, we still watch a show here and there and there’s a few movies coming out this fall that I am excited to see. We just realized we were spending way too much time in front of a screen and not enough time in the presence of Jesus.

We felt the prompting of the Holy Spirit to give some of this up, and we obeyed. And He blessed us for it. I have finally realized that Jesus is better than anything I could watch, read, or listen to.

He’s everything.

By: Jill Reini, Reini Days

Photo by Alex Courso

 

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Tune in this Friday for a link up on Media! If this week’s chapter affected you in any way, we want to know about it! So share about it on your own blog and come back and link up this Friday {or share in the comments}!

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