The Lost Year

As I drank my coffee creamer and choked down my Tums this morning, I felt the weight of how busy my life has become. Managing the family store, going to seminary, home-schooling the kids, writing 2 blogs, pastoring a new church, adoring my beautiful wife, and praying for the end of the Hollywood writers’ strike so I can have fresh episodes of The Office again. Not enough hours in the day. I found myself wishing I could get back The Lost Year.

The Lost Year. It started in May 2004 and lasted...a year. My wife’s business was requiring her to do some work online. Dial-up wasn’t cutting it. We needed high speed. So I called the local company and inquired. Whether by chance or by design, the representative I talked to was possessed by the devil and bent on my ultimate destruction. And as is customary among the demonic, this evil one was quite charming and persuasive and lovable and keen. I expected the price of high speed internet to be a significant increase over dial-up so I wasn’t surprised when the dark lord gave me the quote.

Then came that fateful moment, that instant of weakness, when Satan seized the opportunity, skillfully delivering the temptation and deceiving me into flushing away a year of my life. His medium on the other end of the phone line informed me that for only $10 more per month....I could have not only high-speed internet, but also digital cable. 200 channels. A digital video recorder. And pleasure beyond my wildest dreams.

All discernment and wisdom and love and perseverance and commitment and decency and patience and familial devotion and common sense disappeared like a sneeze in a tornado. I wanted that digital cable. I needed that digital cable. I deserved that digital cable. And it would be the height of poor stewardship to not take it for the unbelievably reasonable price of $10 per month.

You see, up until this point we didn’t have cable at all. All we had were three fuzzy stations, and those were only watchable on a perfectly clear night during a leap-year crescent moon. We were third-world being offered a slice of the American Dream. We were people on the brink of starvation being offered a veritable buffet of entertainment delight. We accepted.

And gorged.

In retrospect, it was quite disgusting. My wife is having a difficult time with my even writing about this. We are embarrassed. But we take comfort in the possibility of others learning from our past excesses.

After the cable was hooked up and the DVR was humming, we realized that the common maxim, “there’s never anything good on TV,” was a complete misconception. It’s not that there’s nothing good on, it’s just that there’s nothing good on when you only have three channels and can only watch in real time. True there’s nothing good on the Big 3 during primetime hours. But there are 197 other channels, each serving up 24 hours of all kinds of interesting stuff while normal people are sleeping, showering, eating, working, and loving their families. The digital video recorder bridges the time gap. You can record stuff all day and watch it at your own leisure. So, friends, there’s always something good on.

We put a billion miles on that DVR, setting it to record our favorite shows every time they were on, recording multiple shows at the same time, stashing cartoons for the kids, storing health shows, science shows, technology shows, military documentary shows, military history shows, military revisionist history shows, reality shows, fictional reality shows, washed-up celebrity reality shows, game shows, motorcycle-building shows, crime scene shows, and watching all these shows while recording other shows and simultaneously scrolling through the on-screen program guide looking for still more shows. My wife was working several nights a week at the time. She would get home around 9:30, change clothes, and come down to the basement so we could buckle-up for 2-3 hours of whatever was next. We believed we were being good stewards of our time because by skipping the commercials, we could watch four hours of TV in three. If cable was food, we would have been that huge side of beef down in Mexico who hasn’t seen his feet in 12 years.

We forgot how to read, care, and carry on intelligent conversation. We named the DVR, bought it Christmas presents, and prepared a place for it every night at the dinner table. We loved – nay – we cherished that DVR ...

...as Satan laughed in victorious contempt.

What I hadn’t consciously picked up during our conversation when he sold me on the whole deal was the vocal fine print informing me that the $10 per month thing was only for 3 months and that after that it would be nowhere near reasonable. But after 3 months, you’re hooked. Three hours, actually. It’s like audio-visual crack – it sucks you in and after a while what it costs is completely irrelevant. It rises to the level of toilet paper and food – you don’t question the necessity of it, you just pay the going rate.

Except this debauchery didn’t just cost dollars. That’s no big deal – we can earn more dollars. No, it required something far more valuable. It cost us life’s most precious resource, the one that can never be replaced.

Time.

One day by God’s grace we woke up and saw the wretches we had become. Our brains were mush, our hearts were black, and our muscles atrophied. So I made the call. The devil sent a warlock out to the house to pick up that infernal window into hell – the DVR.

Life returned to normal, we reconnected with loved ones, and resolved to find a way to atone for the time we wasted. But we soon realized it was too late. It was The Lost Year.

That hurts especially right now, since I’m so busy that whenever I need to go to the bathroom I have to pencil myself in. I can’t help but think about what all I could accomplish if I had that year back. 35 term papers. Or 52 sermons. Or 347 blog posts. Or 4 bowel movements. It’s tragic.

So, friends, learn from our mistake. Don’t give the devil a minute. He’ll take a year.

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