Yup, I do, sometimes even loudly and passionately. I do it because I have all this anger and rage that needs an outlet. So instead of taking it out on myself, which would be completely inappropriate, I yell at the people in whatever TV program I’m watching. Of course, a lot of the shows I watch are about crime and all it’s ramifications, which is already a sensitive subject for me, so I have lots to yell about.

One of my favorite TV channels is Investigation Discovery, which is a channel of nothing but reality TV shows, and all the shows are True Crime stories. I’ve had a fascination for all things criminal for as long as I can remember, I think because I’m perpetually trying to understand what made my father tick, and more to the point, what made him do all the terrible things to me that he did. I think if I can understand why he did it, it will be easier to forgive him.

So I spend a lot of my time while I’m watching TV either talking to the people in the shows I’m watching, or yelling at them. If I can see that they’re going into a dangerous situation, I’ll yell at them to go a different direction, or tell them not to answer the door because the bad guy is there with a gun to kill them.

Logically, I know they aren’t real-life people, but in my imagination they’re as real as if they were standing in my livingroom. I may see them as substitutes for interactions with real people, and the thought occurs to me that interactions with imaginary people such as I’ve described are safe, because I can program in advance what people will do and say, and they will only utter what I tell them to.

The frustrating thing is that the people on TV never say what I want them to say. If they would only say what I think they should say, the story would have a much better outcome ~ at least it seems that way to me.

If only life were as easily controlled as that! Even more, if only you could dominate God like that! But then, if you could, God wouldn’t really be God, would He? I wouldn’t want to be able to rule over God. That would make me God, and I’ve already figured out that I would make a terrible God (see my previous post, I Would Make a Terrible God). God is far bigger and much better than anything human beings try to make Him out to be, and that’s the way it needs to be. Any time human beings try to put God in a box, it won’t be a box that He designed, and He won’t stay there.

So maybe the people on TV not doing what I want them to is a metaphor for the way God works in my life. Hmm… I only just thought of that. I can’t control what the people on TV are doing, and I certainly can’t control God, nor do I want to. I guess that’s the difference. I’d like to be able to control what the people say and do on my TV shows, but I don’t want to control God.

I love God just the way He is: majestic and beautiful and wonderful and amazing and marvelous and unfathomable and best of all, mysterious.

“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the LORD. “And My ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts higher than your thoughts.” ~ Isaiah 55:8-9, NLT.