My name is Michael, and I have cable.

I’ve thought about getting rid of cable a bunch of times. Sometimes it’s because of expense. But most of the times I’ve considered cutting the cord it’s out of frustration. Appointment times missed, poor service, outages – all of these things have caused me more frustration than they should have. And that’s kind of the point. I know many people who have felt the same as me and have thought about getting rid of their cable. Others have looked at how to save on your cable bill and actually had some success, although there is often some negotiating required when trying this. The overall feeling is that cable companies could be doing a lot more in order to make their customers happy, but they don’t.

Every once in a while, you come across a situation that brings something to light in your heart. Sometimes it’s anger, sometimes it’s bitterness, sometimes it’s fear. Thing is, we think these situations are causal. I am afraid because of the diagnosis. I am angry because I was mistreated. I am bitter because someone else got the credit I deserved. More accurate, though, is the fact that these situations didn’t cause all that stuff; they only revealed it.

Think of it like this – if you were to take a piece of fruit and put it inside of a vice and start tightening it, eventually the juice will come out. The juice was in the fruit all the time; the vice was only the mechanism that caused what was inside to come out. Situations and circumstances are like the vice. They tighten and tighten and tighten until something eventually come out of us. But what comes out was in our hearts already; it wasn’t placed there because of the vice.

So a couple of weeks ago when, yet again, the cable company didn’t deliver, I felt very, very wronged. That’s not to say I wasn’t wronged (nor is this meant to be a commentary on whether or not the cable companies are jerks or whether you should have cable or not). What came out of me was my latent sense of consumerism. And it was ugly.

I believe it’s this way for many of us; we live our whole lives as consumers. We consume good, services, and even church, and when someone or something doesn’t meet our expectations, our sovereign rights as consumers are infringed upon. We feel wronged; we feel that we deserve better. The question is what happens next. Well if you’re wanting to see what some of the population do when they are now faced with if they should cut the cable in these modern times if favor of streaming services, or watching their TV and films some other way online, you might be interested in reading this source here revealing more facts and stats regarding cord-cutters, streaming services, and paid cable networks, etc!

So anyway, when that sense of consumerism is awakened inside of us, we would do well to recognize just how deeply it runs. Even spiritually, do we have the sense that we deserve more? That we deserve better? Perhaps so. This, along with so many other circumstances, is a chance for us not only to deal with the individual circumstance, but to deal with the heart issue our reaction in the midst of it revealed.

So maybe there’s something redemptive after all about the cable company. Maybe.