Who says television is a bad thing?

It was like a train wreck and I couldn't look away. Some kind person who knows I have Wednesdays off work, warned me ahead of time that they were going to kill off a child on Days of Our Lives, just in case I would want to avoid the storyline. But I couldn't...of course. Call it morbid curiosity. I wanted to know if they would do the storyline any justice. And it wasn't like they were doing a stillbirth story or anything. So I turned it on and watched. Bo & Hope's young son, Zach, was the victim of a hit and run...rumor is he will be declared brain-dead tomorrow and will be a life-saving organ donor for an infant in need of a transplant (liver, I think). Today was the initial "discovery" episode...where the mother stumbles upon her own child lying bloodied and broken in the street. Can you think of a more dramatic storyline? I was unmoved.

I used to the be kind of person that would cry at sappy commercials and sad television shows and/or movies. But as Hope cried on her adult son's shoulder, "I can't lose my baby," I looked at the television and said, "Yes, Hope, you can." There was never a more definite moment when reality was so obviously clear. Regardless of my critique of the show, I was able to distinguish my own pain from the pain of the soap-world. I didn't shed a single tear. But even more importantly, I wasn't angry or bitter or nasty about it. I was able to feel reality, in it's fullness, without any interference from my own pesky psyche.

Then, I was watching As the World Turns (yes, I know, a day of soap operas...how exciting) when I was faced with a truth about myself...one I'd been running from for a while now. A while back, Lily had bargained with God for the life of her teenaged son. Her son fully recovered. And despite her own unhappiness, she was going to live up to all of her promises to God in return for what she saw as an answer to her prayers. She said outright, "If I don't do this, he will die." She sounded like a raving lunatic as she talked about how she had to fulfill all her promises to God or her son would die...how she held the power to decide his life and death. I laughed.

How could anyone think they held the power to determine life and death? How could someone truly believe that what they say had so much power with God that they could decide their own fate? It's ludicrous. Isn't it? But I'm not that far away from that...minus the miraculous survival, of course. Wow...what a sense of ego.