Movie Hate Feeds your Demons

I had an interesting experience yesterday.

I watch Youtube a lot. It’s full of good Christian material, it has many valuable educational videos, and it gives me something to do when I’m spending time with my pets. Yesterday on a whim, I clicked on a couple of thumbnails for videos taken from the movie Heartbreak Ridge.

If you haven’t seen this movie, I can sum it up. Clint Eastwood (who actually spent the Korean War as an Army lifeguard in North Carolina) is a tough Marine sergeant with lots of combat medals. He takes over a platoon of spoiled punks. In the process, he beats a lot of people up and turns his platoon into a top-notch fighting machine.

Clint’s character says lots of crude things during the film. He makes fun of homosexuals and suggests other men have done perverted things with housecats.

It’s a funny movie. Not the gentlest kind of humor, though.

I watched a couple of fight scenes from the movie, but I quit because I felt it wasn’t healthy to keep watching people vent their rage. Christians are supposed to be full of warm, affectionate love, so I stopped watching.

I talked to God about it, and he gave me this: watching actors do cruel and vengeful things is just as bad as pornography!

This pretty much kills about 60% of screen entertainment for me. James Bond, John Wick, every superhero, most Clint Eastwood characters, Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris…what’s left? Chick flicks? No way! I’m not going to sit through two hours of cancer, adultery, shattered dreams, self-pity, veganism, blind self-righteousness, and man-bashing.

I don’t know why women enjoy films about misery. Strangest thing. Maybe it feeds the victim complex many women wallow in. Women are more manipulative than men, and wallowing in self-pity is a great strategy for manipulators. It has worked for moms and wives throughout history.

Watching cruelty and revenge is a lot like watching porn (so I hear…*cough*). It’s highly stimulating. You get drawn in emotionally. Many of us are subjected to abuse and injustice in this life, and when we see actors beating their bullies, we get some of the pleasure of fighting back and making abusers taste their own medicine. It can be very satisfying to see an actor blown up, crushed, mutilated, or whatever.

It should be obvious that the pleasure is in our flesh, not our spirits. When we enjoy this stuff, we give power to the flesh, and the flesh is the enemy of God. It has to be subjugated so the spirit can rule.

I gave up what I call “revenge porn” some time ago, but I didn’t realize how bad it was for me until last night. I have to avoid watching even short clips, the same way I avoid watching erotic videos.

To be close to God, you have to be distant from the world. This has become obvious to me. I can see why John the Baptist moved to the wilderness and why Jesus spent so much time alone. If you immerse yourself in the culture of the world, one of two things will happen. You will be corrupted, or you will simply feel fatigued and disgusted, as though you were being forced to share an apartment with pedophiles and pimps.

I’ve noticed that the closer I get to God, the more people I lose and the less contact I have with corrupt cultures. This is why God moved me out of Miami. It’s a sick, twisted place. God recognized me as a son, and he doesn’t want his sons stuck in places like Miami. Going there briefly to minister is okay. Living there is not.

He moved me to a better place. I have improved considerably since I’ve been here, and I think this is why I feel like moving to an even cleaner area.

This is why the rapture will take place. The world will be extremely filthy, and God’s remnant will be too clean to stay here and be subjected to it.

I love the area where I live, but I have suffered a lot here. I thought about it yesterday. I went back and read things I wrote while I was taking care of my dad and after his death. Looking after him was very, very hard, even though I didn’t understand it at the time.

I witnessed a lot of things that were painful to see. He deteriorated the whole time he lived up here. He lost his dignity. He became a weak little old man who walked like a toddler. He had to start using a walker. He then ended up in a wheelchair. Strangers came to the house to bathe him. He lost the power to control his life. We reached the point where he had to ask me for things, like a child asking a parent. “Can we do this?” “Can we go there?”

I had to go and sit with him in an assisted living facility every day. I made him cookies so he would have some sense that someone cared about him.

There were financial issues that were extremely stressful. It took me a long time to get them under control.

While he lived in this house, it became filthy. He developed a habit of rubbing spit on things, which was too much for me to take. He defiled the food in the kitchen. I had to clean up messes of types that shouldn’t exist in a first world house.

It was tough, and now, even though I love this property, when I look around, I think about the difficult times a lot. I also miss my dad. I feel as though he should be out walking on the private road I live on, as he used to. Sometimes I feel as though I should drive to the ALF to see him, because it’s that time of day.

I don’t want to go back to dealing with the negative parts of his personality. They were oppressive. I don’t miss that. I wouldn’t want the pre-salvation Dad to come back to life and return to me. But I still miss him sometimes.

If I go somewhere else, I won’t have to see the place where he sat every afternoon or the area of the front porch where he used to read his newspapers. I will never catch myself calling a new place “our house.”

I suffered tremendously in Miami. So did my mother. My dad and my sister were abusers, so they weren’t as unhappy. Abuse is all about putting your unhappiness in other people; you use them as emotional toilets. They were causing most of the suffering. When I left Miami, I was thrilled to escape a place where so many painful things had happened. I may have a similar feeling if I leave Ocala, even if this area is a much, much nicer place to live.

Here’s what I think: if you want God to move you away from a place where you’re unhappy because of the nature of the people around you, you need to be sanctified to the point where you won’t be a liability in a better place. God takes pains to move his people to areas where they fit in better. Why would he ruin that by inviting you, if you’re not ready? If you insist on hanging onto the world’s culture, you’ll just defile your new surroundings and make his other children unhappy.

Sometimes I’m afraid that if I move, I’ll never have another home I love as much as this one. But isn’t that typical of people who refuse to grow? If you take that attitude in life, you will resist leaving the womb. You have to be willing to let go of the old in order to receive new things that are better.

I plan to continue the sanctification process. I don’t want to be submerged in a sick culture any more than I have to. To insist on hanging onto unproductive things is to fight God.