Do You Want Butter with that Popcorn? 🍿

By Pam

Have you ever gone to a movie and become so completely immersed in the story that you sort of forgot it was a movie, and that those are actors?

Ok, well, I guess that’s kind of the hope of everyone who is part of the film. Maybe that’s how you know it’s a good movie. Unless it takes over your ability to think and reason! And I’m not proud to say that was my experience recently.

I wont bother to tell you the film. But I will say that it was so compelling I had to go a second time! Even that’s ok until I found myself actually researching the real personal lives of a couple of the actors and ,….here’s the embarrassing part, pondering if I approved how they were living them!

Now I bother to write this up and do the true confession moment because it was significant.
It truly illustrated how caught up we can get in a story, and then how it can compel us to think and even act in ways that really we would not do if thinking clearly and rationally.

When I was flummoxed by what I was finding out in my hypnotizing research, I mentioned it to my very reasonable husband, who looked at me a little surprised at my strange involvement, and said simply, “They are ac-tors.” What pithy wisdom.

But what took me down such a strange path? It had to be the classic statement about film in which we are told to “suspend disbelief.” Good advice for a couple of hours of a movie, bad advice for living a productive life!

Rational thought and reasonable, intelligent thinking help protect us from such divergent paths. Clarity between reality and imagination is certainly the whole real story. But taken from the higher perspective, an ethical, even spiritually discerning viewpoint, we are better than this. We are individually prayerful people with an eye for good, not bad. The Golden Rule that Christ Jesus gives us as a guide for successful living and relationships, guides us to do to others (including how we think about others) as we would have them do to us. So it is very obvious it really isn’t helpful to give ourselves over to what is unreal. Or of no significant value to us, our life, our better purpose, or our thoughts about others.

One question, then, is how many decisions do we make in our day before we consider if something we are doing, or thinking, or a part of, is really worthwhile, or should be an influence to us?

Way too much of what is “out there for our consumption” adds no real value to our lives, yet we get drawn into conversations, or news stories, or personal relationship issues, or films, without considering what this is doing to the rest of our day, and to what is really important. We need to have the courage and discernment to be wise about what influences us away from our value and real purpose of our lives.

It’s pretty obvious in my case that I led myself down a rabbit hole that had no real significance in my life. And remember, I did this all by myself! No one influenced me, nothing but the temptation to be distracted, or know some gossip.

In the end, it did alert me to be so aware and conscious of my own thoughts, and activities and to remain alert to that which holds no real value for me. So it has been a good lesson to stay awake, and to decide consciously about my own real worth, purpose and value. It makes me realize I do have the ability to think and act rightly, and that I will not allow anything to dispossess me of this ability, and trespass on my life of Love. *

I am now wondering, if anyone else has had a similar experience, and how this kind of scenario might be instructional.

I will say that now if I find myself wandering or considering wandering into non-productive moments and disturbing distractions I simply ask myself, “Do you want butter with that popcorn?” And I have to choose!

Anyone else ever do this?? Give me a call, I’ll provide the popcorn! ♥️

*”Know, then, that you possess sovereign power to think and act rightly, and that nothing can dispossess you of this heritage and trespass on Love.” Mary Baker Eddy. Pulpit and Press. 3:7