Influences

I have been contemplating something I heard recently, and it's hung like a nimbus since I heard it this last week. It came from a book that I was listening to on CD during a long drove. I don't remember the exact phrase, but a boy was talking about how he took this girl from the past (indian times) to a movie in his day. He didn't want to take her to anything gorey or scary, so he ended up taking her to E.T., a perfect movie as he saw.

(I've never seen the movie, so I'm not sure what this next part is talking about, but maybe you'll follow). At one point, they swore and did something only "slightly" crude that he thought was perfectly fine, yet she ran out with hands over her face and tears streaming down her face. When this boy caught up to her, she was crying, "how could you watch something so horrible?!"

That made me wonder how many crude, unrefined, degrading, inappropriate, or negative moments or scenes I allow in the movies I watch. How many times have I watched movies with these "little" things within them that push the Spirit of God away?

More than I should, I'm sure.

I read something in a talk by Ezra Taft Benson in the September 1988 Ensign, that hit me:

"We would do well to follow the counsel of John Wesley’s mother: 'Avoid whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, takes off your relish for spiritual things, … increases the authority of the body over the mind.'"

Everything we say, listen to, watch, see, or do has an influence on us. I remember when I was younger complaining to my parents that what movies or music I listened to had no impact on me. But I didn't understand. It does have an influence on me. Every bit of it. The question is whether or not it is a good influence or a bad.

That is the question, and that is what is so much harder to see.