During this Thanksgiving Holiday I believe it is important to take a moment to thank God for the little things that often get ignored or neglected in our hectic lives. Lots of football will be watched over Thanksgiving for example, which reminds us to take time and say a little prayer thanking God for commercials. Why commercials you ask? Thus proving my point that we as Americans often neglect to realize the crucial theological principle that what Satan meant for evil God uses for our good.

Commercials were first implemented in the 50”s I believe when T.V. was in its infancy and no one knew how important it would be to create moments in a program, mini intermissions if you will, that advertise some unnecessary junk in order to give we the viewers our cue to go to the bathroom, make a sandwich or put on our pajamas.

Over time of course it became obvious that there wasn’t enough triviality we could do to occupy and numb our minds to the point of distraction in order to avoid the commercials and thus we actually found ourselves sitting through them.

Thus we had to endure things like the makers of exercise products that preach having the body of your dreams comes not by exercise anymore but by buying an overpriced machine that is fun to use, requires no effort, and trims your waistline while reducing fat and you do nothing but strap it on and eat pizza which proves that the new axiom in retail is no longer “the customer is always right” but instead a more accurate 2012 version is “the customer is always a rube”.

We should be thankful for this serendipitous situation of course because with this insidious relentless hammering to our skulls of these insipid and creativity crushing vignettes singing the praises of toilet paper and feminine hygiene products (none of which ever needed to be advertised considering we all are well aware of their usefulness) that it finally became too much for some computer/ technology geek who found them so repulsive he actually spent a Sunday afternoon once not watching football but instead figuring out a way to record T.V. in real time, pause it when we needed to leave the area and when we returned have the omnipotent option of fast forwarding through the commercials to get right to the action and thus Tivo was born.

All thanks to commercials and our disdain for them. Of course Tivo evolved into every cable box in America that can now “stop” time and forward past the boring parts, which if we were able to do in our real lives would make our journey so much shorter but a heck of a lot of fun!

It’s comforting to know that though the Lord finds Himself in the unenviable position often times of having to let our fallen status catch up to us in the form of pain and temptation, even God finds Himself feeling compelled to intervene in our affairs when it comes to certain forms of hell on earth like commercials.

So I wish everyone a happy and grateful Thanksgiving. Be sure and use your TV program recording device I whatever flavor you prefer to save yourself aggravation, and maybe take a moment to bow your head and give a quick shout-out to the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who if T.V. was around in his day I believe would have, like that fruitless fig tree, found the desire to curse and damn commercials a tough temptation to dodge and probably would have been one of Satan’s most devious temptations in the wilderness.

Happy Thanksgiving!