Positive and Encouraging K-LOVE?

My grandmother was dying in the room next door. She had sepsis. This was the third time, it wasn’t looking good. I flew in from Salt Lake City the night before to see her one last time.
My grandmother lay in a transported hospital bed, spending her last few days living under hospice care in her own house. The oxygen stuck in her nose like used pixie stick tubes. Her face moved, docile, up and down, soft and even. Every so often she would cry, feel the pain, and my mom would give her light drops of morphine, from a device that looked like a red candy stick. Then she would softly quiet back down.
It was time. We all knew it. It was a good thing.
What was not a good thing was the noise of the radio coming from the room I sat in. I say NOISE for a reason. K-LOVE was on. Do you know this radio station? Positive and Encouraging K-LOVE? Now, you may already think you know what I am about to say, but I’m not going to talk about the um, “quality” of this music station, because that would be purely my subjective, relative opinion which is really no better than yours, right? (Wink).
What I want to discuss is Christian rhetoric. On K-LOVE they were doing their annual, or bi-annual, hell maybe weekly, pledge drive. And these were the words they kept saying over and over: Twenty dollars a month! You can save a life! Make an impact across the world! You can introduce people to the healing power of Jesus Christ! If you just obey God and believe, he will bless you!
For only twenty dollars I can do all these things? I wish I would have known sooner. For one hundred dollars I could have saved FIVE people’s lives already!
I apologize for the sarcasm. I do not want to be divisive, nor do I want to be unkind. But, I can’t help myself. I am sick of Christian rhetoric. I am sick of people telling me that if I “have faith” and “obey” then God will bless me. I am sick of people asking for money for causes that I honestly don’t know if Jesus would support. Would Jesus support Christian Radio? Would he pledge a monthly twenty dollars? Would he support golf fundraisers and chicken cordon bleu banquets for the homeless?
Maybe. But at the same time, it’s hard for me to see.
Now if you listen to K-LOVE regularly, I think it is only fair for them to ask you to support the ministry and what they are doing. So fine. I just have a problem with how they ask. It reminds me of penance. It makes the gospel into a little more than a clever way to raise money. Now, if they came on and said, “Listen, we want to do this without commercials and we’d like your support because we really believe what we are doing is making a difference. If you give, it would help us out a lot.” I would be okay.
The fact is, though they are lightly guilting people into it. I say “lightly” because the way people talk on that radio station reminds me of way-to-happy televangelists and vacuum salesman. It’s hard to get too mad at them, but way-too-happy people scare me. I am skeptical of them. I don’t know how anyone gets that happy.
Yet it seems as if many times, organizations, not just K-LOVE, use Christian jargon to promise something to their donators. A promise that I would say more often than not, gives donators false hope.
My family loves K-LOVE. Whenever I go home, it’s there. Staring at me, waiting for me to walk in the door so it can push my buttons. And generally I forget all about K-LOVE when I leave, until I return, and there it is.
So I listened to these two hosts go on and on. And on and on and on. Until I got so sick to my stomach I wished I was watching the 700 club—and that’s saying a lot. Every two minutes they mentioned twenty dollars—twenty dollars, positive and encouraging, save a life, save a life, make a difference, and all I could really wonder is how much this really was making a difference.
Once again, I’m sorry. Please know that I am a hypocrite and I don’t want to engage in bashing because I realize that K-LOVE is probably better than the most, so granted.
Really K-LOVE was just a reminder to me how much we want to use the gospel to serve our own means. How we will manipulate, skew, promise, bless, anything to get people to support whatever cause we are a part of. And if this is part of the Kingdom of Heaven, great. But really it just seems like we can never get away from using the Gospel, scripture, etc. to back our own personal agendas.
I guess this is life. I do it. Almost every day.
But I wish this was not so. And maybe the darkness is in my heart rather than K-LOVE’s. Probably. But, I would like to see a Christian rhetoric that is based on more than cheap commercial sales gimmicks.
So while I sat in my grandparent’s living room, listening to K-LOVE, I finally got up and went to my grandma’s room. I decided I’d rather listen to dying woman and her death rattle than stand in a room, K-LOVE blaring, with no morphine to spare me the pain.