Am I a bad Christian if I hate inspirational videos?
A friend sent me this video, “In the Dash.” I like this friend very much, so I watched it all the way through. My skull nearly burst out of my skin with boredom and frustration. In fact, I found myself yelling, “Oh, come ON!!!” at the screen at least twice.
Here’s what I wrote her:
“Thank you for thinking of me. The poem is lovely. However, I’m far too impatient for the video — I did watch it to the end, but I kept wanting to “dash”! Or to fast-forward it so I could get to the point. 
Is that horrible of me?
“I don’t feel that way with real people — I just don’t deal well with inspirational videos.”
I think it might be a generational thing. I don’t know. I’ve gotten them from friends in their 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s. However, all my friends in their 30s loathe them and refuse to forward them.
Why the difference? I have no idea. Maybe we OD’d on that kind of thing young. Too many sappy Hallmark cards, too many moving commercials, too much MTV (which is so much faster than sunrise fading to mountain vista fading to closeup of flower fading to…).
I also hate being told to slow down when speeding up is really honest to goodness truly the only way I can even get half of what I want to done. I spent too many early years of my life reexamining my frickin’ priorities. I would now like to LIVE them, thank you very much. And I am. Slowing down to contemplate my navel has been proven to be a bad idea in large quantities. In small quantities, sure. But a video is not gonna do it for me.
If I want to slow down, I’d much rather have tea with the friend who sent me the video. She’s far more delightful, and more beautiful to me than the best generic photo of a sunset.