Look What Else You Need!

Saturday night as I waited up for the prom queen to come home (not literally the prom queen, just the little princess of this house who felt like a queen for the evening), I was privy to watch all sorts of enlightening commercials on television. If you think the ads are crazy during the day, you should check out the ones they reserve for late night TV watchers, folks who are mourning the fact that they are home alone watching TV on a weekend night or maybe those who have put away a few and are carrying on conversations with the people on the screen.

At any rate, I learned more than I ever needed to know about the newest ways to grow tomatoes (upside down hanging from a bag), get your cat’s claws groomed (I never knew that was such a big deal… we have dogs), paint a room, bump your hair up a notch (or two or three), hang more clothes in your closet, lose weight and grow additional and longer eye lashes.

Now I do love me a good tomato, but I am most familiar with the traditional way of growing these summer treats – straight up from the ground or a large pot, confined with a tomato cage or along a post. Something about them hanging from a bright green bag strung up on your patio just doesn’t seen natural to me. Maybe you could enlighten me if this method has actually worked for you. I’d be curious to know since I do indeed have a backyard the size of playpen. But this commercial definitely played on my ignorance. I saw the same two silly and gullible looking senior adults pulling the same two tomatoes from their hanging vine over and over, but I never saw any facts or figures, something I usually require before investing my $19.99 in anything I’ve never seen before.

Come to think of it, all of these commercials played on my ignorance. They assumed I was ignorant about the given subject matter (and most of us are, when it comes to how cats groom their claws or how eyelashes grow), they kept me as ignorant as possible while feeding me senseless information and miraculous demonstrations, and they asked me to act on my ignorance by sending them my money and giving their product a try.

Now this is not to say that if you’ve ever ordered anything off the television you are ignorant. I’m sure there’s some good stuff out there worth ordering and maybe even some of the products I saw Saturday are completely worth the 19.99 they all happen to cost. That’s not the point of this post. So if you’re steaming under the collar right now because I’ve made fun of your favorite way of shopping, please forgive me and hang in there with me. No offense intended toward you TV shopper folks.

But as I sat there watching the happy cat groom its little claws on its compact and sturdy Emery Cat for the second time during my third Hallmark Channel movie (and therein lies my addiction), I honestly got one of those “voice of God” messages. It helped that I had just read and written about Eve’s conversation with the serpent a couple of days before, but I clearly heard felt God say to me, “Reference back to Genesis 3:1-7, Kay, where Satan is convincing Eve why she needs to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She too already had everything she needed and more, but that sneaky snake came along and sold her a bill of goods based on faulty promises and by playing to her ignorance.”