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The following is an excerpt from Shannon Primicerio’s article “Bold Is Beautiful: Learning to Stand Out in a Fit-In World” from the Fall 2010 editions of Horizon and Direction magazines:

Choosing Your Celebrity Friends Wisely

I used to believe that what I watched wasn’t a big deal, but most of us could probably quote more movie lines than Bible verses, a talent that doesn’t exactly come in handy in the middle of temptation.

When I was in college my friends and I were into a popular sitcom. Every week we piled into one dorm room just in time to watch the unfolding events in the lives of our favorite characters. From the very beginning my friend Jen was opposed to the show. She thought the characters led immoral lives. Many times she chose to sit out in the hall and do homework while we used her roommate’s TV.

Over time, Jen lost her willpower and began watching the show with us. When some of the storylines got old to the rest of us, Jen found them fascinating because they were new to her. She was hooked. About a year later she started making poor choices. It was like she became a different person.

Our friend Jill decided to talk to her about the drastic change. Immediately Jen was defensive. “Wait a second,” she said. “For years you watched the characters on our show do things like this and you didn’t have a problem with it. So, don’t tell me you have a problem when I do it.”

Although Jen’s actions weren’t justified, she had a point. Inviting similar behaviors into our dorm rooms each week (via our favorite show) was hypocritical. If we wouldn’t live like those characters, we shouldn’t have been willing to watch them make poor choices week after week.

First Corinthians 15:33 tells us evil company corrupts good habits. That’s just as true with the company we keep through our television sets and movie screens. Choose the TV shows and movies you watch the same way you choose your friends—wisely and with godly discernment. They really do matter more than you think.

Check out the rest of the article in the Fall 2010 editions of Horizon and Direction magazines.

By now we’ve all heard about Balloon Boy. Every station is playing the story…over and over and over and over. When new details emerge, we hear those over and over and over and over.

Despite the story being a hoax, somewhere the crazy family behind the fiasco has to be smiling.

They did this for a publicity stunt. What has happened? They got publicity! Even though the story sounded fishy to begin with, the media jumped all over it. They were being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer before the smoke had even settled.

However, thanks to that interview, we now have valuable information that says the story was made up.

But for that family, you can’t buy this kind of publicity. Their appearances on Wifeswap didn’t generate a fraction of this. This morning, Mike Glenn, the Senior Pastor at Brentwood Baptist in Nashville, TN wrote on Twitter: I know it says a lot the Balloon family went to extremes to get their fifteen minutes. What does it say about us that we gave it to them?

Pastor Glenn is exactly right! We’ve made these people celebrities. At first they had our pity, then they had our shame, and honestly now they’re back to having our pity again, just in a different sort of way.

We love our celebrities and wanna be celebrities, don’t we? It doesn’t matter if they’re pure, true, crooked, crazy, or deceiving. As long as they stir up some sort of emotion in us, we either love them or love to hate them.

When election time comes around, celebrities have to start running their mouths. It seems like that was part of the contract they signed when they sold their souls to the devil decided to become a big star in Hollywood.

Do celebrities really deserve to have a voice in politics? Read more…