THE HELP MENU [T, 9-28-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

 I am a master clicker of the remote control for the TV. I don’t know how we got along without that thing. We couldn’t now, because neither of us can get up off the sofa to walk across the room to turn the dial to change the channel. Helen, being the perfect wife [and this is the definition of “the perfect wife”], has always let me be the one to control the control, to hold it in my hands, folded in the prayer position, and never demurs regardless of how much I run up and down the channels, scanning for something worth watching.

She just holds her computer on her lap and works crossword puzzles or plays “Grand Theft Recipes” or throws sheep at people on Farmville. [Are we the only ones who remember “Farmville?”] Sometimes it takes a very long time, scrolling up to channel 3389 and back down again to channel 2 & 1/2,, and up again, and down again, and then I finally click on “Off,” for seldom is there anything worth watching, even on PBS, since we’ve already seen all the “Clifford, the Big Red Dog” episodes. Also, “Brooklyn 99” is over.

But--and as one of our pastors once said in a sermon, “I’ve got a really big but here,” which was true, and which caused the entire congregation to go comatose in an attempt to avoid chortling--we got a smart TV, because our daughters insisted that we get Netflix so we could watch reruns of Brooklyn 99, and because Helen got dizzy when she looked at the blinky suits of the commentators on the sports shows on the old unsmart TV.

Despite the new TV’s intelligence level, we were frustrated again the other night, because we were eating supper, and Netflix wouldn’t let us watch Call the Midwife. There’s nothing quite as good for the digestion as watching births and Caesarian section surgeries while eating spaghetti. We know the new smart TV is smarter than we, but this blanking of Netflix had happened before. We were so disconcerted that we would have paid big bucks to get some geek to come hold our hands, but it was Sunday night, and even geeks have other hands to hold on Sunday night.

Then I noticed that in the vertical menu on the left side of the screen, there is a menu called Help. I had seen it before, of course, but what good could come from clicking on a word like “Help?” Nonetheless, in the manner of a master clicker, I clicked on it.

Of course, on one of those infernal electronic contraptions, whenever you click on a menu, it gives you anther menu. So, I kept clicking, menu after menu, and eventually came to “Reset Netflix.” Clicking on it restored our normal calm demeanors, since we were immediately back in the East End of London in the early 1960s.

It reminded me of the time that Pastor Ingqvist of Lake Wobegon Lutheran was hosting all the Lutheran pastors in the area—and this being Minnesota, there were many—on a flat boat on the lake. The owner of the boat decided to grill something for them, on a regular yard grill. Someone knocked it over. All the pastors ran to the other side. The boat tilted and began to sink. Disaster was imminent, for, being pastors, none of them knew how to call for help. Fortunately, as I recall it, they were saved because the lake just wasn’t very deep on that side of the boat.

God has a Help menu, and it’s okay to click on it. Inside that menu are lots of click possibilities—Friend, Prayer, Song, Cookie, Book, Nature, Coffee, Walk, Bible, Tea, Meditation, Reset Your Brain… Netflix…

If you can’t see what you want to see, click on Help.

John Robert McFarland