When I was a kid, television was only about a decade old. Shows were in black and white, broadcast over the air, and nothing was on 24-hours. There were times you’d turn on the TV and get nothing but “snow,” a Poltergeisty, white-noise static.
These days we can’t get away from broadcasting. Instead of three networks controlling all the content, though, everyone with a smartphone is a broadcaster.
The astounding amount of content humans produce has even outgrown the TV box itself. Most of our media is, once again, delivered over-the-air directly to our smartphones, computers, tablets, and flat screens, which are not televisions, but monitors. Television is no longer a piece of hardware, it’s one of many broadcast services we receive.
With the need to fill the airwaves 24/7 and waaaay too much amateur content, finding something decent to watch is a daunting task. There may be hundreds of channels, but a recent Nielsen poll reveals that most of us only watch about 17 of those regularly.
So even with an explosion in the number of programming options and 24-hour, on-demand entertainment, most of us still seek out only a handful of quality broadcasts—channels and shows that speak to us in some way that’s worthy of our ever more-limited leisure time.
We intentionally tune into the shows we want to watch. We consciously become receivers for what’s being broadcast to us. It’s easy to turn on the TV or fire up an app.
Sometimes, perhaps during our daily commutes, this process is so second-nature that we unconsciously become receivers for whatever’s being fed to us. We’re simply in the habit of turning on our screens and watching stuff.
So if we’re alone at a restaurant or on the subway, we sit down and fire up our screens. We watch stuff. We do this so often now that we don’t even think about how often we mindlessly watch stuff. There’s a name for mindlessly watching stuff: brainwashing.
If we can so easily tune in to tune out, I believe (and in fact, Jesus shows) that we can also easily tune in to tune-up.
Tuning in to God’s Lovecast
The program we should be tuning into when we have a few moments is God’s Lovecast. On my spiritual journey, I have found it useful to think of God as a broadcaster of love. In fact, I think of God as the ultimate broadcaster, sending a signal of pure, unconditional, energizing and creative love throughout the multiverse, to every reality, to anyone and everyone open to its reception. We’re all capable of receiving the universe’s love messages. We’re gathering them right now! Take a second to experience God’s Lovecast coursing through your soul, a great ball of light energy forming in your heart center, loving its way through your veins, infusing your being, atomically energizing you with lightness and love.
God’s Lovecast calms and inspires, urging us to join together in love, resisting and eliminating evil systems. This is what Jesus teaches, too: To change the world, we have to first change the channel from the fear-filled programming of greedy human institutions to the grace-willed jamming of God’s love revolution.
What Jesus Says About Lovecasting
The message of Jesus and the actions of his life are an invitation to change the channel. Jesus invites us to open our hearts and minds to new programming. Jesus broadcasts good news, a program of love that transforms our very being. Tuning in to the always-on God Channel conforms us to a Christ-like image and teaches us a new program of compassion, love, forgiveness, generosity, and selflessness.
I see this message of selfless generosity all over scripture—it’s foundational to the Jewish idea of divine covenant—but I notably see it in the Gospel of John. The author(s) indicate that the Spirit of God resided within Jesus—and consequently that the Spirit lives in us, which was and continues to be a radical idea. You mean we don’t need a priest to tell us what to think? You mean we don’t need a mediator between God and us? We don’t need someone to make a blood sacrifice for us?
Jesus says, “No, we don’t.” We just need to tune in to the appropriate channel—the God Channel. And I’m not talking about televangelists. I’m talking about tuning into a broadcast that’s older than creation, a transmission that is eternal creation itself, a show that we don’t just sit on the couch and watch, but one that we are invited to participate in. This is broadcasting so powerful that it compels us to take loving action in the world.
It’s God’s broadcast, a Lovecast that moves us all toward being Jesus in the world, not just paying him lip service.
It’s important to know that we are always ready to receive God’s Lovecast. We are inherently able to receive messages from the Conscious Cosmos because we are made from the Conscious Cosmos itself. Formed in star factories from starstuff, we are much more intricately woven into the fabrics of realities than we realize. That’s why we often fail to intentionally change our channel.
Tuning Out Our Distractions
On any given day, we are so tuned in to a specific lane that we ignore God’s Lovecast. We’re focused on work, or family, or school, or any of the zillion things we have to do. You know what else we have to do? Tune in to God. Every day. All the time.
But we’re so distracted by all the other, often vital channels in our lives (although there is still a lot of white noise) that we forget we’ve been naturally formed as God’s perfect receivers. We have the power to change the channel and sit and receive God, anytime, anywhere. We just have to remember to do it. More than once a week. More than once a day, even.
Next time you’re grabbing a quick meal between appointments, instead of reading the news, tune into God. At a stoplight? Don’t rant at the idiot in front of you (thereby becoming the idiot in front of someone else), tune into God.
In between breakfast and the first task of the day, tune into God’s Lovecast. When you hit a block doing whatever you’re doing, stop and tune in to God. Every time you think about it, tune into God’s Lovecast, even if it’s for 15 seconds.
Just become aware that the Lovecast is on and ready for you to tune in. After you intentionally remember God’s Lovecasting a few times, you’ll find you tune in more and more often. Naturally, no supernatural anything required. God’s love is nature taking its course.
We Are God’s Network affiliates
What I find most astounding about tuning into the God channel is that, after spending some time receiving God, I’m often motivated to create my own Lovecast, writing something inspirational, serving the community somehow, praying. And so it goes, each of us receiving and ultimately retransmitting God’s love. All of us. Imagine if every human on the planet agreed that on someday, at a specific time, we were all going to stop whatever it is we’re doing, and instead, just Lovecast for half an hour. Hell, I’d be happy with 15 minutes. Okay, I’ll take five. Do we have a deal? Because we’ll definitely have a different planet.
We should consider ourselves God’s network affiliates. The old-school broadcast networks like CBS, NBC, and ABC, have affiliates, local stations that rebroadcast the network feed from national headquarters. We’re affiliates, too, of and in Jesus Christ. Like the network affiliates, we’re tasked by headquarters to rebroadcast Jesus’ international, eternal signal of God’s unconditional love. We are very much intended to be Lovecasters in our own right.
Increasing Our Spiritual Sensitivity
Matthew has Jesus say that “it takes more than bread to stay alive. It takes a steady stream of words from God’s mouth. A steady stream is a signal. Jesus is talking about God’s Lovecast spreading throughout the universe for everyone to receive.
We can more readily receive God’s Lovecast by increasing our spiritual sensitivity. To tune into God, we need to consciously adjust our spiritual receivers, just like we change frequencies to receive a TV, radio, or Internet channel. Spiritual sensitivity is our ability to perceive and respond to the call of God for the spiritual demands of the moment.
We can increase our spiritual sensitivity and expand the range of frequencies we tune into by practicing spiritual disciplines such as intentionality, mindfulness, Yoga, reading holy texts, offering community service, creating art, music, dance, and literature. Anything that helps us focus and center in the eternal, omnipresent love of God also makes us more spiritually sensitive.
It’s important to understand that we are innately, naturally sensitive to God’s signal and that sensitivity is more than a mystical term. It’s also a technical term that describes the ability of a device to “tune in” to different frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum. Radios, TV,s X-ray machines, cellphones and microwaves are all devices designed to operate within specific natural frequencies. So are we.
We are sensitive to God because we’re created from and exist in the God frequency. Everything does. We don’t need a more powerful tuner to receive God’s love, we just need to practice using the one we’re born with for something more than watching another Marvel movie.
It’s another sign of God’s universal love, freely given, that all of us, no matter our position in the economics and politics of the world, already have everything we need to perfectly tune into God, anytime, anywhere. Everything, it seems, except the will.
So are you ready to change your channel and tune into God’s Lovecast? I certainly am.
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