Read the Label  

Our society's values are being corrupted by advertising's insistence on the equation:  Youth equals popularity, popularity equals success, success equals happiness.  ~John Fisher, The Plot to Make You Buy, 1968

I am a label reader.  Maybe it is because since we started making our own products for Purple Ranch, I find it interesting to see what ingredients are in the everyday items you buy and also what they call the benefits of the products. 

So I decided to read what was in my conditioner.  Now maybe I am the only one who would find this interesting because there are words in there that I don’t understand, let alone have the ability to pronounce. 

This time I decided to focus on the benefits. These are the three that I found most interesting.  This product claims to have Bioamp, Transactive Delivery System  and Glyco-shield.  This started me thinking about what those things mean.  I started with the easiest of the three, Bioamp.  I think this really means you can have Texas Big Hair if you use this conditioner.  Now, Glyco was a hard one for me so I went to the dictionary to see what I could come up with.  Glyco means sugar.  So I can have a sugar shield for my hair once it’s amped up.  This gets more complicated because I looked up “transactive” and it gave me “a geometric isomer having a pair of identical atoms or groups on the opposite sides of two atoms linked by a double bond.”  What does that mean?  I am no chemistry major so this one thoroughly confused me.  Does this mean I will have thicker fuller Texas Big Hair?  I am not sure what geometric isomers are doing linking up in my hair and being active but it could mean they’re on a sugar high.

Yesterday our sermon was about the things we decide we can’t live without and how advertisements influence our thinking every day. Our world has become one huge advertisement.  The thing is we feel like we can’t get ahead of the competition unless we can apply some made up name for something that no one can pronounce much less identify what it means.  Then when we buy it, we do so because it has something in it that we don’t know the meaning of but it must be good because it says so on the label. 

The thing I do know is that the Bible is very straightforward in most cases.  I admit sometimes the parables get me and I have to study them over and over again before I really get their true meaning but God’s Word is not filled with made up words with unknown definitions. Jesus was the best advertisement ever made and if you decide on life everlasting that is truly what you will get.  

Prayer for the Day: Heavenly Father, we are bombarded by advertisements on TV, the radio, in the grocery store and on billboards along the highway.  They tell us our lives will be better, we will live longer, we can be or look successful if we will just try whatever is being advertised.  I am often caught up in these very ads that promise me all those things.  Please remind me that my hope is in You.     

Scripture:   Show me your ways, Lord, teach me your paths.  Guide me in your truth and teach me for you are God my Savior, and my hope is in you all day long.  Remember, Lord, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old.  Psalm 25:4-6