Today, I am calling for action! Live a life of purpose! The best time to do something worthwhile is between yesterday and tomorrow. “Live life, then, with a due sense of responsibility, not as men who do not know the meaning and purpose of life but as those who do.” (Ephesians 5:25 PHILLIPS)
“I’m bored” should never be spoken by a servant of the Lord who is the biggest DO-er in the universe. Boredom should be exclusive to a person without God-focus. “A heart that turns from God becomes bored with its own ways, but a good person is satisfied with God’s ways.” (Proverbs 14:14 GWT) I don’t want to miss out on what God has planned for me, but too often I am like the little boy in this story:
My young son asked what the highest number I had ever counted to was. I didn’t know, but I asked about his highest number. It was 5,372.
“Oh,” I said. “Why did you stop there?”
“Church was over.” (Joanne Weil, Bore No More!, p. 7)
Today, we need God’s wise and right discernment. We joke about boredom and easily excuse it. I know I have. In the movie Click (Columbia Pictures, 2006), Adam Sandler plays a man with a remote that can fast-forward through life. Defying consequences, his character jokes, “So, what am I going to miss—thirty arguments and a haircut?” Eventually, he discovers the moral magnitude of his choices.
In sharp contrast to the character’s attitude, God’s Word commands “Let’s not sleepwalk through life like those others. Let’s keep our eyes open and be smart.” (1 Thessalonians 5:6 MSG) Jesus IS coming soon. We have limited time on earth; today is the day to get something done. We need prudent perceptiveness!
- Live wisely among those who are not believers, and make the most of every opportunity. Colossians 4:5 NLT
- So be careful how you live. Don’t live like fools, but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days. Don’t act thoughtlessly, but understand what the Lord wants you to do. Ephesians 5:15-17 NLT
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pointedly asked, “Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
Winifred Gallagher is an established, behavioral science writer who doesn’t write from a Biblical worldview, and I do not recommend her mixed views on spirituality. However, I was intrigued by her discussion of boredom in New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change (Penguin, 2011). Gallagher suggests that the word “boredom” (she defines as “the unpleasant sense that there is nothing that interests you” is distinctive to our modern western culture – particularly in the United States. She writes:
Situations that would strike us as unbearably dull, say, waiting for hours or even days for a bus, are considered just the way life is in many developing countries. Anthropologist Henry Harpending has done extensive fieldwork in the back country of [Africa], where in most ways, he says, ‘folks are just like you and me. But one thing that the Westerners that go there just can’t understand and are open-mouthed about is the people’s tolerance for tedium. They can just sit all day under the trees ….’ [Harpending] is fluent in Bushman and he has tried for twenty years to elicit a word for boredom, but the closest he has gotten is the unsatisfactory [word for] tired. (New, p. 126.)
“Boredom” is a uniquely English concept. “Boredom has no derivation: That is, it doesn’t come from any other word but was specially created.” (New, p.127) Yale English professor Patricia Meyer Spacks reveals, “The verb to bore, as a psychological description, arose after 1750 (it does not appear in Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755) . . . The English-speaking world, in other words, long managed to sustain itself without recourse to the concept of boredom.” (Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, 1996, p.13-14) Spacks adds, “Surely a society that got along without it [boredom] felt better than our own.” (Boredom, p.13)
The concept of boredom was certainly publicly known by the 1850s with Charles Dickens’ use in Bleak House when Lady Dedlock laments, “And I am bored to death with it. Bored to death with this place, bored to death with my life, bored to death with myself.”
“At first, boredom was considered to be a moral and intellectual failure on the part of individuals who couldn’t keep themselves engaged or entertained. By declaring that ‘when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,’ Samuel Johnson (1709-84) asserted that it’s your own fault if you can’t find things to interest you.” (New, p. 128) Oscar Wilde, a popular Irish poet in the 1890s, bemoaned boredom as “the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.” In the early 1900s, French author Jules Renard said, “To be bored is an insult to one’s self.”
In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, “to be bored” was viewed as undesirably deleterious – boredom was your own fault. In the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century, boredom no longer has a negative connotation – boredom is blamed on something or someone else.
When I was in middle school in the 1970s, “boor-ing” was the all too common critical chant directed toward any subject that required thought! Here is the way Nashville Pastor Robert Morgan describes that accusation:
It’s the final condemnation, the complete put-down. Parents hear it after a concert or on a family vacation or in church. Actually, it’s pronounced, “Booooring!” and it seems to emerge from the depths of disgust. It should be a four-letter word. The epithet never loses its power to terrify. Children, with blunt honesty, hurl the accusation like a hand grenade toward anything they consider undeserving of their presence, but adults, though perhaps more politely circumspect, fear it and feel it and flee it just as much. (Nelson’s Complete Book, 2000, p. 83.)
Today, with ever-increasing technological distractions, few flinch when someone declares, “I’m bored.” Have we lost something? Is boredom really acceptable? Today, I’m making a change. I will live a life of purpose. I don’t have time to justify dullness. I choose to be satisfied with God’s ways. How about you? Don’t you won’t a life with purpose? Spice up your day by doing something significant for God.
