Driven by boredom. . .

If you have lived around a teenager over the past dozen or so years, you have heard the common complaint:  I am so bored!  With an abundance of techno toys and a host of opportunities awaiting in places to go and things to see, our youth (and our adults) find themselves bored.  How odd!  It reminds me of a Facebook meme from a while ago in which high school age youth from Amsterdam were on a field trip to an art museum.  They were sitting in front of Rembrandt -- oblivious to the splendid piece to dazzle the eye hanging on the wall and were on their cell phones in search of new! different! and exciting!

Surely this is one of the great temptations and trials laid upon us (not by God!).  We so easily become bored -- even with things that to do, places to see, and voices to proclaim the wonder of it all. Even beauty we find boring!  What is wrong with us?  All our choices afford us little and instead we complain about the prison of our boredom.  Perhaps that is God's problem -- He is boring.  We are like my old dog in a yard full of squirrels.  We don't know what to do with our longing and we are sure that if we change another channel or open another web page, there might be something good -- a surprise of blessedness to consume before the want of it consumes us.

The greatest danger of our boredom is that we will meet the wondrous gifts of God and survey them all and sigh because we are bored by God's grace.  Imagine that, we look at what God has done for us in His Son and shrug our shoulders to look for more, something new, something different.  The training of the Spirit surely begins by teaching to let go of the ever present push for new, for more, and for different in order to survey with the wonder of faith what God has done.  At least that is the hope.

This shows up in the way we have turned worship into a variety show, an entertainment setting in which the goal is to amuse, entertain, and instruct us without confronting us with the reality of sin and the mercy of God given to address that sin.  But it also shows up in the way we pursue Bible studies that focus on the fringes, the curious, and the mysterious parts of Scripture only to turn up the nose at the central message of the Bible -- Christ crucified and risen.  It is surely another symptom of our failure to be energized by the profound and to succumb to our boredom in pursuit of things less central.

Sin began with an awareness of God's richest mercy and the conclusion on the part of our first parents that it was not enough.  That desire opened the door to sin and its death that have corrupted God's creation ever since.  We still do the same thing.  We hear the message of the Gospel and grimace -- is that all there is?  We meet God in the great miracle of the Incarnation and we turn the season into a trite and trivial season of self-indulgence.  We look up to the cross not to marvel at such wondrous love but complain that God talks too much about sin.  We stare into the empty tomb and then tell ourselves that maybe death is not so bad and that life is only as good as the person makes or judges it to be.  Our problem is that we have amused ourselves to death, turned every promise of technology into another vice, and still we are bored to tears because it is not enough to satisfy us.  

Boredom has driven us in the wrong direction and that is why we find ourselves so far from God and so distant from His gifts and so dismissive of God's mercy.  Perhaps when we stop amusing ourselves into numbness we will awaken the grandest mystery the world has ever known -- in the manger, at the cross, from the empty tomb, and toward the future He has prepared for us and all who love His appearing.