Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

(262) 763-3021

PASTOR'S PENS 2008

Grace Church of Burlington May 25, 2008   “When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I'm leaving.”              Stephen Wright             What's the most popular video game ever made? Tetris? Pokemon? The Sims? No. According to a Slate article published this week, it's Solitaire. Included by default on every single Windows PC in the world, Solitaire has been a popular diversion for bored office workers for decades, even causing New York City office worker, Ed Greenwood, to be fired when city mayor Michael Bloomberg spotted him playing it on the clock. And you’ll see folk playing this silly game for nearly hours on end.             Recently, I was talking with someone who shared that they were struggling with feelings of depression and just feeling overall blah a good bit of the time. As I probed a bit further, I found that they were spending quite a bit of time either watching TV or playing computer games. The bottom line...they were simply bored. They weren’t doing anything worthwhile or significant with their life.             Boredom is a combination of weariness, listlessness, apathy and unconcern that causes a person to feel like doing nothing. Related words include dreariness, flatness, lethargic, and dull. To the bored person, the world is all shades of gray. When you’re bored, there is nothing to do because there is nothing to do that matters. There are two primary causes of boredom.             a) Overstimulation. We live in a society that encourages us to believe that more is better. If a little of anything is good, then more will always be better. If one drink is good, two is better, and five will send you to heaven. If one pill helps, two is a kicker, three is a party, and five will knock you out. We see this in relationships as people jump from one person to another. We see it in the pressure to constantly move “up the ladder,” so people hop from one job to another, hoping to find the perfect fit. And we move from house to house, job to job and even from church to church. We make friends, keep them for a while, get to know them, and then we move on to someone else. Advertisers prey on this tendency when they urge us to buy more, buy new, buy now. We’re so bombarded with images, with lights and sound and noise that we’ve grown accustomed to it. Why it is that the TV must always be on in the average American home? Why is it that we must have noise in the background or we feel uncomfortable? We are a TV/media addicted generation. We’re so over stimulated by TV, radio, music, movies, the Internet and by video games, that we’re hyped up, tense, wound up tight, and as a result, easily bored and quickly distracted.             b) Undercommitment. Too many people live at a very low level of commitment. They do just enough to get by. They’re like the man who, when asked what he believed, replied, “A little bit of everything.” Or, they’re like customers in a cafeteria line. They will have a “little of this” and a “little of that” and not much of anything. Is it any wonder that they’re frustrated and antsy and bored? They aren’t committed enough to anything to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning.             Underneath all of this is a deeper problem. Boredom comes from an excessive self-focus. Bored people are essentially selfish people who view the universe through their own stunted perspective.              Friend, the reason you’re bored is because you’ve become a boring person ... you’re bored with yourself. The problem is not “out there” somewhere. Look inside if you want the answer. Lest I be misunderstood, I do not think busyness is the answer to boredom. Busy people are often very bored but they use their busyness to mask their inner emptiness.             So how can we overcome boredom? Invest our lives in something that really matters, that counts, that has significance. God has created us for a purpose and that purpose is much more than spending hours playing Solitaire or watching TV or spending time on something that has little eternal value. Instead my friend, live for Him, serve Him and serve Him by serving others. If you’ve got the blahs and are bored, it’s because you are not pouring your life into something that really matters.             Our calling and purpose as Christ-followers is to love God completely and to love others compassionately. A year from now it won’t matter who won this year’s American Idol or Survivor, but it will matter if you encouraged someone, spent time with a lonely friend, spent time in the Word, prayed, or served the Lord by using the skills and gifts that He has given you in a ministry. God does not want us to be bored but to have significance. Friend, which one are you?