When I sit through a long lecture, no matter where I am - or who is talking - it's incredibly difficult for me to enjoy and fully listen to what I'm hearing. In other words...it's far too easy to get bored. I find that our culture, is easily bored. I watch people get "bored" all the time, and know that I'm just as bad as they are. We marry someone, and we get "bored" of them, so we go after someone else. We start a hobby, but we get "bored", so we start a new hobby. It's an on-going cycle of what bores and doesn't bore us. I know this to be true, only because I have the same problem. I don't know if I really like the thought of always being bored with the things around me.
I got a fantastic letter the other day from one of my good friends, telling me how she felt bored with God. She wasn't saying it like she just thought God was getting old and tiring and didn't want a part of Him anymore; she was saying it like for some reason, she never felt a spark whenever she read her bible; there wasn't an a-ha moment if she read something profound. God just wasn't as interesting as He used to be. I sat there with the letter, thinking. Bored with God? I had thought, frowning as I looked into her cursive letters on the page. I could almost hear her speaking the words, and they felt all too close to my delicate heart, because the words slammed into me like a thousand shards of glass. I knew the exact feeling she was struggling with, because at one point, I had been bored with God.
Being bored with God isn't just waking up one day and deciding that God hasn't moved mountains or brought the dead back to life so you should stop following Him. Being bored is waking up one day, reading the bible, and not feeling something anymore. Like when you open the book, smooth out the extra thin pages and search for something more beyond the inky letters, there just isn't the same level of beauty or excitement that was once seen shortly ago. And now, that shortly ago feels like forever ago. I know the same feeling all too well. Then all of a sudden, you read your bible less and less, because when we get bored, we move onto the next thing, right? So slowly, the firm hold we once had on God begins to slip away, slicing between our fingers and running down the drain.
I wish I could just come to you and say that magically the "boredom" with God fixes itself after a couple of weeks, but it doesn't quite work that way. God doesn't send angels singing at your doorstep, or move mountains for you like you may have hoped. He doesn't speak to you until you run flying back to His arms. Maybe it's not so much that God gets boring, as it is that we get bored. A youth pastor once told me: "Only boring people get bored."Is it possible that maybe we are so mundane, that we get bored, versus God getting boring? I've realized there is only one way to cure this excessive boringness: don't stop searching.
When we get bored with God, we fall away from Him, but I've discovered that when I start feeling bored with God, it's because I've slowly fallen away from Him. I have come to the conclusion that I need to never stop searching for the awesomeness of the Creator. The only reason I feel that God becomes boring, is because I stopped searching for the excitement that bounces off the pages of His Word. To make God exciting in your life, actually search for Him and His adventures; God is so thrilling and so beautiful, but we have a hard time seeing it because we get bored easily. My challenge for you, is that if God doesn't feel exciting, make Him exciting! Search for the adventurous world that lays beyond the pages of the Bible, buried inside your prayers.
"Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality." Romans 11:11-13
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