This doesn’t mean, of course, that we have only a hope of future joys—we can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles. Taken in the right spirit these very things will give us patient endurance; this in turn will develop a mature character, and a character of this sort produces a steady hope, a hope that will never disappoint us. Already we have some experience of the love of God flooding through our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us. Romans 5:3-5, J.B. Phillips NT.
My father in law has a phrase he says to children sometimes, “You’ve got to get used to being bored”. Although a rather negative outlook, it does at first seem to relate to many people’s life experience. Whether it is waiting in the checkout, caught in a traffic jam on the M6 or a tedious report to write at work, life at times is boring.
One of the ways we combat boredom is bombarding our senses with more and more amazing experiences in our free time. For children, the TV games console is now such a visual, auditory and interactive experience that old family board games seem unappealing. “What can I do now?” is a frequent question in our house once the allotted screen time has ended. Ironically the Xbox just makes the boring times harder to cope with.
But can there be positive aspects to “boredom?” The Bible has many stories of people in boring situations. Moses had forty years in a foreign country, looking after sheep in the desert (Exodus chapters 2 and 3). His must have seemed a futile existence, unable to integrate back into his own society for fear of a past murder catching up with him. Yet in this seemingly pointless life, God speaks to Moses through a burning bush and gives him a new mission. Maybe it took the boredom of the stripped bare, parched, desert landscape for God to get through to Moses.
I think the Biblical answer to boredom is not getting used to it, or masking it with ever better experiences, but growing in patience. I think patience is totally different to accepting boredom, because it has Hope. Hope listens for God’s voice, and even if a particular situation seems unresolved in this life we know that everything will be made well in the end.
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