Bore Your Way Out | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: Bore Your Way Out | Previous Challenge Entry
By Rebecca Lunn
01/17/18
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Bore Your Way Out

“Mom! I’m bored.”

I scratched my head and thought, “How can you possibly be bored?” My young son’s look of misery jabbed at my heart, so I rattled off a list of fun things he could do. Play with Legos? Read a story book? Draw pictures with colored pens? Ride the bike? Swim in the pool? Play ball?

But my ten-year-old’s idea of happiness was not on my list. He whined, “I want to watch TV,” I shook my head. “Can I play with the Gameboy?” I frowned. “Okay, I want a puppy.” We both chuckled, rolled our eyes, then sighed. I finally decided to let my son struggle out of the doldrums of boredom by himself. I’ve discovered that, paradoxically, the lack of motivation can sometimes breed motivation. Yes! Patience paid off. Using odd bits and pieces around the house he ingeniously became Sherlock Holmes, then Charlie Chaplin, followed by Zorro, a gangster, a clown, and a blind beggar. The belly laughs refreshed us both as I tried to guess each character. The blind beggar was the best! I captured those special moments on camera. The photos are to be savored all over again if I ever get blindsided by boredom myself; I can laugh my way out.

I wonder if patches of boredom foster fertile grounds for sprouting destinies. Long ago, I sat in a long hard pew inside a grand church. I was a mere child listening to a clergyman dressed in a black robe droning on and on monotonously. My mother ordered me to stop wiggling my feet so I wiggled my eyes to stare at the pretty sun-lit blues and yellows and greens of the stained-glass windows. My gaze wandered to some black words painted on the wall behind the pulpit: “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” My boredom popped like a big bubble. My imagination took off! Where is all-the-world? What is the gospel? When can I go? Why to-every-creature; seriously? Does that include animals too? Little did I know then that when I grew up, I would become a missionary preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ in English as well as in Chinese on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. For forty years, I have never ever been bored with preaching-the-gospel.

Speaking of forty years reminded me of the time Moses spent tending flocks in the far side of the wilderness. How characterless the flatland and sparse brown grass were. How dull the conversation about sheep was. Gone was Moses’ Egyptian high-living as a pampered prince primed for the throne. Gone were the servants, the reputation, and the lavish parties. How mind-numbing those dreary thoughts of past glory must have been that were interspersed with screams of bloody murder. That panicked flight in the night from Egypt to Midian landed Moses smack in the prison of boredom serving time as a foreign fugitive.

Moses’ destiny was being groomed by God all along. Actually, watching sheep served him well. His forty humdrum years turned out to be the hands-on stamina-training for Moses’ next forty years of shepherding God’s people through another wilderness as a senior centenarian. Heroically, Moses survived a nation of implacable whiners, grumblers, and revilers. Had they forgotten all about the sensational Passover? Crossing the Red Sea? Manna? Sabbath-rest? Water gushing from a Rock? Hearing God’s voice? Healing from fatal snake bites? All these signs and wonders were tossed to the back of their closed minds as they murmured against the unvaried food and directionless trekking.

Moses witnessed the demise of the entire first generation of his people even as he watched the sprouting up of the second generation preserved to enter the Land of Promise. There had been no outside interests to entertain the second generation while they grew up wandering around in the wilderness for forty years. Rather, they were morbidly occupied with funerals as each family buried grandparents, parents, relatives, and friends. Who could have imagined that—miraculously—this new generation managed to cultivate the motivation to meticulously vanquish thirty-one heathen kings?

Undoubtedly, boredom is a pain with power to blind and stunt potential victories. Or, we can recycle Jabez’s prayer list: “Bless me! Enlarge my territory! Be with me. Keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain.” Good-heartedly, God granted Jabez’s request and reshaped his destiny.

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