The Effects of Boredom!

The affliction which drains so much of the sense of meaning from our lives these days is the disease of boredom.

So many find their jobs boring, their marriages boring, their friendships and hobbies boring. In pathetic desperation, they look for a movie, a vacation trip, an outlet of some sort to lift their lives above the level of the mundane.

Some will even find themselves doing all sorts of potentially self-destructive things, driving too fast, hang gliding, white water rafting, bungee jumping, because "only then do I feel alive." Some people will turn to drugs in a desperate effort to rise above the emotional flatness of the everyday and learn what it feels like to feel again.

A generation ago, drugs were the escape mechanism of the ghetto. It was a way for the hopeless to stop feeling the pain. Today, with a commensurate rise in price, they have become the plaything of the jaded upper middle class, not to relieve the pain but to escape the boredom, to feel high and feel good and experience heightened sensations of sight and sound and touch, because nothing in the real world gives them that feeling.

The people who dabble in such things may not be evil people. They may be just looking desperately for something to add excitement to their otherwise humdrum, boring lives. Like Faust, they are prepared to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for one moment of feeling alive.

We keep thinking that the cure for the plague of boredom is to change jobs, to change mates, to change neighborhoods. Then life will become more interesting; or so we think. But often the problem is in us.

Life is flat, often because our souls are.

How desperately we need to be filled with the Spirit (Eph.5:19). Our souls need the refreshing wind that can blow over our lives (John 3:6-9). Walk in the spirit and you will not know boredom. Numbers 6:24

Ephesians 5:19 (New International Version)

Speak to one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs.
Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord,

1 John 3:6-9 (King James Version)

6Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not: whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him.

7Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous.

8He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.

9Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.

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