Boring!

I am reading a book titled 'Boring' by Michael Kelley. 

So far as I have read, I surely did find it to be a treat. This book is all set to confront our customary complaining at the mundaneness of life.

Think about it. What is life to many of us? Mr. Average Joe wakes up early in the morning with a jolt. Randomly helps his wife in the kitchen. Gets his kids ready for school. He whirs through the incorrigible traffic, drops his kids at school and his wife at her office. He works his heart out at his and scoots off to home, waiting to meet his family. He ends up spending good time with this family and does a couple of chores. And yet at bed in the dark, he gets lost in his probing thoughts. "Is there more to life than what I've been going through?" he wonders. For Mr. Average Joe knows too well that, that day is going to repeat itself tomorrow. With a heart that is sunk in desperation and dissatisfaction he drifts to sleep, a seeming respite from his incessantly nagging thoughts. 

Michael Kelly offers a different answer to this boring(!) problem.

He asks,

"What if God actually doesn’t want you to escape from the ordinary, but to find significance and meaning inside of it?"

He goes on...

"The question isn’t whether or not God is present and active; the question is just how aware we are of that presence and activity"

"In all those dirty diapers, bill payments, e-mails, and daily commutes, God is there. He is intimately involved in the small, seemingly insignificant areas of our lives."

"God operates through, not in spite of, these seemingly ordinary circumstances."

"The work of God is not constrained to the big and audacious. His divine fingers steadily weave together the tapestry of the mundane and ordinary too."

"Jesus is the Hebrew equivalent of being named “Joe.” There were probably four other kids in His class with the same name. Nothing special there. But that’s how God works."

He challenges and also offers a perspective on perspective!! 

"We can easily say, with gusto even, “Yes! There is no such thing as ordinary!” but as soon as we say it, we will be confronted with an endless progression of the mundane. What changes isn’t so much the obligations and responsibilities of everyday life; those keep on coming as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow. What changes is the perspective with which we see those things."

Mr. Kelley quotes the prudent musing of the poet Elizabeth Browning, which to me too has become a favorite,

“earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes, the rest sit around and pick blackberries.”

He also quotes Chesterton,

"...perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.... God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them..."

He astutely says,

"We must, in a sense, fight to not fight to escape the ordinary. When we do, we’ll find the extraordinary lurking inside what has become ordinary to us."

Then he talks about the need for a Christian to be saturated with contentment. He says,

"The person of contentment isn’t constantly striving after something else." Whereas a person who strives after something he deems as 'better' is saturated with discontentment. According to Mr. Kelley chasing after something else betrays one's ignorance of appreciating the true value of what one already has in Christ and eventually ends up living a life that is irredeemably boring.

The lesson that I've personally learnt so far is 'to seek the extraordinary not in spite of but in the very ordinary, monotonous things of life'. Unfortunately our present-day Christianity has been indoctrinated with the crazy rush for the supernatural by despising the natural. Blessed is he who has eyes to see God in the very ordinary things of his life! May God help us to do so every other seemingly 'boring' day!