God on the Go: Feeling Boredom

If you’re feeling bored and uninspired, it’s time to shake things up! Boredom is actually an opportunity for creativity. Take a cue from the journey of the Hebrews from Egypt to embrace boredom as a chance to think differently and try new things, rather than complaining. Contentment, even in boredom, is a great gain.

What’s New!

Monday Story:

• Julie Lyles Carr always ready for summer and then…bored. My mom having a fix for bored | Israelites just a couple of months into their journey are bored and restless (Exodus 16)

Tuesday Key Verse:

• I Timothy 6:6 – But godliness with contentment is great gain.

Wednesday Prayer:

• Lord, thank you for when I am feeling bored because I know that’s when you can also make me really creative! In Jesus’s name, amen.

Thursday Question:

• When was the last time you felt bored? What did you do?

Friday Fun Fact:

• Q:What does boredom do for you?
• A. It makes you more creative!

Show Notes:

To get this week’s episode and daily text prompts, text the word Go to 89419.
If you are in Canada, text GodOnTheGo to 866-729-1065

Transcription:

It would happen almost every spring. I would get so tired of having to go to school, so tired of having to wake up early, so tired of having to do homework. And I would think, I cannot wait for summer break. I just want to be on summer break. And finally the day would come, where we’d turn in all of our textbooks and we would clean out our desks, and we would take the bus ride home and it would be summer… which was awesome for a few days. And then can you guess what would start to happen? I would start to have a particular feeling, and that feeling started to spiral into something bigger and bigger. I’m Julie Lyes Carr, and this is God on the Go, part of the Purposely Podcast Network. And we want to help you make the minutes matter. We’ve been talking about feelings that don’t often get a lot of attention, feelings, we don’t talk about a whole lot. Feelings like feeling awkward or confused or understanding what it means to feel calm. And today, the emotion that we’re going to talk about on this episode is the feeling that I was talking about when it would finally be summertime, I’d be out of school, but then after just a few days, I would start to feel BORED. Have you ever felt bored? Mom, I’m bored. I’m so bored. There’s nothing to do. I’m bored. A feeling of being bored is when your mind is having trouble filling the time that you have. So, you might feel kind of restless, you might feel a little fidgety or even a little irritated.

Boredom is a really strong emotion because we just keep getting reminded of what’s missing. Have you ever had to sit through someone giving a long talk, or you’ve had to be in a class or in a practice that just kept going and you were bored? Or maybe it was during a holiday break, or maybe it was a time when your mom and dad said, you know what? We are going to be off screens for a while. And you thought, Oh no! I’m going to be so bored. What am I going to do? I’m going to be so bored. But God makes all of our emotions. It’s what we do with our emotions that makes a big difference. So, being bored is not a bad thing. We tend to think of boredom is something bad, but it’s actually not. I thought this was really interesting. Boredom can be good for you. You know why? Because it can make you more creative. You see, when we feel bored, it’s because we are waiting on someone else, or something, to fill the time. So, instead of just being bored, sometimes we’ll turn on a TV show instead of just living with being bored.

If we get bored during a class or we get bored during a talk and we start fidgeting and doing other things… We’re bored because we want something to fill the time and we don’t know how to fill it. But it’s also an opportunity to get really creative. Some of the most artistic, creative people that you may ever encounter understand how to be bored, and how to pay attention to their thoughts while they’re bored, because that can make you more creative. The thing with boredom is how you use that feeling. Now, we’ve talked about in previous episodes when the Hebrews who had been enslaved in Egypt came out of slavery, when their leader, Moses was taking them from Egypt to Israel. And you may remember that because the Israelites had experienced 400 years of slavery, they really, really wanted to be able to leave Egypt. And when they did, it was with all kinds of adventure and drama. There were the plagues that happened to try to convince Pharaoh to let them go. All kinds of strange things that happened in the land of Egypt until Pharaoh finally said, “Yes, get these people out of here.” And then once Moses started leading them out of Egypt and started heading toward the desert where he would lead them to their new land, Pharaoh changed his mind and decided to chase them because he wanted to bring them back. The Israelites came up to a huge body of water called the Red Sea, and they didn’t know what was going to happen. And Moses miraculously, through the power of God, was able to split the Red Sea, and the Hebrews were able to walk across on dry land. And then when Pharaoh and his armies came running up after them, the Red Sea closed up over them. And so the Israelites, Hebrews were able to escape. So, here they’ve had all of this drama, right? You would think they might want a chance to take a breath, but just a few weeks into their travel toward the Promised Land, they start complaining. I think they got a little bored, frankly, they’d had all of this adventure, and then things kind of quieted down and they got bored, they got bored, they got frustrated, they got angry. And frankly, they started whining a lot. They started complaining that they didn’t have enough to eat and that maybe they should have just stayed back in Egypt. See, that’s the problem with boredom. When we don’t accept it as maybe a place to get creative, and instead we start using it as a place to start complaining.

When you feel bored, that’s what I want you to do. Take it as a signal that it’s time to get creative, not grumpy. Learn how to be content in your boredom. Learn how to look for ways that you could do some cool things, or try something different, or think in a different way. Being bored is not the problem. It’s we do with our boredom that can become the problem. It makes me think about one Timothy six verse six,

But godliness with contentment is great gain.

What that means is when we learn to be content, even if we feel a little bored, it’s a great thing for us. There are things that can be gained through that experience. So, because God makes all of our emotions, God knew we would have times that we would be bored. And so, he gives us this beautiful gift that when we feel bored, it’s also an opportunity to get really creative.

I want to encourage you to text the word GO, that’s GO to 8 9 4 1 9 because when you’re on that text stream, we’re able to send you trivia questions and discussion questions and the memory verse and all kinds of great things letting you know when the next episode’s coming out. We just love to be in touch with you that way, and I’ll see you next time on God, on the Go.