I am wearing a dress and smart shoes, and even a dash of lipstick. It must be Sunday! Every Sunday during lockdown, I have dressed up a bit and cooked a roast dinner after we have “ been to church” , that is, interacted with our church online in our lounge. It gives contour to the week, makes a change and varies the rather monotonous routine.
I am reminded of a little book called “Hinds Feet on High Places”. It is an allegory of a girl called Much Afraid. She meets the Shepherd who begins to change her life as she journeys with Him to the High Places. She encounters many difficulties and dangers, highs and lows, but at one point she comes to a dreary shore alongside a leaden, dull sea. Day after day she trudges along; nothing seems to change, the landscape is grey and featureless, the sky uniformly cloudy. There appears to be nothing to look forward to on the horizon, and every day is dull. She begins to get frustrated and restless. This is worse than facing deadly peril when at least there is excitement, an adrenalin rush, action! But this endless boredom is making her wonder if she has made a mistake! She can’t see the Shepherd: surely he wouldn’t want her to be living in such mindless tedium? Should she go back and look for something more fulfilling?
But she can’t go back, she must keep doggedly walking.
Sometimes our path lies through boring territory. We didn’t choose it, it’s just where life has taken us. Of course, in this strange
lockdown time, some people would give anything for a chance to be bored, to just stop and lie down! They are dealing with the opposite
problem. But others feel like they have been trudging through the wilderness and getting nowhere. Every day is the same! Attempts to
liven things up work for a while, but the novelty wears off. You live for the one day in the week when you make a quick dash to Tesco.
Imagine: that is now an event, not a chore! You torture yourself with memories of visits to the grandkids, days at the beach, picnics…even going out for coffee would be nice.
Where is God in all this? You feel useless, non-productive, sluggish. Surely this can’t be right? We followed the map: but we ended up
here!
Yes. The map takes us through Boredomville. Why? Because everywhere the Shepherd leads us is with purpose. There are things
he wants us to learn while in this season. It would be tragic if later on we realised that we failed to lay hold of the lessons we were
meant to learn.
One is patience. Patience isn’t learnt when you are preoccupied and rushing around. It is learnt when life comes to a standstill, and you don’t know when it will move again. For most of us, we experience this sort of frustration on the M25 when the traffic has ground to a
halt in the rush hour. But we haven’t had to live through days, weeks, months of nothing much happening. We won’t learn just by gritting our teeth: we learn by believing God has a purpose and is working it out, so stay in faith!
Another thing to learn is persistence in prayer. God is giving us time to remind him of his promises for revival and to pray into them. It is encouraging to hear of the sale of Bibles rising exponentially; of increased numbers watching church videos, of small groups multiplying online. These are not revival, but they are indications of a stirring taking place: pray on!
Linked to this is the exhortation in Psalm 46 to “Be still and know that I am God”. We have lost the art of being still in his presence and cultivating hearing his voice. Now is the time to rediscover it! Wouldn’t it be great if we emerged from this humbler, closer and more full of love for him, and faith in his promises?
The Wendy House 