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When I was a youth minister and had the task (or opportunity) to preach, I would often tell our students, "Make a sign if I get boring. Scratch your ear or something."
I was trying to lighten the mood... maybe even get them to listen, you know if you are so busy listening to tell if you are bored, you won't get bored!" I had a great desire to not be a boring person. I sincerely tried to do this by being brief and trying to pack the most into the least amount of words.
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I recently had a conversation with a retired French pastor who lives not to far from us. He talked about the pitfalls of ministry, especially the pitfalls of missionary work. One of those was turning everything into evangelisation. It sounds better to the supporters to hear that you talked to your neighbor about Jesus than you talked to them about playing bingo and whether there were more important things in life.
It also becomes this way of weighing your worth. I spent 40 hours talking to people about Jesus almost sounds like justifying support.
Sometimes it was like this in ministry. At times we would invite people (especially teens) over to the house to eat, play games, and just see what happens. Sometimes it was just a few hours of games and food, sometimes not.
So now in this role as "missionary" we often like to tell you about the victories, sometimes open up about failures, and sometimes fish for something to say. I think that's because we want to live up to the hype, and other times because we want to force God's hand.
DO SOMETHING GOD!
In a reading of the Bible, I think it's fair to say a few things:
- we get a lot of highlights (and lowlights)
- it's a retelling of 4000+ years of history in a hundreds of pages
- it's meant to illustrate God's power and desire to be with us
- it leaves out a lot
John talks about Jesus when he says "I could fill a lot more books with what Jesus did, but I'll leave it at that" (Paraphrase).
It should strike us that Abraham, Jesus, Elijah, John had normal days. Days when the highlight was finding a fish on sale at the market, or when the highlight was another hundred miles of sandy desert road.
Maybe they were even bored. Maybe that's ok.
Just to be clear I don't feel bored at the moment. My head spins sometimes at the amount of tasks and daunting projects ahead. Recently we got sick with covid. The first two days were doing everything I could to take care of my wife, then I got sick and for several days I didn't leave the house. For a few days I didn't really think about anything.
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Likewise in church we have to make everything exciting.
More lights. More graphics. More exciting words. I've done this too. Sometimes it's ok to just let things be. Read the text, ask a few questions, listen, pray, done. Sing that one song you sing all the time. It's ok.
We aren't using much cutting edge technology or methods (in my opinion) here. We sit around a table. We eat. We discuss. We sing sometimes. We cast vision. We meet challenges. We support friends and talk to other missionaries.
We just try to be. If living in a hyper connected world has taught me anything it is that:
Being is a real battle.
I'm not sure that's boredom. I never promised to be a wordsmith... nor an author. I'm not saying this will preach... but just take some time to embrace the boredom. Embrace the now- even if the now might not be what you wish it was.
You'll find a youtube video below, I like this way of updating you because you get to hear and see how are doing.
Take care
Greg