No Excuse for Boredom

As you can imagine, I got a particular charge out of reading this post by my son over on Facebook today. I still believe that there's no excuse for boredom.

My dad always told me that "only the boring are bored." Such thoughts have been confirmed by a lyric from a song by "They Might Be Giants Song" which declares, "Now it's over, I'm dead, and I haven't Done anything that I want / Or, I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do." Then I recently saw this:

Why we get "bored" with the Bible...and other worthwhile things

"The unspoken secret is that many people find the Bible boring. This is a serious problem and a quite recent one. Ancient Greek* had no word for boredom. The word did not have its current meaning in English until the last few centuries. We look at the ancient world, and they had no television, no Internet, no movies, no iTunes, and virtually no books--and we think of how boring it must have been.

"But the ancients were not bored. We are the ones who get bored because our capacity to focus our attention, to delight our minds in sustained thought, has been weakened by our dependence on external stimuli." (John Ortberg in The Me I Want to Be)

Our capacity not only to read God's Word, but to lead useful, fulfilling lives in general, increasingly depends on our capacity to break away from the crowd to read, to think, to use the minds God gave us, instead of the hapless victim impulse and the unreflective herd mentality.