Boring
I’m currently teaching Revelation to my middle and high school students at RCA. I’m using a book by Eugene Boring as a secondary source. It is very easy to remember his unfortunate name. Interesting enough he presents a very boring (one I largely agree with)take on Revelation, in comparison to the others I’ve read. I’ve learned to love “boring” over the last few years.
I’ve spent a large portion of life equating “boring” with “bad” and avoiding it as such. My kids can not bear the thought of being bored and I certainly deserve more than my fair share of the blame for that. I was not a fan of boredom until I began getting my bloodwork done on a daily basis in my Cancer fight. I became a survivor who was fighting hard to get back to normal or in my oncologist’s words “boring bloodwork”. I was tested every day for a month, then every work day for four months and now every six months and boring is the goal. When I had a bruise show up in a familiar place over the weekend from playing basketball, my goal and prayer was to have a boring result on Monday (Thankfully the result I received). There are millions of people around the world right now with the same hope. The hope to be boring. To enjoy the mundane once again.
It can be a tremendous gift. You may be reading this in the midst of some kind of battle. If you are not, you can probably think of someone close to you who is. It might be a visible or an invisible struggle. Know that you are not alone and you don’t have to fight alone. There is a God who desires to battle alongside you on the mountain, in the valley and the mundane. He finds you highly valuable and has a purpose for your suffering that might be hard to see. He promises in his word that suffering has a purpose that molds us into the image of Jesus. Your mundane can bring you into a wonderful relationship with the Almighty as a trip to the well did in John 4. Jesus can take the same job you go to everyday and turn it into Kingdom business as he did to those guys on the boat in Matthew 4. He can take a place no one wants to find themselves like a cancer ward and shine a light so bright that the pain seems like a “light, momentary affliction” that is preparing us for a very out of the ordinary “eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison…” (2 Corinthians 4:17)
Travis