Do You Bore God?

Christians like to think in terms of themselves or others being “pleasing to God.”

But isn’t that about the most boring way of framing your relationship to God? Because who doesn’t know when they’re behaving in a way that’s displeasing to God? Who can’t tell when they’re working against God’s interest?

Who sins, and doesn’t know they’re sinning? No one. Kids know when they’re being selfish, greedy, mean or wasteful. If you’re being displeasing to God, you don’t have to wonder whether you are. You know it.

What I’m interested in is whether or not I’m boring to God. Because I’m confident that’s something God has a problem with: people who bore him so badly he’s forced to produce thunder, or consider smiting all televisions, or whatever. At least a person who is sinning is engaged; their conscience is alive and roiling; it’s ready to be pricked. But a boring person has placed themselves beyond the pale by so thoroughly wrapping themselves in everything that makes them boring you couldn’t engage them if you were a magician with a talking dog.

I don’t want to become a person God looks at, and thinks, “Wake up, already! Stop being so dangblangit boring!” A person who thinks they’ve got it all figured out. Who is sure they know God about as well as they know anyone. Who thinks they long ago grasped the phenomenon of God incarnated as Christ. Who goes many days in a row without once stopping to let their mind be boggled by the at once ineffable mystery and tangible reality of the Holy Trinity. Who never thinks of the world as being created, but only as having been created. Who believe themselves done with their past, and secure in their future. Who are deaf to the symphony of the present. Who are more interested in preaching to others than saving themselves. Who see God in their image, instead of them in His.

Who for so long have been so sure they’re pleasing enough to God that the question itself has lost all meaning.

I want to make sure I’m always awake to the glory of the now, always alert and ready for The Next Big Change. I want to be sure that I’m constantly clearing from my mind and heart anything that might interfere with anything God wants to tell me. I want to vigilantly guard against complacency, ease, the taking of gifts for granted, the perils of comfort. I want to dare to insist that my life isn’t mine at all, but rather a means by which God, through yet another of his miraculous creations, fully engages with “my” little corner of His wondrous world.

Speaking of which, there’s someone at my door!

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