Finding God When You’re Bored

I used to resent how ordinary my life was. I even hated my own, boring name – Eric Huffman. What kind of name is Eric? So when I was seven, I asked Santa Claus for a new name.

As you can see, number thirty-six on my Christmas list that year – just after “more girlfriends”, “a brother”, and a “cordless telephone” – was “a new name – (Gary, example)”. Gary seemed like a cool name – way better than Eric.

I didn’t include it on my Christmas list, but I also wanted my last name to be Jackson. Thriller was my favorite song at the time, and I wanted to be cool and black like Michael Jackson. You can imagine my surprise a few years later when I learned that Michael Jackson wanted to be white like me!

For whatever reason, I was sick of being Eric Huffman. I would’ve given anything to be called something more exciting…like Gary Jackson.

It didn’t help when, a few years later, I learned that my last name, Huffman, comes from an old German word meaning farmer or, more accurately, a steward who managed someone else’s land.

Great, I thought, my family name is ‘Farmer’, and the farm isn’t even ours! 

It wasn’t until I discovered the writings of GK Chesterton that my entire perspective on “ordinary” names like mine began to change. In his book called Heretics, he insisted that the most ordinary things hold the most extraordinary secrets. He grieved the thought that someone with a common name like Smith – which is far more mundane than Huffman – would forsake the fact that their family name was forged in the fires that gave rise to a thousand kingdoms:

“In the case of Smith, the name is so poetical that it must be an arduous and heroic matter for the man to live up to it. The name of Smith is the name of the one trade that even kings respected…The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the weirdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith.

Yet our novelists call their hero “Aylmer Valence”, which means nothing, or “Vernon Raymond”, which means nothing, when it is in their power to give him this sacred name of Smith, this name made of iron and flame. It would be very natural if a certain arrogance, a certain carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, distinguished every one whose name is Smith. From the darkest dawn of history this clan has gone forth to battle; its trophies are on every hand; its name is everywhere; it is older than the nations, and its sign is the Hammer of Thor. “

How did Chesterton find so much inspiration in something as ordinary as Smith? By seeing God in the most ordinary things. When you learn to see God in everyday life, everything ordinary becomes extraordinary. Changing your perspective isn’t as hard as it sounds. Consider these three steps:

1. Seek Joy, Not Happiness
The first and most important step in finding God in ordinary life is knowing how to seek joy instead of happiness. Most of us have been conditioned to seek happiness. If you listen, you’ll hear people in our culture talk about joy and happiness as if they’re the same thing, but they’re not. The Bible says a lot about joy but very little about happiness. The real difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is intertwined with your circumstances, while joy always transcends them. Happiness is an emotion that comes and goes; joy is a friend who stays and persists. 

The problem with the pursuit of happiness is that your circumstances will never be as good as you think they should be. Pay attention and you will see this sad reality playing out in people’s lives on a perpetual loop. People who seem to have it all are never any happier than those who don’t. Why? Because no matter how much you have, there’s always somebody else who has more. Even more upsetting to unhappy people who have it all is the realization that there are people in the world who have less than they do, but who appear to be happier than they are.

Why are some people so happy when their lives look so…basic? It’s probably because those folks aren’t merely happy; they’re joyful. As long as you’re looking for happiness, ordinary life will never satisfy you. You will always need something more extraordinary.

But when you’ve got joy, there’s no such thing as ordinary life. Every day that you’re alive is extraordinary.

2. Understand That ‘Stuck’ Is Just a Season
The second step toward finding God in ordinary life involves knowing what season you’re in and remembering that seasons change. King Solomon wrote about the importance of seasons in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 –

I hear from people all the time who feel stuck – stuck in their jobs, stuck with their boss, stuck being single, stuck in their marriage, stuck with their parents, stuck with their kids, stuck in their faith. Feeling stuck can seem like an existential crisis, especially when you’ve been chasing happiness instead of joy. Unfortunately, we tend to make our worst mistakes when we feel stuck because we see other people who aren’t stuck like us, and we get restless.

These are the dangerous moments in life when you’re tempted to bend the rules to get ahead at work. Or when you’re tempted to take unprescribed stimulants to keep up at school. Or when you have the affair. Or when you stop studying the Bible. Or when you buy something you can’t afford, just to feel good or somehow prove yourself.

Some people will do whatever it takes to not feel stuck anymore.

But what if feeling stuck is just a season to live through? There is a time for being stuck, and a time to be unstuck. Finding joy in everyday life will require you to remember that seasons change, and if you feel stuck now, you won’t feel that way for long. So instead of buying, cheating, or self-medicating your way out of it, you choose to trust God through every season.

Through your stuck seasons, ask God what He wants to teach you.
Seasons come and go, but God never changes.

3. Remember God’s Love
The third step toward finding God in ordinary life is remembering how He cares for you and how He has always provided for you. One reason we get stuck, cynical, and resentful is because our brains are wired to remember negative experiences more readily than positive ones. Many people keep their distance from God because of a handful of times when they prayed for something and He didn’t deliver what they wanted or needed. How easily we forget, however, the thousands of ordinary, little prayers God has answered and the millions of ways, big and small, that He has loved and provided for us!

In Matthew 6:26-32, Jesus said –