Boredom happens when we lose our appetite for things that used to energize us such as a job or a relationship. Strangely, we can be bored even while we are busy.
Overcoming boredom is more of a process, a journey, an inner transformation. It is a golden opportunity to find out what we really value.
Most people suppose that the opposite of boredom is excitement. Personally, I have discovered that the opposite of boredom is meaning. There are people who don’t mind difficulties and drudgery as long as they know that they are making a difference in the world.
Imagine two bakers. One complains, “I do the same thing day in and day out. Buying yeast, kneading dough, operating this oven. What’s the point of it all?”
The other relishes each working day and says, “I get to feed the world. I get to help a child create memories of the yummy sandwich only his mom can make. I get to encourage family members to bond around a good breakfast.”
The second baker sees meaning beyond the physical stuff of yeast, dough and oven. Because of that, he is hardly bored.
You may be doing something repetitious, perhaps even menial. But look for meaning in whatever you do. Happiness is a by-product of a meaningful life. Pursue happiness and it will elude you.
But pursue meaning and, in due time, boredom will give way to joy!
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A relationship is like a car engine. It needs lubrication. I had a friend who used to be a prosperous businessman. His car was a fancy Volvo. Then he fell into hard times. He still drove the Volvo to get around, but, being financially tight, he skimped on regular tune-ups. The time came that the engine oil got so dirty that it damaged the pistons. His car, now useless, sits rusting in his garage.
Grace is the lubricant of relationships. Great grace makes for great relationships. It works like this: You hurt me, but I choose not to hurt you back. Rather, I choose to give you a blessing you do not deserve.
This doesn’t mean that we condone the wrong or evade the issue. It doesn’t excuse domestic violence which is not necessarily physical. But one can still exercise grace which seeks the redemption of the offender.
Yet the chronic dilemma persists. “How can I ever forgive her? What she did was so hurtful!” The answer is first to realize the enormous grace which God has given us. Then extending grace to the wrongdoer should be the by-product.
So exercise grace to each other. Grace without keeping count. Grace because we received amazing grace from God. Grace that would keep us in the pathway of God’s favor.
The popular song “love will keep us together” needs some tweaking. Many couples start with romantic love. But how can we explain weddings that sparkle with bliss, only for the marriage to mutate into bitter court cases of annulment and child custody? The better adage would be “Grace will keep us together.” Truckloads of it!
You may have heard of the story of Joseph in the Old Testament. Joseph was his dad’s favorite boy but was despised by his brothers, who sold Joseph as a slave in Egypt.
While in Egypt, Joseph was doing very well for his boss, Potiphar. But Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce him and Joseph resisted her sexual advances. Incensed, the wife accused Joseph of attempted rape and Potiphar threw him in jail. But rather than becoming bitter, he still used his God-given talents to serve others, even in such an undesirable place like a dungeon.
Later, Pharaoh, the ruler of Egypt, had two dreams, which Joseph interpreted as a warning sign that a severe famine would befall the land. Joseph recommended that the Egyptians should hoard a massive amount of food to sustain them during this terrible period. Pharaoh liked Joseph’s interpretation and advice so much that he immediately appointed Joseph as his second-in-command to oversee the food storage project.
I do not know what is your situation at work.
Are you a factory worker toiling in heat and obscurity?
Or a schoolteacher wondering whether you are making an impact on your students?
Or a salesman struggling to clinch that next deal?
Or a call-center agent enduring the grind of the graveyard shift?
I doubt Joseph saw his being a slave and prisoner as “Boy, this is great career training.” Yet he was faithful to the smaller yet significant responsibilities – even if it was in a place of pain!
Whatever your status, take heart. Give your best today. Excellence builds upon itself and soon, it won’t go unnoticed. Rather than whine about not being given the big breaks, cultivate a grateful heart that you have an arena where you can showcase your unique personality and abilities.
Joseph used his God-given gifts “in the hidden places, among forgotten people.” But it became his prelude to greatness.
So can we.
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Want to discover an insight about happiness that will only cost you forty pesos?
Don’t worry. Half of that amount will go back to yourself. No, I won’t be getting the other half.
Here’s the thing: Spend twenty pesos to buy your favorite ice cream and eat it. Feels heavenly, right? Especially if it’s chocolate. (Sounds familiar?)
Now get another twenty pesos. Only this time, use it for an act of kindness to a total stranger. For example, when you see a street kid selling sampaguita flowers, buy all his stock. And let him keep the flowers so he can sell them to someone else.
Guess which one will put a wider smile on your face?
That’s right. The insight is that happiness is a by-product. Chase happiness itself and it will elude you. Do something meaningful for others and happiness will embrace you.
This is the paradox of happiness. Don’t expect your career, your possessions, or your relationships to make you happy. Rather, give value to others and happiness will follow. Focus on excellence and satisfaction will well up within you. Go an extra mile for others and their delight will be yours as well. Learn skills beyond your current level and you will unleash the thrill of exploration.
Today, survey your situation with a fresh pair of eyes. There is a gold mine of joy waiting for you. You just need to know where to dig and emotional treasures will soon yield themselves to you.
Have a great weekend ahead!
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Hungry years can actually save us from accumulating stuff, which, in turn, demand much time, expense and effort to maintain. More importantly, we can stop focusing on things and start cherishing relationships.
Hungry years also remind us of God’s faithful provision. One day, I chanced upon a Czech proverb that stuck in my mind: “The God who gives us teeth will also give us bread.”
God may cause us to hunger, but He will not allow us to die of hunger. Indeed, He had brought the Israelites to utterly depend on Him for their very survival.
God is not a sadist who dangles a bone before a chained dog, never letting the dog to get the bone. Rather, God responded to their hunger by giving them manna, day after unfailing day for forty years.
Hungry years are just as valuable as the satisfied years. In due time, God put an end to the Israelite’s wandering and brought them to the Promised Land, the land flowing with milk and honey.
If God wills, someday He will usher us into the “Promised Land” He has in store for us. There, we will no longer wrestle with tight budgets and gnawing need.
But until then, there are treasures to be gathered, lessons to be learned. Trusting in God’s matchless goodness, we embrace the hungry years as the necessary shadow for what promises to be magnificent portrait.
#hopeforthewearysoul
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Most of us go through times of tightness and inflexibility. We feel trapped and constrained, then frustrated, depressed or angry. I call this period the hungry years. It may be in our finances, career, love life, or physical health.
I had my own hungry years.
I was accusing God of being stingy, like a billionaire who hands me a bowl of bland porridge when he could have treated me to a sumptuous buffet. But one day I came across a line that changed my thinking. “[God] humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna…” (Deuteronomy 8:3).
Wait a minute. God causing you to hunger?
I thought that when God blesses us, we are filled, happy or even carefree. But the more I thought about this sentence – given to the people of Israel after wandering through the desert for forty years – the more I realized that God’s blessings do not always mean that He makes us comfortable.
Put differently, suffering does not necessarily mean that one has lost God’s favor. In fact, there are blessings that God can only give us through hunger. Hunger can be an instrument in the hands of a God who knows perfectly what He is doing. We have to accept that God uses both the pleasant and the unpleasant, the famine as well as the feast, in a divinely ordained blend.
In what way can going through “hungry years” – times when our finances are tight and we wonder if we will ever prosper – serve to our benefit? We will explore this in my next blog post.
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“It takes a millennial to understand a millennial.”
I was intrigued by this line from Grace Chong’s Foreword for Take Heart: Letters of Faith, Hope, and Love, published by Church Strengthening Ministries (CSM) this year. So I grabbed a copy and read it.
Take Heart collects 30 short letters, written by 14 millennials (30 years old or younger) for an imagined millennial going through tough issues such as joblessness, unanswered prayer, heartbreak, self-esteem, tight finances, pregnancy out of wedlock, and more. As the subtitle says, these letters are arranged in three clusters: faith, hope and love (1 Corinthians 13:13).
It is a beautiful book for at least three reasons:
First, each letter begins with a portrait of the hypothetical recipient in a particular dire strait. The writing is so picturesque that I found my heart aching with empathy. You can practically feel the sorrow, see the tears and hear the groan. Consider:
Second, the writer then identifies with the recipient. Transitions such as “I, too…” or “I once stood where you are right now” shows how the writer had trudged through similar dark valleys and shed the same tears. In so doing, the letter has earned its right to be read.
Third, the writer points the recipient to Christ. This echoes the structure of the Psalms: the unabashed woe, followed by an unflinching trust in God’s goodness. There are some paragraphs which I feel borders on being preachy, but overall the book encourages out of experience.
I rejoice at this. Millennials have gotten a bad rap for being narcissistic, entitled or shallow. Take Heart debunks that stereotype. Each letter sparkles with compassion and wisdom, showing how a youngster can be mature beyond his years.
Be ready for delightful turns as you go through the book. Check out, for example, the touching symmetry of “Loved with an Everlasting Love”. The last four words of “Loving Even from Afar” left me saying “awwwww”. “Confronting the Plight of Superman” has a stirring, triumphant coda that still gives me goosebumps whenever I think about it. “Waiting for God’s Best” proves why it’s worth the wait.
I also savored the sympathetic salutations (“Dear Missing Stone”, “Dear Pressured Provider”, “My dear shattered one”) and closings (“Waiting to see your real beauty”, “Looking forward to see you smile again”, “Rooting for you”).
If there is something I wish this book can be improved on, it is that out of the 14 writers, only one is male. One of his two pieces is a passionate love letter to his future wife. (Sorry, ladies, I don’t have his mobile number.) While doubtless this was outside of CSM’s control, a gender balance would be nice. Spirituality is not feminine; the world needs more tender warriors of the Gospel.
Back to Grace Chong, her Foreword muses why millennials are different from her generation and mine, the Baby Boomers. For example, why do millennials love to take photos of themselves? With due respect to her, such differences are superficial. Take away their Facebook and YOLOs, and you will uncover aches and angst that are true for every generation. Heck, I wrestled with the same issues when I was their age, 30 years ago!
Oh, by the way, in those days, instead of smartphones, we had those bulky Olympus cameras that store images on Kodak film (remember ‘em?). It was difficult getting selfies with those babies. But I digress.
All in all, Take Heart is a book you’d like to hold close to your… well, heart. While one may say that it takes a millennial to understand a millennial, a millennial can also understand Baby Boomers, too. All we need is to listen to each other.
Two words: character counts.
We have to be a certain kind of person in order to make marriage work. That character must be such that when trouble comes in a marriage—as it inevitably will—our natural response will be one of patience and forbearance, one that refuses to retaliate but is willing to listen. Otherwise, our carnal, selfish nature contaminates what would have been a blissful union.
There is no short-cut to character building. It takes time. Speaking for myself, my character was formed while going through much heartbreak before I met my darling wife Lucy. After tasting pain, I certainly don’t want to inflict it on others, let alone my wife. It also births a spirit of empathy and long suffering.
Sadly, many people get married so young, their character didn’t even have a chance to form. Even more tragic, many people get married without knowing the Christ who wishes to imprint His gracious and holy character in their hearts.
I don’t know about you, I am more terrified of displeasing God if I should treat Lucy shabbily. Thus, an indispensable ingredient to a strong marriage is a healthy fear of God.
I am not sure what God’s reward will be for an excellent husband or wife. Will it be the words “Well done!”? A crown? Some wag would say, “A T-shirt that says ‘I Survived Marriage!’”
But I do hope that God will honor me for being affectionate, faithful and understanding to my wife while on earth.
Now that’s character!
Oh, Lord, may it be so!
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December 14, 2019
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