Christianity Today: This Winter, Be Bored, by Hannah Miller King (Associate Rector, The Vine Anglican Church (North Carolina); Author, Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness (2026)):
This slow and quiet season is an opportunity to hear anew from God.
Parenting literature these days is full of encouragement to let kids be bored. In an over-scheduled world, kids need downtime. Their brains benefit from white space, which ultimately results in greater creativity and motivation. …
Adults aren’t given the same permission to be bored. Instead, we are encouraged to be productive. We evaluate our worth and usefulness in terms of busyness and efficiency. In our achievement-driven society, any kind of lull is perceived as evidence of poor planning or low ambition. The quiet rage I feel when I am held up in the grocery checkout line—without any more emails to respond to on my smartphone—exposes my pathological aversion to white space. …
Of course, productivity is part of our calling as God’s image bearers. Work predates the Fall and will likely last into eternity (Isa. 65:17–25). But we are more than what we do. …
I am challenging myself to welcome my own encounters with boredom as a spiritual discipline of sorts. In the spare moments of the day when I would typically turn to my phone for either a quick task or mindless clickbait—waiting in line at the store, sitting at a red light, even walking from the bedroom to the kitchen—I am seeking instead to be present. …
Sometimes, after we’ve inoculated ourselves to the world’s gifts, we need to force ourselves to look again until we remember how to see. This too is a kind of attunement to God, who is always affirming creation by holding it together (Col. 1:17). When we learn to value presence over productivity, we grow into his image and rediscover the wonder for which we were made.
In Orthodoxy, theologian G. K. Chesterton put it this way:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
The inevitable winter lull, with its long stretches of routine and inclement weather, can lead to more frustration and determination to get things done. But if we let it, these months’ slower pace can reorient us to the gift of being, apart from questions of usefulness and productivity. We can choose to embrace these unavoidable inefficiencies—and the boredom they may evoke—as a kind of spiritual discipline that reconnects us to our true selves and to God.
As we become attuned to the people and things in front of us, we live counter-culturally, reflecting the image of the God who said in the beginning, “Let there be,” and it was good.
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