Bored Is Not the Same as Gone

There is a clock above the door and it was a mistake to look at it.

That is the first rule and everybody who has ever sat in that hall on a Sunday learns it eventually. Once you have looked, you know the time, and once you know the time you know how much of it is left, and then the clock has you. Twenty two minutes. Then, an unbelievably long stretch later, twenty minutes.

The notice sheet folds in half nine times before the paper refuses. Not eight. Nine, and the ninth is a fight. There is a water stain on the ceiling in the shape of a country nobody has been able to identify. There is one panel of the ceiling that is very slightly a different color from all the others, and now that it has been noticed it can never be un-noticed, and it is going to be there every single week for the rest of your life.

The songs are all right. The third one is your favorite, which is a design flaw, because it means the good part is over early and everything after it is downhill.

And then there is the thing that actually happens, the one nobody talks about. Somewhere in the middle you realize you have not heard anything for about four minutes. You do not know where the four minutes went. You were not thinking about anything in particular. You just were not there, and now the sentence being spoken is landing in the middle of a paragraph you missed the start of, and you cannot get back in, and you have to sit there doing the face of someone following along.

None of this is funny in the car afterwards. That is what this is really about.

Because in the car, or later, lying in bed, a much colder sentence turns up, and it does not shout. It says: if you actually believed any of this, would you be bored by it? People who really believe do not count ceiling panels. So maybe you do not really believe. Maybe you have been going through the motions this whole time, and everybody thinks you are one thing and you are quietly something else.

That is the sentence. Not the boredom. The verdict you handed yourself about the boredom, alone, with nobody in the room to argue with it.

So let us take that verdict apart, because it is wrong, and I am not going to be gentle about how wrong it is.

Attention is a body, not a heart

First, the plain mechanics, because nobody explains these and they explain nearly everything.

Attention is physical. It runs on a body: on sleep, on blood sugar, on how warm the room is, on whether you can hear properly from where you sit, on what happened at school on Friday that is still going round. It has a length, that length is not the same for any two people, and it runs out without asking permission from the person it belongs to.

That is not a spiritual condition. That is a nervous system doing exactly what a nervous system does, and it was doing it in humans long before anybody built a hall with a clock above the door.

You have a mind that wanders and a God who has never once counted that against you. Psalm 139:2 says He understands your thought afar off, and understands is the verb rather than judges, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a line like that read as company instead of surveillance.

Now watch what Jesus does with exactly this, on the worst night of His life, with grown men.

In the garden He asks three of His closest friends to stay awake with Him for one hour. They cannot. He comes back and finds them asleep, twice, and He says the sentence everybody quotes and nobody applies to themselves: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Read what that sentence actually does. He looks straight at the gap between what they wanted and what their bodies delivered, He names it out loud, and He does not treat the gap as evidence about their love for Him. Then He goes back to praying, and He comes back, and He gets them up, and He goes on with them into the hardest night in history.

You are held by a Lord who has already told you the flesh is weak and did not change His mind about anybody when it was. Matthew 26:41 is His own sentence about His own friends, and the Spirit who is called the Comforter is the one who makes that stop being a verse about them and start being a fact about you.

Nobody got demoted for falling asleep. Nobody was asked to prove anything the next morning.

Nobody said a word about staying awake

There is one more account, and Luke tells it without embarrassment.

Paul is teaching at Troas, upstairs, at night, with the lamps lit, and it goes on a very long time, and Luke says so plainly. A young man named Eutychus is sitting in a window. Sleep comes over him and he falls from the third floor.

They go down. Paul goes down. And then this:

And they brought the young man alive, and were not a little comforted.Acts 20:12

Then they went back up the stairs, broke bread, and talked until daybreak.

Sit with what is missing from that page. There is not one word of rebuke recorded. Nobody told him he should have been listening. Nobody preached him afterwards as an example to the other young people about paying attention. He is a young man who could not stay awake through a long night, and he is written into Scripture as a person who was carried up the stairs alive and made a room glad, and that is his entire testimony and it is a good one.

You have never once been on the wrong side of God for having a body that gets tired. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and remembering is what He does with that fact rather than resenting it, and the Spirit is the one who takes a verse about dust and makes it feel like being understood.

I want to be careful here, and honest with you. This is not a message about the service being too long or the songs being wrong. That is a different conversation and it is not mine to have on somebody else's behalf, and the people who put that morning together love you and got up early to do it. The boredom is not a complaint that needs settling. It is a fact about a room and a body, and the reason it hurts is nothing to do with the room at all.

You were made a believer by Christ and not by your concentration, and that has been true every single week. Ephesians 2:8 says it is the gift of God, and a gift is not withdrawn on the basis of how alert the person holding it was at eleven forty on a Sunday, and the Holy Spirit who sealed you is the seal itself rather than a feeling you check for.