#37. Why Motherhood is Boring

Last article, I said we need to come to terms with worship in the spaces where God has given us responsibility and authority. Firstly and mostly, that’s our homes. The trouble is, we live in a time where home is seen as either a day spa you retreat to, or the site of heavy-duty, mind-numbing labour we’re desperate to escape. For the mothers of young children, we long for the former but live with the latter. Both ways of thinking about home are pretty boring and neither help us mature in worship while we raise worshipers. Let’s talk about boredom, because it is surprisingly connected with worship.

Motherhood is boring when we don’t notice good gifts or when we don’t know how to make good use of them. I could write a whole book on boredom, and perhaps it will be a separate writing project in the future (as an aside, I am presenting a workshop about boredom at an online conference soon, see here.) Ultimately, boredom is a worship problem. Follow this trail with me…

Worship, trust and service all go together. Look at what you trust, what story you motivate yourself with, and you’re looking at the object of your worship. We all worship, trust and serve something. That thing is what we become like. Worship has a formative, or even a de-formative, effect.

Psalm 115:2-8 reads,

‘Why do the nations say,
“Where is their God?”
Our God is in heaven;
he does whatever pleases him.
But their idols are silver and gold,
made by human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.
They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.’

and Romans 1:21-25 says,

‘For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.’

False worship, trusting things we have made, or things other people have made—or even trusting things God has made—dims our wits and senses. It renders us unable to see and speak and hear and smell. It makes us unable to feel, unable to walk. Our ability to function in God’s world, our means of enjoying it fully, decreases when we worship the wrong god. False worship deforms and darkens, it depletes and diminishes our personality, and with it, our capacity to be pleasantly occupied. False worship is stupefying. Those who make false gods will be like those false gods, and so will all who trust in them. Worship degrades us when we trust and serve anything less than the God who made and owns everything. We all become like that which we reverence. In the end, trusting stupid things makes us stupid.

Perhaps the greatest risk for mums reading these words is not overtly false worship, but flimsy worship. Biblical substance in our corporate and household worship matters, because flippant, superficial, self-centred worship makes for flippant, superficial, self-centred people. Vague or sloppy words about God lead to a vague or sloppy view of God, which makes us into rather vague and sloppy people.

Our other risk is when we’re not inclined to be shaped by the words we voice in public worship (which might be wonderfully robust). Good liturgy can be distanced from what we trust and serve in private. This is an ancient problem which the prophets and Jesus laboured to address (Isaiah 1, Isaiah 29, Matthew 15). Our kids will be able to tell, over time, if there is a dissociation between the public Christian activities we do and how seriously we fear and delight in the Lord the rest of the time. This is the greatest hindrance we can put in the way of our children, a sore not healed with a bandaid. The bigger that gap, the more fragmented and dimmed we become.

Whether it’s false worship, flimsy worship, or disconnected worship, disordered worship hardens us. The more calloused our skin, the less we sense. The less we sense, the less we notice. The less we notice, the less interesting the world seems. Less interest means more boredom. Giving up meaningful worship, or not cultivating a coherence between our public and private worship, will make us more bored with the duties which land in our way. We then blame the duties, and try to minimise them, when, in fact, it’s our capacity to notice and enjoy which is lacking. By trying to solve boredom the wrong way, we miss the real remedy.

If sinful worship deadens our faculties, then rightly worshiping the Creator has the opposite effect. True worship changes us from glory to glory; it’s expansive and swelling; clarifying and growing our scope for joy. In redeeming us into true worship, God gives us back all the parts of ourselves which had been dead, dark and senseless. He takes us outside ourselves into infinitely more than we have within, resurrecting our faculties, and with them, our varied enjoyment.

Jesus doesn’t just set us up with distant forgiveness and safety from future judgement. He makes us new now, with a new way of being in the created world. It’s a newness which takes time to grow into. It’s sometimes a hard-won lightness; a costly relief. As newborn creatures, we need to learn how to speak and see and hear and smell and feel and walk. The more alive to the Creator we are, the more sensitive our senses will become. We’ll notice more of his work—not just in our salvation—but in all creation. We won’t be able to glance an inch without seeing something new of interest. God gives us back the proper use of our parts, for savouring his goodness and reflecting his image as we work with the many-sensed materials of creation. It’s reasonable to expect that the more we mature in Christ, the more interesting, and less boring, everything becomes. Even motherhood.