We Were Made to Crave Drama
Just Not the Kind Offered by the World
When my siblings and I were growing up, we learned that the phrase which irritated our parents the most was “I’m bored.” Perhaps to parents—understandably—this phrase seems to imply ingratitude. We were very fortunate, and thus had more toys than we knew what to do with indoors, and outdoors, we had a two acre yard, complete with a swing set and basketball hoop. They would run through the list of all our entertainment options, and all of us learned at some point to figure out how to amuse ourselves and quit whining, or else they would give us housework to do. During our childhood, Mom and Dad claimed there was so much work to do they were never bored, and now that they are retired, they say they don’t understand how their peers complain of being bored once they retired. Between errands and house maintenance, they say they are keeping as busy as ever.
I remember one summer day in particular when I was eight years old. Mom and Dad were both at work, and my sister (six years older) was babysitting. I was a bit of a weird kid, a little more introspective than most kids my age, and that day, it was starting to occur to me—though I didn’t quite know how to verbalize it at the time—that what I was feeling was not boredom in the sense of having nothing to do, but a deep, abiding restlessness, a nagging sense that there had to be more to life than the endless school years of pointless worksheets, followed by summers of silly craft projects, children’s books and playing on the swing set. I wanted to do something real, something exciting, something meaningful. In other words, I was already contemplating in a childish way that universal human question: what is the meaning of life? Unable to articulate verbally exactly what I was feeling, I remember whining to my sister, “I want to do something I have never done before.” “Then do something you have never done before,” my sister said in a tone that clearly indicated annoyance with her little sister. I don’t remember how I ended up passing the time that day, but for the most part, I let the subject drop for the remainder of my childhood. Maybe the feeling would go away once I grew up and was allowed to do real work that made a difference in the real world rather than pointless school work that would be thrown into the recycling bin at the end of each semester. But in the adult world, I would discover that most jobs, though they may occasionally present opportunities to make a lasting difference in the world—or at least for one starfish as the parable goes—are mostly bureaucratic and ultimately pointless. And thus this restlessness is like a lifelong virus. It can be masked somewhat, but this side of heaven there is no cure. During the school year, children relieve its symptoms by rebelling—misbehaving in class or deciding not to do their homework. (I will neither confirm nor deny that I was one of the kids who decided not to do my homework.) During the summer, they mask it by passing the time doing a craft project, playing on the swing set, or escaping into a silly book or video game. During their working years, responsible adults like my parents learned to accept, and taught us kids to accept that the mundaneness of everyday life is an unavoidable reality. They intuitively lived out a modern take on the book of Ecclesiastes. The most you can hope for from life is a job that pays a fair wage, with a good company where your coworkers are pleasant and your boss treats everyone fairly. Despite what TV or social media might lead us to believe, it is actually extremely rare for people to land a job getting paid to do what they love. You go to work to pay the bills, keep your nose to the grindstone while you are there, come home and cherish time with family, finding time to pursue what you enjoy on evenings and weekends. That is a good life. Unfortunately, less responsible adults mask their restlessness by living beyond their means, doing the bare minimum in their jobs, indulging in shallow entertainment like reality TV, or self-medicating with junk food, pornography, drugs or alcohol. Middle-of-the-road adults like myself cope with boredom by getting overly excited anticipating man-made holiday traditions—singing Christmas music in October. As I write this, it is December 26 and I am coping with that annual post-Christmas malaise I feel every year. The week of Christmas, but especially Christmas Eve and Christmas Day always feels like a slice of heaven on Earth, as all society pauses from the routine of work to eat special food, play board games as a family, pack into church and sing joyful Christmas songs, and I have always found it difficult to come down from that emotional mountaintop and resume ordinary life.
And since the reelection of Donald Trump, I have read some fascinating commentaries arguing that boredom at the societal level may explain the “burn it all down” mentality of so many that allowed for the rise of Donald Trump. In his book, Our Own Worst Enemy: The Assault from Within on Modern Democracy, Tom Nichols quoted George Will who remarked in 2020 that “Affluent societies are often gripped by a hunger for apocalypse, a wish for a great struggle that could give drama and deeper meaning, a frisson of risk to the otherwise dull rhythm of life in a country that meets almost all of the needs of its population, at almost all times, and entertains them continuously while doing so.” Tom Nichols adds that “Democracy at its best is boring, and when a society becomes attached to the idea that boredom is a burden that government should alleviate, the attraction of politics beyond the edge of reason becomes a matter of entertainment rather than of justice or even of necessity” (Page 67). Tom Nichols wasn’t writing specifically to Christians, but we are no better. In a November 13 editorial in Christianity Today, Russell Moore remarked, “What we call politics these days offers people a sense of meaning and purpose, an interruption to the dead everydayness of life. A jolt of adrenaline can feel almost like life—for a little while.” But ultimately, news cycles full of political drama only leave us feeling burnt out and distract us from the truth, that this manufactured political drama is temporary, fleeting and pitiful.
But the fact that we are discontent and bored with this life isn’t in and of itself a problem. In fact, for true Christians, it is a good thing, a sign that we recognize we were made for another world. As Augustine famously said, we were made for God and only He can fulfill what are restless hearts are longing for. And as Russell Moore noted later in his article, “You are meant to have a life of drama and adventure and excitement. Politics—of the left, right or center—can’t deliver it. News cycles can’t replicate it. For those of us who are Christians, we already have it. We need no Jungian hero’s journey. We are joined to the life of Jesus of Nazareth. His story is our story. Our lives are hidden in Him” (See Colossians 3:3). In other words, it is okay to long for drama, adventure and excitement. It is just that in our fallen state, we are prone to looking for this drama and excitement in all the wrong places.
Still to this day after an especially tedious day of work, I can lapse into doubt and wonder, if only I had been able to land one of my dream jobs I longed for all my childhood—a reporter for a newspaper who would fill the hearts of dishonest politicians with terror and dread, or a paid singer in a fabulous choir or Broadway production—I wouldn’t feel this restlessness. But King Solomon had the ultimate dream job, king over Israel, the global superpower of his time, and yet many scholars believe he wrote the book of Ecclesiastes full of depressing rhetoric such as “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:11). Ecclesiastes ultimately points to Christ, the only one who can redeem this fallen world and offer what our restless hearts long for.
Our hearts should break for those who do not believe in Christ. They do not know that peace that passes understanding from a Father who forgives their sins and promises eternal life, and thus they are more susceptible to despair when life throws them curveballs because in their minds, this life, and this broken world, is all there is. But even for those who have accepted Him, life can feel pointless sometimes. God requires even his followers to endure the mundane tedium of everyday life, toiling at a job we don’t particularly enjoy because it is in the ordinariness of everyday life that our sincerity and commitment to our faith is tested. God also uses ordinary life, especially adversity, to cultivate character qualities that we will need to accomplish his true purpose for us. When we are first introduced to Joseph, he is a rather arrogant teenage boy, boastfully sharing his dreams that indicate that his brothers, and one day even his father would bow down to him. What his brothers did out of jealousy was wrong, but God used the experience of slavery, and what I am sure were long, tedious years in prison, to cultivate patience and humility so that when he was promoted to a prestigious position by the king of Egypt, he was prepared to exercise the authority he had been given for God’s glory, whereas if he had been given this position without first experiencing years of adversity, he almost certainly would have misused this authority, concerned only with his own worldly power.
Though Scripture doesn’t say so, Moses would have had plenty of time while tending his father-in-law’s sheep day in and day out for forty years, to lament his impulsive and foolish decision to kill that Egyptian whom he witnessed beating a Hebrew slave. By God’s providence, he was rescued from the river as a baby by the pharaoh’s daughter and was raised in Pharaoh’s palace where he would have received a world-class education, only to be sentenced to a boring life tending sheep. But God would use the patience, gentleness and perseverance cultivated while tending sheep to rescue his people from slavery in Egypt and lead them to the Promise Land.
In the apostle Peter’s day, all Jewish boys typically studied Scripture until around the age of 15, but the dream job was to be chosen to be a disciple of a Rabbi, who would train them to become rabbis and lifelong scholars of Scripture themselves. But only a select few boys made the cut to be discipled by a rabbi. Most were told to return home and learn the family trade. But through years of hard, unglamorous work fishing, and mending the nets, Peter learned important skills that Jesus would repurpose to make Peter “a fisher of people.”
The reality is that in this fallen world, all jobs to some extent are tedious. None of us will find that magical job that fills the God-shaped hole in our hearts. In my case, I have heard interviews of former Broadway performers who say that performance schedules were so demanding they practically burned themselves out, not to mention that by the end of a production’s run on Broadway, they may have performed it hundreds of times. They know how to paste on a smile so the audience doesn’t know, but in their hearts, they are so sick of performing their role they can hardly stand it. In my mature moments, I know my job working in a call center isn’t really pointless. Occasionally, people will tell me that speaking with me brightened their day, and I have even had a few opportunities to inspire and encourage senior citizens experiencing vision loss. And most likely, God is aware of people for whom I have made a difference that I am unaware of at this time. So as we embark on this new year that is sure to be full of political drama, I pray that all Christians, myself very much included, will listen to the Bible instead of cable news or political podcasts, the Holy Spirit rather than social media. Instead of praying for a more exciting job by my standards, I need to pray that His will be done, and that he might help me recognize and appreciate the foretastes of Heaven he gives us all the time, like the wonderful fragrances of flowers or cookies baking, conversation and laughter around the dinner table with my parents, or a song so beautiful you could cry. And even on particularly tedious days, those days we all have when nothing seems to go right, we can still find abiding, internal joy in knowing that one day, we too will be resurrected to dwell with Christ forever in a fully redeemed creation free from the curse of sin, that life of drama, adventure and excitement we were really made for.
That Reminds me of a Song: When I was seven years old, Mom ordered a collection of John Denver albums that was released to commemorate his tragic death in a plane crash just a few months prior. Immediately, I too fell in love with his music, and Mom and I spent many happy childhood hours listening to these albums together. But my absolute favorite of these songs has always been Wild Montana Skies. I have always been fascinated by its aura of mysteriousness. It tells the story of a man whose mother died the summer after his birth, but her prayer as she nursed him, and the refrain of the song was a prayer for practical needs—a home, the love of a good family, a wife someday—but also that he would have a fire in his heart, a light in his eyes, the wild wind for a brother, and the wild Montana skies. His uncle raised him, gave him a good home, but he never quite fit in: “There was something in the city that he said he couldn’t breathe. There was something in the country that he said he couldn’t leave.” I remember turning this song over in my mind at seven years old, and I still ponder this song today. In a Creative Writing class, I wrote an essay reflecting on this song. Perhaps the city is a metaphor for conformity, resignation, dashed hopes and dreams, whereas maybe the country is a metaphor for freedom, and the life God intended for us. There is no mention of God in this song: his mother prays to Montana. But this song came to mind again as I wrote this post. Perhaps there is Christian symbolism in this song. Perhaps we need to find the courage to not fit in, to flee the “city” with its petty political drama, its shallow concept of entertainment and its culture of striving for things that will never satisfy our restless hearts, and live differently, taking seriously the truth that we were meant for another world. The song never definitively answers the question of whether Montana ever gave this man the fire in his heart, the light in his eyes that his mother prayed for, but these prayers can be answered in Christ.