From Boredom to Gestation

I have not been bored in… oh, practically my whole life. I so easily muster up something to occupy my time or hands or mind. But tonight, I think I might actually describe myself as bored. Uninterested. Itchy. Discontent. Maybe this feeling has been lingering for a couple of days as I’ve focused so intently on preparing everything for the baby’s arrival, only to find myself in a season of waiting – perhaps for a couple of weeks. I know that I have to get a grip and not pine away the hours wondering when a Braxton Hicks contraction will transform into a deeper, more painful signal. But for tonight, I gave into the restless boredom of waiting… and not wanting to do anything except wait.

So, I poked around in some virtual shops, looking forward to my post-baby wardrobe renewal.

I cracked open the Sudoku books that Ryan stuffed in my Christmas stocking, contentedly breezing through the one- and two- star problems and mustering up enough staying-power to complete a three-star. (Bored?)

I changed the background of my blog a couple of times.

And sulked when Ryan came home from his elder’s meeting… just long enough to feel like I had done something tonight.

Then, I half-heartedly opened a little booklet, The Quotidian Mysteries, that my sister had left for our bookshelf a couple of weeks ago. Who knew that the author, Kathleen Norris, would jump right on the topic of boredom, restlessness, waiting… Who knew she would somehow take me by the hand from my discontentment to gratitude – worship, even – for these slow moments of very simple living. A faithful challenge to worship my Lord instead of mourning my lack of busyness… to emerge again into the “real world of God’s creation” as a creature who desperately needs to thank and be with her Creator.

Norris immediately captured my attention with something that I sincerely could have written tonight (if I would have been un-itchy enough to write and think for a moment):

“…and it always seems that just when daily life seems most unbearable, stretching out before me like a prison sentence, when I seem most dead inside, reduced to mindlessness, bitter tears or both, that what is inmost breaks forth, and I realize that what had seemed ‘dead time’ was actually a period of gestation…”