Boredom — A Great DirectTV Commercial!

“Don’t attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Shiftly.”  Great commercial.  The primary point seems to be BOREDOM, doesn’t it?

Boredom is a great problem in our over-saturated, technology-addicted culture.

“I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say ‘I’m bored.”
― Louis C.K.

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The Beatles saved the world from boredom.” ― George Harrison

“I am never bored; to be bored is an insult to one’s self.”
― Jules Renard

“… millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”
― Susan Ertz

“I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.”
― Isaac Asimov

Questions:

1. What do you when you are bored?

2.  If you could speak to Isaac Asimov (see the last quote), what would you say to him?

 

How Happy Are You? (really?)

One of my favorite Geico Insurance commercials.

Yes, he does look happy.  The actor playing the body builder is actually named Kali MUSCLE!

Someone has said that happiness comes from our happenings — that is, the circumstances of our lives that are pleasurable.  But what about when those circumstances are anything but pleasurable?  What then?

The Psalmist faced this question head-on when he wrote in Psalm 16:

¹⁰ because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
nor will you let your faithfulone see decay.
¹¹ You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

Notice that true joy comes from counting on God’s promises to not abandon us.  The Bible makes it clear that this promise is only for those who belong to God through the finished work of Jesus Christ.  For those who reject the Good News about Jesus, only abandonment awaits them after death.

Where is true joy to be found?  The Psalmist says, “You will fill me with joy in your presence.”  How could JOY be the experience of someone in the presence of a totally holy God?  The only answer is that the blood of Christ covers that person, making them able to be in the presence of God.  Have you found that God has filled you with joy in His presence?  If not, why not?

One day, the Bible teaches, all believers will be with the Lord.  And what will we find?  Many, many things, of course.  The Apostle Paul briefly discusses the joy of heaven in 2 Corinthians 12.  But the Psalmist puts it a bit more succinctly:  “with eternal pleasures at your right hand.”  How could anyone not want to be with that kind of God?

Questions:

1.  How could an accomplished writer and scholar like Isaac Asimov say:  “I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.”  Had he not read Psalm 16?

2.  How is joy different from happiness, do you think?