Snippet: "You're boring." (Thrill Series)

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

I’m cheating today and slipping in a snippet from another book into this series on Trevin Wax’s The Thrill of Orthodoxy’s book. It’s from Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life by Tish Harrison Warren (Lois shared this with me).

“Once a student met with [a professor] to complain about having to read Augustine’s Confessions. ‘It’s boring,’ the student whined. ‘No, it’s not boring,’ the professor responded. ‘You’re boring.’

“…Our worship together as a church forms us in a particular way. We must be shaped into people who value that which gives life, not just what’s trendy or loud or exciting.”

“…Our addiction to stimulation, input, and entertainment empties us out and makes us boring—unable to embrace the ordinary wonders of life in Christ.

“…much of the Christan life is returning over and over to the same work and the same habits of worship. We must contend with the same spiritual struggles again and again. The work of repentance and faith is daily and repetitive. Again and again we repent and believe.”

Can we try to be at least a little less boring?

Maybe put down our phones and pick up a challenging read?

Or turn off the radio and think about something while driving to work, school, or the store?

Or talk to someone close by, asking questions about their lives and passions?

Photo by Debashis RC Biswas on Unsplash.

Snippet: Talking to Stranger on a Bus...Transformative!

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from an interview with University of Chicago psychologist Nick Epley on the Plain English with Derek Thompson podcast in an episode titled “‘The Anti-Social Century’: America’s Epidemic of Solitude—and How to Fix It.”

He’s talking about his 15 years of studying the transformative effects of talking to people and taking interest in them, from strangers on the bus to deep conversations with friends. We think strangers don’t want to be talked to, but it makes them happier when we do. We think we’ll feel better by not interacting. We’re wrong, even if we’re introverts! Making the wrong choice and keeping to ourselves literally dozens of times a day adds up.

Thompson: “Do you come away from these studies thinking that your natural inclination to keep to yourself should maybe be exploded a little bit and you should open yourself up to people.”

Epley: “So there's no research that I've ever read about or been involved in that's changed the way I've lived my life more than this. … I've now seen 10,000 data points showing these gaps between our pessimistic expectations about what happens when I reach out and take a genuine interest in you and reach out and try to connect to you in a positive meaningful way with good intent. …I've seen so many data points at this point about the size of that gap. that it has changed the way I live my life from top to bottom.”

Photo by Luke Michael on Unsplash.