The inevitable boredom of bread

I mentioned on Sunday that one of my favorite smells in the entire world is fresh baked bread.  It's awesome. It's so awesome that I own two breadmakers, for the express purpose of baking bread, for the express purpose of being able to smell it when it's baking.  It's amazing, and is probably the greatest scent of all time.  Yes, even better than puppy breath.

Now, there's something fairly unique about scents.  After a while, you stop being able to smell them.  As I said on Sunday, the way your senses work is that they require essentially constant stimulation to keep on working.  Here's a fun experiment you can do at home, whilst you read this blog.  Take the index finger of your right hand, and place it on the back of your left hand.  Okay.  Remove said finger.  Now take the index finger of your right hand, and move it back and forth between your knuckles and your wrist. What you should have noticed, if your body works properly, is that you will have felt the finger resting on the back of your hand only for a fraction of a second, then your body sort of forgets about it.  The but if you get constant stimulus, then you feel it a whole lot more.

That constant stimulus is what we crave as people.  It's so true, I can't even overstate it.  We need something happening all the time.  These days, we've all got fantastical computers working in our pockets, a million channels, twitter, blogs, youtube, and a hundred thousand distractions.  All the time. And it never stops.  Now, this isn't a bad thing, but we crave this novelty to the point where the novelty is all that counts. The entire advertising industry is dedicated to telling you why you should be dissatisfied with your life.  Your life as it is, says the advertising industry, is simply no life at all.  If you only owned this one product, subscribed to this one service, used this one thing, then, THEN you'd have a life.  You'd smile and laugh and eat chicken with your family around the dinner table.

Fine.  Except it's not true.  And you know it's not true. And you know it's not true based on personal experience.  You know that the last tablet or phone or tv or car or whatever that you purchased didn't actually change your life completely the way it promised to .  Instead, your life turned into your life, plus a tablet.  Or a tv, or a moustache, or whatever.

Point being, this constant stimulus that we're looking for, it fails to genuinely satisfy.  Even though you think it will.  You're as convinced as I am that the novelty of a thing equals its superiority.  But the joke's on us, because the novelty of a thing is actually to its detriment.  Because the things that change your life are the things that aren't new or novel.

Now, you know this to be true.  The new, the novel, it has a way of exciting your senses, of making you feel alive.  It has a way of making your heart beat a little bit faster, precisely because it is new. But once you take it home, make it your own, it won't do that anymore.  I can promise you that.  We expect it to, though.  We expect to make this new thing part of our lives, and expect it to give us those familiar heart palpitations always.  And then it stubbornly refuses to. It becomes old, it becomes outdated, or worst of all, it becomes familiar. Now, I've been around churches long enough to know that people do the same thing there. They go to the church that give them the thrill, the promise of excitement, the novelty.  Or even more so, people follow the faith that gave them that novelty, that promise of new and exciting things.  But there's a fatal flaw built into all of this - you're still you, even with the novelty.

You know what changes you, what brings long term happiness - your relationships, your talents, your desires, your loves.  These things bring and breed happiness.  Your novelty doesn't.  It makes your heart go pitty pat, but doesn't change you at all.  The stuff that changes you long term is the stuff that makes you who you are.  And as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another, according to proverbs 27:17.  The brief flash in the pan romances, the affairs, the dalliances with this and that, doesn't do much for you.  It's in the daily practice, the daily observances, the daily relationships, the daily involvement, that's what changes you.  That's what makes the difference between just you with a new ipod, versus you as a changed person.

This holds doubly and triply true for church.  You may feel as though your faith has gotten cold.  There's no excitement anymore, there's no thrill, nothing new.  You and God have gotten into a bit of a routine, and it's business as usual.  Ho hum.  You may be tempted to find that new thing, because the smell of fresh baked bread can't even be detected anymore.  Well, just because you've gotten tired of it, doesn't mean it's not there, or that it doesn't do what it promises to do anymore.  The children of Israel in the desert were fed with manna, which they loved at first because it kept them alive, but got a little tired of after a short while, because it was dull.  Jesus posited himself as the living bread from heaven, which sounded great, until people started getting sick of the same old thing.

People like us.

Ask yourself when you got tired of the whole God thing.  The whole God thing that started with such promise, and then turned into routine, and emptiness.  Ask yourself when it was that you stopped being able to smell the fresh baked bread in your own house because it got to be too familiar.  Ask yourself when dinner became a grind, and you wanted some novel food.  Ask yourself when your relationship with your spouse stopped being fireworks and lavender, and became notes on the fridge to pick up milk.  This happens.  This happens all the time.  The real skill and expertise is not in chasing the thrill, because that'll disappear with a new partner / food / tablet computer eventually too. The real skill and expertise is finding ways to continue to be thrilled and excited by what you have, rather than what you don't.  It's a monumental task, because it requires you to throw off the weight of the entire advertising industry, and stand alone, saying "this isn't something new or novel.  This is my spouse / God / church / and what matters in not finding a new thing to disappoint me, but to work with what I have, and to let it change me."  It's not the easiest thing in the world, but easy is flitting around from flower to flower.  It's not easy, precisely because it's worth doing.

PJ