“Praise God for boring days.”
These are the words that my wife, Abigail, wrote to people who were praying for our one-year-old son, Calvin, as he lay hooked to an ECMO machine in Johannesburg, South Africa. ECMO stands for “extracorporeal membrane oxygenation.” It is essentially a life-support system that replaces a patient’s heart and lungs — modern medicine’s last-ditch effort in its war against death. The machine’s recovery rate is only 50 percent. And even if someone recovers thanks to ECMO, the side effects range from nothing to the loss of essential brain functions. In other words, only half of our son might have eventually been restored to us.
So there my boy lay, hooked to this mechanical contraption that looked like it belonged in a low-budget sci-fi movie. A monstrous, blood-filled, serpentine tube came out of the right side of his neck, connecting body and machine. My baby was now relying on it to function.
I distinctly remember our fear of this sinister life-support system as we came to greet our sleeping beauty. It seemed almost a holy apparatus, a carrier and purveyor of life, whose grounds were not to be approached irreverently. The tiniest misstep and we might have bumped a button or snapped that cable. The risky nature of this machine was ever present to us.
Still, my wife wrote that afternoon, “Praise God for boring days.” I heartily concurred.
Out of the Whirlwind
How in the world could these words have come from our hearts? Surely nothing of what I just recounted could come across as boring. And why would we praise God in view of our son’s condition?
That day was the first in almost three weeks with no decline noted in Calvin’s health. We had been swept up in such a vortex of tribulations that merely a severe thunderstorm seemed to offer ample reason to praise God. To fully make sense of this, I would need to relate our whole story. Since length precludes this, permit me to highlight the main events.
Abigail and I were missionaries in Yaoundé, Cameroon, when our one-year-old burned half of his body with boiling water. The care there is insufficient for dealing with such a condition, so we were medically evacuated to Johannesburg. Upon arrival, the doctor remarked that Calvin’s lungs had almost completely collapsed because of the infections from his burns — and from COVID, which, we discovered, he had also picked up. The doctor was not even sure how he was still alive.
She proceeded to put him on a ventilator. When that failed to restore his lungs, she hooked him to an oscillator (basically a stronger ventilator). That eventually failed as well, so after being resuscitated several times, he was put on ECMO. While on ECMO, he developed a blood clot, which is essentially a death sentence. The doctor said she could not operate and that the clot would not go away on its own. And yet, in response to much prayer, it miraculously disappeared! The medical staff were stunned. In his sovereign grace, God had saved Calvin from death again and again.
Sweetness of Dull Days
I hope this brief summary shows you why we praised God with thankful hearts for a comparatively boring day. A day without any major event worth reporting to our prayer warriors was a pure delight. We had endured our fill of eventful days, so we praised God for this dull one. Most of us are not naturally inclined to do so. However, as Boethius (d. 524) writes, “Bee’s honey is sweeter far if first a bitter flavour bites the mouth” (The Consolation of Philosophy, III.I). Nineteen revoltingly bitter days taught us to see our boring day as the sweetest delicacy. We discerned in it our sovereign God’s overabundant grace, which alone made this most delightfully boring day possible. “Praise God for boring days.”
As I write, we have been back in the US for a couple of months with our miracle boy. Our now nineteen-month-old is thankfully still doing well. Every day, he reminds us of God’s miraculous power to give and preserve life. And now people who know our story often ask us what we have learned from our three-month-long descent to death’s doorstep with our baby. We say this somewhat uncanny truth: praise God for boring days because they are possible only by his grace.
Each day, like providential fireworks, God’s grace lights up our lives. Just like John the Baptist, each exploding glory is meant to call us out of our spiritual stupor. Each testifies to our soul about the light. Yet more often than not, we are deaf to these calls and blind to their brilliance. We stand unmoved before the luminous spectacle of grace sustaining our day. We dare call it “a boring day” and show that part of our soul remains in the darkness. Then we offer — if at all — laments to God for our boring days where praise is his due for them. We do so even though they are possible only by his extravagant grace. Seemingly dull days are in and of themselves sufficient reasons to praise him.
Our Plans Fail
This truth deeply impacted a friend who was praying for us. He realized anew how much “life could always be otherwise.” In fact, it is often when we or the ones we love are “caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that [we] realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life,” as Herman Melville writes in Moby Dick. Every step of every day could lead to life-altering events or even death.
We “do not know what tomorrow will bring” (James 4:14). We are but wisps of mist whisked in a maelstrom of existence that thoroughly escapes our control. That is why it is boastful, even evil, to firmly plan anything without reference to God (James 4:16), the only one who commands the waters of life to be still (Psalm 65:7; Mark 4:39). Instead, we should say, and we should pray, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:15).
My point is this: our lives are much more fragile than we think. Boethius puts it so well: “It is decreed by firm, eternal law. Nothing that comes to be can firm remain” (Consolation, II.III). When we woke up the morning of the accident, we had no clue that our life would be thrown into unrelenting grief and pain for three interminable months.
End of Boring Days
Dear reader, I hope you see how boring days are possible only by our sovereign God’s grace. Oh, blessed are the eyes to which God gives the discernment of this truth! I pray you will praise God for your boring days. They are a gift from his merciful hand.
Even now, months after our trials, I praise him more than I ever did for my boring days. We deserve only wrathful days to begin with. Yet he “makes his sun rise” (Matthew 5:45) on us, he gives us “rains . . . and fruitful seasons, satisfying [our] hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17), and much more. If you woke up next to a lovely wife and a healthy child this morning, praise God in your heart for these most excellent gifts from his sovereign hand. (And go give them a hug and a kiss after you are done reading this article!)
Yet even if all earthly goods are stripped away, we have grounds for praise. We are already blessed “with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 1:3). Today, if you were called to be in Christ, if you received a new heart capable of answering that call, if you were, in other words, predestined, called, justified, and glorified (Romans 8:29–30), what more reason do you need to praise God for every boring day he might have written for you?
To be sure, boring days must remain, in some sense, boring — uneventful, without trouble or thrill. But do not worry. Soon, there shall not be any boring days at all. Indeed, every day will be a feast, for we will be with the Lamb, day in and day out (Revelation 19:6–9). So, we look further up and further in to that coming world, where every day will be marked by unadulterated joy. Every agony will be turned into glory (The Great Divorce, 69). Our souls shall, as Bach so lyrically puts it, “walk on roses.” All will be well, for God shall be all (1 Corinthians 15:28), filling our days with the gladness of his presence.
In the meantime, as we wait on this side of eternity, discern how even your boring days are possible only by God’s grace, and praise his holy name.
