Drive the nail, turn the screw, tell them about Jesus.

Building is often boring. It’s doing the same activities over and over again, whether driving a nail or turning a screw. Ground is gained slowly, which is why, a lot of times, if you want to make building something look epic, you have to use time-lapse footage. Little images captured every several minutes, hours, or days and strung together make the very boring and often tedious work look awesome, especially when set to the right sort of music. And that’s how it looks after the fact. But while you’re in it, there’s a certain level of tedium that you must face.

Now, with that in mind, let me flip this a little bit: Boring can be building. In other words, the boring life is the life that builds something epic, little bit by little bit. If you rush a job, the quality of the thing you’re building will be shoddy. So it is with the rushed life. The rushed life is the life you want to experience as an epic time lapse. But that is not how time is experienced.

As I’ve made obvious, I am quite the boxing fan. If I don’t watch a match live, I catch up with the highlights online after the fact. And highlights can make boring fights seem very epic. But if you go back and watch the whole fight, there are long periods of two men circling each other, clinching, and throwing jabs, trying to set up a big punch. Casual fans sometimes find that boring. But those who understand and love boxing know that this is part of setting up those epic moments, those big knockouts. You have to go in there and figure out your opponent and set him up, sometimes over several exhausting rounds.

To keep pushing this metaphor, I have seen boxers who have a hundred times the talent of the men they’re facing lose matches. A few weeks back, Moses Itauma fought Filip Hrgovic. Itauma was 14–0 and had been quickly climbing the ranks. Truly a once-in-a-generation talent, with good power but also incredible speed for a heavyweight. Hrgovic himself is a huge, strong man, a piece of iron, and many people, myself included, thought Itauma would beat him, likely with a late TKO.

And it did look that way for a long time. Itauma was teeing off and winning most rounds, but Hrgovic was just too tough to put away. Itauma threw everything he had and exhausted himself when, in my view, he could have cruised to a pretty easy points victory. Instead, he’s 14–1. He rushed things. He tried to make things more epic than they could be. He had what it took in terms of firepower and talent to win, but he lacked the patience to be steady, to be boring, and he lost.

A lot of the crises in our lives are the result of wanting to be epic when we should be boring. As a matter of fact, some of us are so broken that we easily mistake being in a dramatic crisis for living in a radical moment. But what it really is, is an epic failure of discipline.

Going back to Itauma, the round in which he got TKO’d was dramatic. Itauma was throwing everything he had and taking everything Hrgovic had. He was barely standing but never got knocked down. That’s why I think the people saying he’s a hype job don’t understand that this kid has an incredible chin and can punch. What he didn’t have was the stamina to finish. He hadn’t learned how to pace himself through those later rounds. He was cruising on talent, and talent’s not enough. You’ve got to be steady. You’ve got to do the boring stuff over and over again.

Let me pivot to family devotions. It is much better to disciple your children for ten to fifteen minutes a day than for a single hour a week. I know at times it may seem like they’re not absorbing or retaining much, and you wonder why you even do it. But it seeps in, and their little brains start to make connections. And sometimes, after months of blank stares, you’re driving down the road and your six-year-old says something profound about the nature of God. It’s an epic moment, one that was the fruit of a whole lot of boring.

Boring is building. Be boring. Be consistent. Life moves fast. When you’re old, you will look back on all that the Lord accomplished through a simple sinner like you, and it will seem like a time lapse of highlights.

Drive the nail, turn the screw, tell them about Jesus. You’ve got this.

Painting: Robin Edmundson