From the Well
Last Saturday it rained from breakfast until dinner, which meant every half-formed plan in my head evaporated by nine a.m. My son stood at the window for about four minutes before delivering the verdict every parent of a three-year-old knows by heart: “I’m bored. There’s nothing to do.”
My hand was already reaching for my phone to open some app that promised to fix that for him, quietly, before his boredom could become my problem too. I stopped with my thumb halfway to the screen and told him I didn’t have a fix for him. He’d have to find one himself.
He was furious about that for roughly ninety seconds. Then he disappeared into the living room, and twenty minutes later I found that he and his sisters had turned every couch cushion in the house into a boat, complete with a rule (his) that the carpet was shark water and nobody could touch it. Nobody taught him that game. Nothing on a screen gave it to him. It came out of the one thing I almost took away from him: an empty afternoon with nothing scheduled into it.
I’ve been thinking since about how much I treat my kids’ empty time like a problem to solve, when it might be one of the only places they’re actually free to become something. Turns out I need that reminder as much as they do.
Draw Deep
The Best Summer Is a Boring One
A handful of editorial boards ran nearly the same piece this week, in nearly the same words: the most memorable summer a kid can have is the one with nothing on the calendar. Child-development researchers are saying it too, that unstructured, screen-free time is where curiosity and self-direction actually get built, not in the well-optimized activity between activities. A bored kid, given enough rope, tends to invent something. A kid who’s never bored never has to.
I don’t think that finding surprises Scripture in the slightest, though I don’t think it’s a formula either. Do a certain number of hours of nothing, get a creative child out the other side, like some kind of spiritual vending machine. It’s smaller and stranger than that.
In Mark 6, Jesus’s disciples come back from a wave of ministry, teaching, healing, more demand than they can keep up with, and Jesus doesn’t hand them a bigger to-do list. “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place,” he tells them, “and get some rest.” Not a reward for finishing well. Not earned. Just an invitation to stop, offered to tired people in the middle of real, unfinished work.
Here’s the part I don’t want to skip past, because it would be easy to: the very next verse, the crowds beat them there anyway. The quiet place wasn’t quiet. The rest didn’t arrive on schedule. Jesus still had compassion on the crowd and kept teaching, which means even his own invitation to rest got interrupted by real, legitimate need. Rest wasn’t a tidy solution he modeled once and solved forever. It was a discipline he kept returning to, imperfectly, in a life that never really let up.
I think that’s more honest than “let your kids be bored and watch the magic happen.” Some days the boat made of couch cushions is beautiful. Some days boredom just turns into whining, or a fight over the shark water, and nothing gets built at all. Rest and unstructured time aren’t a guarantee. They’re an invitation, the same one Jesus kept offering his own friends, in the middle of work that never fully stopped needing them.
Around the Table
Scripture: “Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.” — Mark 6:31
For the little ones: Ask your kids what their favorite thing to do is when nothing is planned, no screen, no activity someone else picked. Read Mark 6:30-32 together. Point out that Jesus’s friends were tired from doing good, important work, and he still told them to stop and rest first.
Discussion Questions:
What’s something fun you’ve made up yourself, without anyone telling you how?
Why do you think Jesus told his friends to rest instead of giving them more to do?
Has resting ever gotten interrupted for you, like it did for Jesus in this story? What did you do?
Activity: Pick one afternoon this week with nothing scheduled, no screens, no plans, no suggestions from the grown-ups unless someone asks. See what gets invented. Pray together beforehand and ask God to help your family actually rest, even if it gets interrupted.
Tales From the Well
Grandpa Eli doesn’t tell stories that go nowhere.
”Every year before the snow came in hard,” he told Oliver and Lilly over lunch one afternoon, ”the men of that old mountain town used to walk the ridgeline together, checking the passes so nobody got caught up high once the weather turned mean. One year my great-great-uncle went up alone to check the one nobody else wanted to check. Steep, ugly trail. Everybody figured he wouldn’t come back.”
“Did he?” Lilly asked.
“He did. Half-frozen, half-starved, but he came back down, and he’d marked the whole trail with cairns, so nobody would ever have to guess their way through it blind again.” Grandpa buttered his bread slowly. “Strange thing is, nobody made him go. He just decided somebody ought to, and he was standing closest to the door when the deciding happened.”
That night, the well hums again, colder this time, higher up, like it’s calling down from somewhere with thin air and steep rock. Oliver and Lilly are about to find out exactly what Grandpa’s story was preparing them for.
That’s the opening of The Climb Before Dawn, Book Two in the Tales from the Well series. Books One through Six are all out now, and if you haven’t started with Oliver, Lilly, and the well that started it all, there’s no better week to begin.
The Blessing
May you find one hour this week with nothing scheduled into it, and may you let it be exactly as unproductive as it needs to be. May you remember that Jesus himself sought out quiet, even knowing it might get interrupted, and modeled rest as a practice and not a reward. And when your own quiet place gets crowded before you’ve even sat down, may you still have compassion enough left to meet what shows up.
“Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.”
See you next Thursday.
— The Well & The Word