I’m so mad at myself.

Back in like 2023 or even 2022, I came across an article talking about April 11, 1954. It was called “the most boring day in history.” I made a note to myself (which, in my world, means I sent an email to myself as a daily reminder) to write a devo about it to release on Thursday, April 11, 2024, 70 years after the day in question. Now, you might be thinking, “but Matthew, 2024 was LAST year,” and yes, that’s true. I completely forgot to write the devo last year. Instead, it was about, I dunno, May or so, when I remembered. So I set ANOTHER reminder to myself, and planned on writing and publishing the devo on Thursday, April 10, 2025, one day before the 71st anniversary (I don’t write devos on Friday; it’s in my North Heights contract. Iron clan contract, it is). So here we are, April 23rd, 2025. Two weeks later. I forgot again.

So here we are, with me mad at myself, but now I’m just going to write the thing before I forget.

April 11, 1954 was, apparently, the most boring day in history.

Every day something happens. There are always headlines atop the newspapers. Sometimes they are sensational. Sometimes they feature breaking news. Not every day is a “JAPAN BOMBS HAWAII” headline, or an “ELVIS DEAD” headline. Sometimes it’s a little more low-key, but always there’s something worth talking about. April 11, 1954, however, was a date scientifically proven to be the most innocuous, the most unremarkable, the most boring and uneventful day in modern history. That date was chosen by a British computer scientist who developed a program that could create and curate a databases of newspapers, news broadcasts, radio reports, and such like. After creating the program, the creator decided to scan the results to see which date (in the 20th-21st century) had the least number of “things” that happened.

April 11, 1954 was the winner… or loser?

That’s not to say nothing happened on that date. Belgium had a general election, though the results were not surprising and nothing major happened as a result. Some sporting events took place. The lead singer of the band Squeeze was born, and of course, the date would go on to be dubbed the most boring day ever, so that, itself, is a distinction.

Is there a spiritual point to all this, I can hear you asking. Yes, there is.

Roughly 273,000 people were born on April 11, 1954. About 126,000 people died on April 11, 1954. Some 80,000 people got married on that date. Some 75,000 people lost their job on that date. Some 75 million people read their Bibles on that date. Those statistics are approximations, based on annual percentages, divided by 365, so it’s hardly exact science, but it paints a fair enough picture to get the point across. The point is this: On any given day, nothing eventful may happen in the world around you, but something, somewhere, is happening to someone. There were 2.7 billion people on Earth in 1954. Today, there are over 8 billion living in our world.

A little is happening to a lot of people, which adds up to a lot happening overall.

When you put things into that perspective, you can’t help but feel infinitesimal. You can’t help but be humbled by how tiny you are compared to so much happening and so many people living around you. You are 1 in 8 billion. You are not just a needle in a haystack, you’re a speck of dust on the tip of a needle in a haystack. You have problems. They may not ever make a headline in any paper, or be the top story in any news broadcast… no one may ever know all that you’re dealing with.

And yet the Lord sees all, knows all, hears all, and sent Jesus to save all.

That’s a comforting thought.

~Matthew