When It All Feels Ordinary

Our days and weeks here in St. Louis are all fairly ordinary. My time is spent cooking, cleaning, and caring for children. Tea parties are an everyday occurrence. Forts are built and taken down. The laundry piles up and diminishes and somehow piles up again just as quickly. We visit the zoo and library, and Emmylou looks forward to Sunday school each week. Sam goes to class and studies and visits the hospital. We have a somewhat peaceful rhythm to our life at home - minus Sam's frequently changing class and church schedules. But in a world that thrives on "more"; our ordinary days can quickly seem boring, lazy, and disappointing.

That last one is particularly hard to deal with. The notion that my life is somehow disappointing. I have wrestled with this thought before. Lately, I have found myself wrestling with it again. And I have a sneaky suspicion that I am not alone; that this struggle is not because I am a stay-at-home mom who lives relatively ordinary days. This struggle, these thoughts belong to the enemy. An enemy who would love nothing more than to have us keeping score, running circles, and searching for the ever-elusive "more". I suspect the banker, CEO, pastor, secretary, doctor, nurse, and teacher have felt this way before too.

As I drove home from the grocery store, I poured my heart out to God. I desperately tried to articulate the feelings I was wrestling yet again, feeling worn out with the struggle. Then somewhere in the very depths of my heart was this thought:

 "There are no unimportant tasks in My kingdom."

I suppose this is what Paul was saying when he talked about the body of Christ to the Corinthian church.

"For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body." (1 Corinthians 12:14-20)

In His kingdom, every task, gift, and position is not only important, it is absolutely necessary. It is vocation. I spent the next several days reflecting on this verse; still wrestling thoughts of being ordinary, boring, or disappointing. Later in the week while washing dishes, I began to recall words, people, names, tasks, and stories from the Bible: 

Fish. Loaves. Water. Wine. Five stones. A manger. A cross.

Mary, a girl. David, a shepherd. The disciples, fishermen. Elizabeth, a mother.

Noah built. David fought. Mary obeyed. Disciples followed. Martha served.

Because, you see, our God is the champion of the ordinary. He transforms ordinary people, ordinary moments, ordinary objects, and ordinary tasks into something sacred.

So maybe it isn't about working hard to make my life extraordinary; because there is nothing I, in my own strength, can do. Maybe it is about going gently through my days, constantly handing over my ordinary circumstances to an extraordinary God. Maybe it is about humility, about contentment, about knowing, in the very depths of my being, that there are no unimportant tasks in the kingdom of God. Cooking, cleaning, reading; these tasks, when performed in His name, they matter. And as I nestle into this truth, I see God transform my ordinary moments into something sacred.