God In the Ordinary
Some days stand out as extraordinary. Special celebrations, landmark events, brilliant successes. Weddings, dream job offers, long-awaited events, the trip of a lifetime. They are scattered across the squares on our calendars, adding bursts of vivid color and vivacious flavor to our lives.
Lining the weeks and months between these colorful squares are hundreds of days that are anything but extraordinary. Days made up of grocery shopping, toilet scrubbing, and egg scrambling. Days in which we face the same routine morning after morning. Days wherein the view looks the same as it did yesterday.
No matter how much we love our job, our spouse, our family, our home, we all find ourselves in rhythms that are normal to us, rhythms that feel incredibly average. We sit in our little (or big) home in suburbia (or the busy city or the remote countryside) and face our daily list of tasks and think, if only I was living a different life. A life that was more adventurous, more exotic, more daring. If only my life weren’t so ordinary.
We might move, take on an exciting ministry, change jobs, get a more prestigious degree. But after the novelty wears off, there we are again, living an ordinary life. Maybe it looks different, maybe it’s a little more impressive on paper. But at the end of the day, we feel no more extraordinary than we did before. Our calendar squares continue to hold more ordinary days than extraordinary ones.
Ordinary time makes up the bulk of our life.
We can resent this if we want. We can fight it. We can book flights to new destinations, change careers every other year, pursue fame, seek out unique opportunities. We can finagle our way into living an extraordinary life by brute force. And we may be pleased with the results, or we might fall into a heap, exhausted and depleted because we’ve spent all our energy and effort getting away from the very thing that offers the most.
Ordinary life—the life of packing lunches and sweeping floors, the life of explaining quarter notes to eight-year-olds and carting preschoolers to soccer practice, the life of scrubbing the same toilet week after week and scrambling eggs for the millionth time—this life is where God meets us.
Sure, there are moments of lightning and fire and angels and life-changing revelations. Yes, we have a big God who does big things and works in big ways.
More often than not, though, it is in the daily, the routine, the ordinary, that we will encounter God. The moments that seem mundane, run-of-the-mill, and even boring are precisely where he likes to make himself known. Just like he did to a shepherd boy who one day became king, or to fishermen who would become apostles, or to a teenage girl going about her business in the small village of Nazareth.
So let us continue through our ordinary days with expectancy. Maybe today won’t be significant, profound, or exciting. But maybe, over a shared meal or a cup of coffee, during another trip to the park or a day at the pool, while scrambling eggs or scrubbing toilets, maybe God will appear.
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Greer Oharah is a lover of authentic words and strong coffee. She is the founder of OrdinaryEpiphanies.com where she writes on encountering God in the sacredness of daily life. She is a nanny, choral accompanist, and piano teacher. Her home is nestled in the heart of the Rocky Mountains where she lives with her gallant, school-teaching husband.
