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When my friend Ray was diagnosed with cancer, he startedreading obituaries. He found comfort in the newspaper’s daily litany of thedeparted. Somehow it made him feel less alone. Like a pilgrim who is travelingin company, instead of someone who stumbles along a difficult path by himself.It was the ordinariness of the thing that helped him the most.I feel something similar whenever I thumb through the oldyearbooks in the faculty lounge. Their faces framed in horn-rimmed and cat-eyeglasses, the images of former faculty gaze back at me with pursed lips or shysmiles. I do not recognize any of their names. They are long forgotten by theschool they once served. Along with them are rank upon rank of students who arealso long gone. They are not remembered either. Indeed, most of them werehardly known when they were here. Like the majority of us, they were justordinary people.It’s hard to be ordinary. Especially in a culture whichworships the heroic. This is particularly true of the Christian world. AuthorWendell Berry writes that the Judeo-Christian tradition favors the heroic. “Thepoets and storytellers in this tradition have tended to be interested in theextraordinary actions of ‘great men’–actions unique in grandeur, such as mayoccur only once in the world” he explains. This is a standard that isimpossible for ordinary people to live up to.As a young Christian, I remember being captivated by thestory of Jim Elliot, one of the five missionaries who lost their lives whenthey attempted to bring the gospel to the Huaorani people of Ecuador. When Iwas finished I got down on my knees and prayed that God would make me a martyrtoo. It was a foolish prayer, prompted more by romanticism than by devotion. Itwas a request born of youthful impatience and a rash hunger for glory. Not atall like the real martyrs, most of whom stumbled into their unique calling.It takes another kind of courage and a different skill setto follow the path assigned to the majority. “The drama of ordinary or dailybehavior also raises the issue of courage, but it raises at the same time theissue of skill; and, because ordinary behavior lasts so much longer than heroicaction, it raises in a more complex and difficult way the issue of perseverance”Berry observes. “It may, in some ways, be easier to be Samson than to be a goodhusband or wife day after day for fifty years.”On some days we feel like we are only going through themotions, merely shuffling along as we pass into oblivion. Instead, we aretraveling in company. We are upholding the world with hundreds of small andordinary efforts. We make the bed. We drive the kids to school and worry aboutthe kind of day they will have. We go to work. We clean the bathroom. We waitfor the end of the world and the dawning of the age to come. It is a kind ofliturgy.Practicing the present requires that we reclaim a sense ofthe eternal significance of the mundane spaces in our lives. We don’t do thisby trying to change the quality of our experience in those areas. The mundanewill still involve the mundane but by accepting the ordinary as a context inwhich God is present. The ordinary tasks assigned to us by our calling and lifesituation are no less meaningful to God than those that are extraordinary. We don’tneed to be attempting great things all the time. We don’t need to make a namefor ourselves. As far as we know from Scripture, Jesus spent most of the firstthirty years of His earthly life doing very little that was
Dr. John Koessler is an award-winning writer and retired faculty emeritus of Moody Bible Institute. John writes the Practical Theology column for Today in the Word and a monthly column on prayer for Mature Living. He is the author of 16 books. His latest book , When God is Silent, is published by Lexham Press. You can learn more about John at https://www.johnkoessler.com.
