God in the Ordinary

My life isn’t often very flashy.  A lot of my days are spent caring for tiny humans, making food for my family, sweeping up crushed Goldfish crackers, changing diapers, and moderating sibling disputes.  I don’t have a lot of time to study the Bible, or to have uninterrupted conversations with people about how God is working in their lives.  And sometimes it’s tempting to confuse the smallness of my tasks with the absence of God’s power in my life.  Can God really use me, with my full hands and thin patience and perpetual tiredness?  

That’s when the Christmas story is so heartening.  The ordinariness of it.  Mary and Joseph have to go pay their taxes.  Jesus comes as a tiny baby.  Mary’s high and lofty calling as Mother of God looks like learning to breastfeed and chasing a toddler.  Angels visit the shepherds in the middle of their routine nightshift.  Everyone is doing the tasks that need to get done—often the tasks that no one else wants to do—and God shows up.  

God works his rescue in the middle of and through ordinary life.  

So if you feel stretched thin taking care of your growing children or your aging parents; if you are battling an illness or addiction that consumes all your time and energy; if you are working multiple jobs or taking extra shifts because your family is depending on your extra income—if you feel like there is no time for God to move, or your life is too small of a stage for a display of his power—God is there.  God loves to show up in the ordinary, to use the regular stuff of our human existence to bring His kingdom here on earth.  God meets us exactly where we are, in the midst of doing the things that just need to be done.  

Here’s the catch: we have to be open and watching.  The Spirit’s movement in our lives may not be as hard to miss as choirs of lightning robed angels in the middle of a night sky, but God is at work, and uses our everyday routines, our places of work (even the hard ones), our homes, as beautiful stages for a grand display of his power, love, and redemption.  

As we relay in our song “Angels, We Have Heard” in the voice of the announcing angel to the shepherds:

I bring news, good news of greatest joy!  
It’s for you, for all the weary world
Rest has come. Peace is here.

The good news of His peace and rest is for you - and matters for your everyday, ordinary life - this Advent.  

Jill, for Ordinary Time

You can also listen to our re-tuned version of “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” for another song with a similar theme. For more Christmas songs see our Christmas Playlist.

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