THE ORDINARY LIFE
It was Sunday morning. Parked three pews back in yet another church service, I held my head in my hands, probably leading some to think I was praying. I wasn’t. My shoulders were hunched over by despair, draped around me like a damp blanket, but I couldn’t think why. I had committed no great sin, and even doubt, that familiar kill-joy foe that often stalks me during Christian gatherings high on certainty, was not the source of my struggle.
The smiling greeters had been warm and welcoming enough; the worship band was skilful and enthusiastic without resorting to cheerleading or insisting we all burble with ecstasy. So why the niggle that buzzed around my brain like a pesky mosquito? When at last we passed the post of the final amen, I was left with a feeling of breathless claustrophobia. Why?
Reflecting later, I decided that things had gone seriously wrong during the preaching. The speaker said nothing theologically controversial, and I had no qualms about his sincerity. But hope had drained from me as he had painted the Christian life as endlessly epic. He had urged the congregation to expect more of God’s activity in their everyday lives, to become full-time ‘conduits of power’.
At first glance, there was nothing much wrong with that. But I was wearied by the suggestion that every day has to sparkle with significance, punctuated by messages from God and miraculous happenings. Life, including life for the Christian, includes plenty of dull days that can be filed away under the heading of ‘Not much happened.’ I’m not suggesting God is distant or uninvolved; but He isn’t a bottled genie who fixes every scrape, or a chatterer who endlessly blethers in our ear about trivia. And if healing miracles are as freely available as the preacher suggested, then we should cancel a few services and head for the nearest cancer ward. Much as I’d like to live every day in the spiritual equivalent of a five-star resort, there are seasons when we all feel like we’re languishing in the bleak landscape of a simmering wilderness. Mother Teresa, who gave herself so heroically in serving the poor and dying in Calcutta, admitted that for thirty years she had sensed little of the presence of God. Writing to her friend, Michael van der Peet, she confessed, ‘The silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.’ Her days were heroic, but not epic.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe in epic days. I became a Christian partly because of a miraculous healing, and I am in ministry because a guest speaker prophesied over me – and God told him my first and last name, which is anything but vague. I drove my car off the side of a cliff once and my screaming turned to laughter when the car was somehow lifted back onto the road by an invisible hand. Don’t think I’m trying to handcuff God or render Him impotent, or worse still say He doesn’t care. It’s just that I also know that there are days, weeks, and sometimes even decades where not much happens.
And then I realised the preacher was projecting his life experience onto the congregation – he was travelling around to conferences, prayer gatherings and summit meetings with other leaders. His vocabulary was shaped by the context in which he did life. And so he thundered we should rise up and shift the atmosphere in the nation – we were going to break through, if we secured our inheritance, and embraced our prophetic destiny. Eh? What does all that mean on a Monday morning to the man who makes widgets in a factory, or the woman who cleans the toilets in a motorway service stop?
And those who do live in the world of Christian events don’t live endlessly thrilled. This morning, I didn’t wake up, do a triple backflip through the air, catch my tambourine as I flew, or land in my cowboy boots with a cry of ‘Hallelujah!. Jesus has washed my sins away, but I still have to clean the car, get stuck on the M25, cough when I have a cold, and get nervous when the credit card bill arrives.
So is God still in the miracle-working business? Absolutely. But one of the greatest miracles of all is to see followers of Jesus, doing ordinary and sometimes dishwater-dull tasks with excellence and faithfulness. The Irish novelist Colum McCann is right: it takes courage to live the ordinary life.
But we can also cherish the ordinary life as something that is quite beautiful. Perhaps we should look at those lack-lustre days with renewed appreciation. I remember when Kay and I visited sweltering Banda Aceh, Indonesia, the city that suffered the greatest losses from the Boxing Day earthquake and tsunami that followed in 2004. On that day, something quite extraordinary happened to the sea, which bunched itself into a wave and delivered a knockout punch to the town. Over 200,000 died here in that pummelling, including a coastal fishing village that just disappeared off the map in seconds.
When Kay and I visited Aceh back in 2004, one morning I sipped coffee with Wahuel, a delightful smiling man who told me that I looked young from the neck down (almost a compliment), but who had lost both his children to that wicked wave. His wife’s entire family were wiped out. And then I chatted with a giggling Nurlaila, a delightful fifteen-year-old whose home was still the temporary barracks hastily thrown up in the wake of that terrible day. Both her parents perished in that awful sea; and just seconds after telling me that most dreadful news, she burst into singing – in perfect English – ‘I believe in angels’ from the Abba classic, ‘I have a dream’. I’m sure she does, but for a moment I wondered how. There are so many here whose lives have been smashed to smithereens by that ominously historic day. Mass graves abound, anonymous resting places for thousands; many were never found, swallowed up by the ravenous beast that was the sea.
All of which makes a restoration of relative normality a delight to behold. Back in 2004 we visited the Community and Children’s Centre run by Children on the Edge, the charity originally launched by Body Shop founder the late Anita Roddick. It was a hive of bustling normality. Kindergarten children giggle on the swings. Computer skills classes are held in one room; embroidery in another. In the large hall, a children’s choir practice their performance for an upcoming concert. All very ordinary, and wonderful with it.
Perhaps some of us are suffering from the raging disease that afflicts all who know for sure where their next meal is coming from – boredom. The ordinary looks rather dull. Why not pause again, and be grateful for those days of quiet predictability, where nothing much happens, including nothing much that is bad? Somehow, the ordinary can start to look rather magnificent.