Visualize
Ordinary: Of no special quality or interest; commonplace; unexceptional.[1]
“There was nothing beautiful or majestic about his appearance” –Isaiah 53:2b
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When our kids were young, my sacred alone time became five am workouts at the local Community Center gym. Five days a week I’d leave a “just in case,” bottle for my husband and drive down the street to work out with my gym family—a group of mostly elderly and middle-aged men and women. One morning after my usual gym run, I slowed my little Prism to turn onto our street when I saw policemen in black, bullet-proof vests and helmets blocking off all entry. Concerned, I turned down the next side road, attempting to head home through the back alley, but as I inched forward into the alley, my eyes caught sight of the local SWAT team lying still on asphalt under cars, pointing firearms towards the fourplex next-door to ours. A female cop stepped out from behind the trees, helmet on, firearm on ample hip, and approached me brusquely, “No entry allowed, but I can escort you to the library if you like.” With no cell phone and no choice, I followed the cop across the street to our local library branch and asked that she call my husband to let him know where I was.
Jon’s memory of that phone call is a gruff woman’s voice saying matter-of-factly, “I’m so-and-so with the OP police department. I have your wife at the library. She’s safe.” Jon immediately dressed the six-month-old and corralled our two toddlers to walk across the street to my rescue. When he opened our screen door, four policemen in helmets with rifles drawn blocked his path, “I’m just trying to find my wife,” he explained. They offered to escort him wherever he needed to go, but couldn’t tell him what was going on or how long it would last.
About six hours later, the SWAT team got to the bottom of the domestic stand-off holding our neighborhood captive. Apparently, a couple down the street fought over what they should watch on their new flat screen TV—the girlfriend tossed the remote at the screen, shattering it. The boyfriend retaliated with a litany of empty threats, then flew out the door in a fit of rage. The girlfriend got the last word by calling the cops and letting them know a dangerous man with access to an arsenal of weapons was loose in the neighborhood. Nearly eight hours later, the SWAT team found this “dangerous” man down the street, asleep at a friend’s house.
By then the news vans were circling our neighborhood, ready to report every juicy detail, and our neighbors were only too happy to oblige. Mortified at the thought of someone seeing us on the local news in our low-income ‘hood, I pulled the blinds and told the boys “No one goes out till the news crews are gone!”
I peeked through the plastic window slats, spying on the neighbors lining up to be interviewed by journalists with cameras and mics. No longer ordinary invisibles living in the “armpit of the city,” our neighbors transformed into somebodies with stories to tell. The mere anticipation of a one-second spot on the evening news brought new light and color to their faces. Chronically overlooked as unexceptional, our neighbors longed—as every human does—to be special.
Jesus himself was nothing special in the eyes of the world. He wasn’t the type of guy that warranted a double-take on the street. No one paused to say “Oh. Wow! Did you see who that was? Jesus!” God could have sent him to earth looking like the next Sexiest Man Alive or with the charisma of the Greatest Showman. But he didn’t. Jesus showed up as one of us—an ordinary man, born to a common carpenter, who blended into his non-descript hometown. When Jesus returned home to Nazareth with wisdom to share, his neighbors scoffed, “He’s just the carpenter’s son! We know his family, and his sisters still live here. Who does he think he is!?”[2] Jesus’ neighbors saw nothing special in him and took offense to the idea that he could be anything other than ordinary, just like them.
Jesus chose to leave his position as the son of the Creator and descend into the ordinariness of human existence. Jesus, “who, being in very nature, God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself.”[3]
Humans, though we often try, can never surpass the beauty of our Creator, and aren’t meant to. We are meant to rest in being ordinary humans loved by an extraordinary God. When we embrace who we were meant to be, we wake up to the beauty of our very own lives. As poet and author Judith Viorst articulates,
“I’ll have no trumpets, triumphs, trails of glory.
It seems the woman I’ve turned out to be
Is not the heroine of some grand story.
But I have learned to find the poetry
In what my hands can touch, my eyes can see.
The pleasures of an ordinary life.”[4]
Accepting your own bit of ordinary life is extraordinarily rare. But I’ve learned that when I stop trying to be extraordinary like God, and accept that I am no more or less than I ought to be, I live present to the pleasures of my ordinary life.
Ponder
What might it look like for you to accept your own bit of ordinary and live it to the fullest?
Pray
Inhale: You took on ordinary. . .
Exhale: Help me accept my own . . .
- You can read the other posts in this series here.
[1] Dictionary.com
[2] Matthew 13: 55-57, paraphrased.
[3] Philippians 2: 6-8, NIV, Biblegateway.com
[4] “The Pleasures of Ordinary Life.” https://allpoetry.com/The-Pleasures-of-Ordinary-Life
Pursued 