God's Calling ~ Holy Ordinary

 

Day three of the nightly challenge to review and remember your day for traces of God’s grace and moments when you felt wanting.  To be sure there are many, many moments in-between.  On this hump-day, this day in-between Sundays, this messy middle moment, I want to invite you into the ordinary of your life.

 

Honestly, not every lunch can be categorized and compartmentalized as either holy or lacking.  Sometimes my sandwich is just a sandwich.  It didn’t taste like manna from heaven and it was not awful, it just was.  The sandwich nourished my body so I could move on to other tasks that day.  Not everything has to be awesome or amazing or the best moment ever.  Not everything that happens to you each day will be able to be put in a neat and tidy column on your piece of paper.  Many moments are in the messy middle.  There was good and there was bad or it just was. 

 

I invite you today to pay attention to those smaller, subtler moments, like lunch.  Or like a meeting.  Or like a doctor’s appointment where everything is fine and the doctor kind of listens to you but clearly needs to get on to the next patient.  Or like driving down the road to pick up milk.  Hold the ordinariness of that in your heart. 

 

I don’t believe Abraham was hanging out in the desert, looking at his watching and thinking, “Well, God should start speaking any time now to call me to be a great nation.”  He was going about his day.  I wonder if God had tried to get Abraham’s attention before, but he was too busy feeding the camels day old bread or raking the sand or patching the tent.  (By the way, I have no idea what Abraham did to fill his days, but I like the image of him tossing old bread to his camel to try to catch.)

 

Maybe God had tried to clear God’s throat and Abraham thought it was a rumble of thunder, so he went inside.  Maybe God had said, “Abraham,” but he thought Sarah needed him so he went to talk to her.  Maybe God had been crying out, “Look at me, look at me,” but Abraham was too busy replaying a conversation with his neighbor in his mind thinking that next time he is totally going to tell that neighbor what he really thinks!

 

The holy in the ordinary.  Our calling coming not in moments of spectacular or set apart, but in the sacredness of this in-between day called, “Wednesday.”

 

May the words you have just read come to life with God’s spirit in life-giving ways this day.  Amen.