Friday, March 1, 2013

Five Minute Friday: Ordinary

Joining in again this week with Liso-Jo and Five Minute Friday. Five minutes of writing from the heart. This week's word is "ordinary". Go.



“It’s amazing what you guys are doing! I could never do that!”

‘We are so very, very ordinary,’ I think to myself each and every time I hear those words. 'I wish you could see that part.'

Because while there is jungle and river and village and canoe, there is also dishes and bedtime and whining children and “we forgot the toilet paper!”

As I battle every day through the ordinary that fills our lives only sprinkled with brief moments of extraordinary that come from God Himself, I feel very small and unworthy and unprepared for all of this. I tell a friend that I feel like there is nothing I have to offer and she reminds me that it’s the ordinary ones that God used the most in Scripture and today is no different.

So I write and share and live and try to convey this: we are just ordinary people striving to glorify and extraordinary God.

And aren’t we all? Even those we serve and those who give so we can go and those who go—all just ordinary. It’s not until the God of the extraordinary gets His hands on the molding clay that we are turned into something beautiful and even then it’s not our beauty, but His reflecting through us.

So there will be babies born with nothing and Indians traveling for days to hospitals and flights to carry sick to the doctors and all of this. But those dishes still stack up and didn’t I already sweep twice today?

And it’s those ordinary moments that seep humility into our lives so that God can be big 
and we can remain so very small. 

 Washing dishes in the river... Ordinary Indian life.

2 comments:

  1. I always love to hear from missionaries as I am one myself. Lived in Ukraine many years and now for a while back in the homeland, but surely bound to go abroad again. And yes, have I heard that phrase! And yes, we are all pretty normal people, living our lives where He has planted us. I think with Him nothing is ordinary, if we let Him do His thang. Blessings on your transition to the jungle!

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  2. I love this-- "And it’s those ordinary moments that seep humility into our lives so that God can be big
    and we can remain so very small." I think sometimes the ordinary is the sacred. The routine. The I-could-do-this-in-my-sleep. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete

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