Extraordinary in ordinary things

There was a time in my life, actually the majority of my life, that ordinary was a word that appalled me. Who in their right mind strives for ordinary? It is boring, unappealing and simple.

Yet being someone extraordinary meant I had made something of my life. My definition of extraordinary would differ from many people, but at its core was the same desire. I never strived to win the Noble Peace Prize, or taking an idea like Facebook and running with it... Yet I did strive to stand out. I wanted to be the best dressed. I wanted to be the prettiest. I wanted to be the best athlete. I wanted to be noticed. To be honest, I think that is why I took to drinking at such a young age. The drinking uninhibited me and helped push me to grab the most popular vote. I NEEDED to be special, significant.

Getting married and having children changed my priorities, but not my hunger to be extraordinary. I wanted my children to be the cutest and best dressed. They needed to be the gifted athletes. Not only was my worth tallied by how impressed you were with my house, it was always in need of new additions or decorations. We needed to keep up with the Smith's and know everything about them. My weekends were spent heading out to another big event eerily similar to the last one, leaving my children with the well known babysitter. And the following morning was spent gossiping about the Smiths', judging every outfit that was worn, every word that was said, and ALWAYS the question, "Can you believe so and so did that???"

Was I actually extraordinary? No. Hollow? Absolutely. I was sustaining myself solely on peoples’ impressions and opinions, never grasping how fleeting and unreliable those are.

It was not until a couple of years ago that I began to open my eyes to the emptiness of the life that we were leading. It was very painful to tear the thick skin away from our bodies. There is a scene in C.S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader symbolizes the shedding perfectly. Eunice is a boy who was transformed into a dragon, and had tried over and over to shed his scales in order to be a boy again. But in every attempt, the scales fell to the ground only to quickly grow back. Eventually Eunice turned to Aslan, the lion and King of the land, out of desperation.

“Then the Lion said… ‘You will have to let me undress you’
I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.
“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I have ever felt. The only thing that made be able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off…It hurts like a billy, but it is such fun to see it coming away,
… Well he pulled the beastly stuff right off-just as I thought I had done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt. And there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker and more knobbly- looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth skin and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been.”

For both me and Brock, it was a long and painful process to “peel our skin back”. We still struggle daily to live in the Way, but it becomes more woven in with study and in the honesty of friends. Our esteem now comes from our relationship with the Lord not in things of this world.

When Jesus was born, he was delivered in a manger. Not the nicest suite in the hospital, but in a trough surrounded by animals and unpleasant smells. There was no room in the Inn for these unknowns. He was the son of a carpenter and a laborer himself. And when he travelled to spread The Word, he was ORDINARY. He was not attractive to the eyes, he was not dressed well and certainly he wore no crown on his head.

Isaiah 53:2-5


He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
3 He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

In C.S. Lewis's book, The Screwtape Letters, the devil is training his nephew on how to lure people into his grasp. When the nephew expresses concern that his client converting to Christianity, the Devil smirks and lets him know that new Christians are the most vulnerable! They will go to church, look down the pews and realize how ordinary everyone is. They will then think ,"I did not sign up for ordinary!" And it is then that the devil should roll up his sleeves and begin his work.

A couple years have passed. I now find my joys and fulfillment in what has been in front of me for a long time. I find it in Brock, my husband and my best friend. In my Home, where the three boys, Brock and I share the core of our life; laughter, love and intimacy. No longer is it a place of pride. At the ball fields where I go to relax and find peace in the boys energy and solace in friends. No tackle or homerun can improve on their greatness in my heart. The ball fields are also where my friends are. Simple, ordinary friends, who love me and love my children. Don't get me wrong, all of these "simple" friends do extraordinary things- but the core is utter simplicity, without priorities out of whack. And lastly, Church is now a daily event scattered around town and in homes, but more importantly in my heart. On Wednesdays we share fellowshipwith an eclectic group of homeless and businessmen at Haywood Street Congregation. Formally, this would have been a place that we attended to check off the list of “doing good for the community”. But now, we can’t miss it. It is where we are all simply brothers and sisters in Christ with one shared desire... To soak up The Word.

I have 5 t-shirts at home that read “Live Simply”. In AA one of the main motto’s to staying sober is Keep It Simple. If you get too complicated you get lost. I have been lost for a long time. I am happy to be on track. Life is in the simple things, I long to thrive in the ordinary.