Courage in the Ordinary

The other day I was listening to The White Horse Inn radio program and they had Tish Harrison Warren as a guest. I've never heard of Warren before, but I loved what she had to say about their topic this week: Courage in the Ordinary.

She recently wrote a blog post dealing with that very topic. In it she pointed out the desire that many Christians have to do something radical or revolutionary for Christ, a desire that she not only has experienced, but acted upon through various ministry efforts throughout her early adult years.

Despite this desire to be extraordinary for Christ though, she has come to see the value in the ordinary.

Now, I’m a thirty-something with two kids living a more or less ordinary life. And what I’m slowly realizing is that, for me, being in the house all day with a baby and a two-year-old is a lot more scary and a lot harder than being in a war-torn African village. What I need courage for is the ordinary, the daily every-dayness of life. Caring for a homeless kid is a lot more thrilling to me than listening well to the people in my home. Giving away clothes and seeking out edgy Christian communities requires less of me than being kind to my husband on an average Wednesday morning or calling my mother back when I don’t feel like it.

She continues...

And here is the embarrassing truth: I still believe in and long for a revolution. I still think I can make a difference beyond just my front door. I still want to live radically for Jesus and be part of him changing the world. I still think mediocrity is dull, and I still fret about settling. 

But I’ve come to the point where I’m not sure anymore just what God counts as radical. And I suspect that for me, getting up and doing the dishes when I’m short on sleep and patience is far more costly and necessitates more of a revolution in my heart than some of the more outwardly risky ways I’ve lived in the past. And so this is what I need now: the courage to face an ordinary day — an afternoon with a colicky baby where I’m probably going to snap at my two-year old and get annoyed with my noisy neighbor — without despair, the bravery it takes to believe that a small life is still a meaningful life, and the grace to know that even when I’ve done nothing that is powerful or bold or even interesting that the Lord notices me and is fond of me and that that is enough.

None of this is, of course, to criticize caring for the homeless or providing help somewhere on the other side of the globe. It merely reminds us that while we often spend much time and energy "looking for ministry opportunities," in reality we have many of them staring us in the face each day. And though they might not seem as glamorous or important as others, we must remember that we serve a God whose economy is radically different than our own.