There was a time, though, back in middle school, when I longed to be ordinary or inconspicuous.  (You all remember middle school.)  I pleaded with my mom to get contact lenses and get rid of those huge brown plastic frames I was wearing already wired back together after the dodgeball incident.  I would try to convince my dad to buy me just one pair of Nikes.  Not even the cool ones, but just any pair so that I could fit in with the other private school kids. Sometimes, I even tried to pretend that I hadn’t done my homework or done it right.  Anything to slough off that label of “brainiac” and fit in.

But that was a phase.  For coiled up deep inside me was a drive that compelled me to succeed – to be the best.  Oftentimes we can blame such cases on overzealous parents, coaches, teachers, but that would be unfair in my story.  My fear of being ordinary rested squarely on my own shoulders. 

While I was at Duke, I was somewhat comforted and yet alarmed to find I didn’t face my phobia alone.  In fact, it appeared my case might even be a mild one compared to every undergraduate I watched claw their way over one another to be just that much better than their peers.  At such a select university it seemed the quest for being extraordinary had become the status quo.

Well, wouldn’t you know, while I’m striving for extraordinary, God is doing something else.  In the scripture we read earlier, God’s calling of Abraham marks a monumental shift in the Genesis story. Chapters 1-11 paint a universal picture – the story of the entire world through creation, sin, destruction through the flood and  salvation through Noah, and then the entrance of sin again through the Tower of Babel.  Now, in chapter 12, God has decided to work through one man to bless the world.  Isn’t that extraordinary!  What kind of man must this Abraham be? The text is sparse with details – no real character study, no reflection on how Abraham felt about his call. The Lord tells Abraham to “go” and in verse 4 “so Abraham went.”  That simple.  For all we know, Abraham was some average, ordinary guy.  Wait a minute.  That appears to be exactly the theological point the scripture wants us to see. 

One theologian has noted, “What really matters is not whether Abraham is good or bad or cowardly or heroic, but that God pursues his design for the welfare of the human family with people like that – in other words, people like us.”  [See Lewis Smedes quoted in Genesis: A Living Conversation, by Bill Moyers.  NY: Doubleday, 1996.]

This isn’t the last time God will call what appears to be an ordinary person.  God calls a stuttering Moses to lead God’s people out of Egypt.  God calls Jesse’s youngest son, the shepherd-boy, to be the mighty King David.  God calls a frightened teenage girl named Mary to carry God’s own son.  “Behold” the prophet Isaiah exclaims, “I am doing a new thing, Even now it is springing to light.”  Isn’t that extraordinary!  God can use any ordinary person to be a blessing to the world.

But I bet after Abraham’s call his life took a different turn.  I am sure he had some amazing stories.  There’s the one he tells about Sarah, when she woke up in the middle of the night and Abraham was packing the bags.  Sarah asked, “What are you doing?”  Packing.  I heard a voice from God, and he told us to head out to a new country.”  Right, Abraham, voices.  Yeah.  Go back to bed.  Imagine him convincing her it was real.

Or how about that time angels came and told Sarah she would have a child.  And she laughed.  “Why, we’re all ready card carrying members of the AARP.  We can’t have a child.”  Oh, but it was part of that amazing promise.

 Or there is the somber one Abraham tells about the time he took his son Isaac to the top of Mt. Moriah and tied him up for sacrifice.  “I didn’t know what God was doing then,” he would say.  Amazing stories of an incredibly extraordinary life. 

But in between these stories lay many days of ordinary.  God’s promise didn’t really include play by play instructions.  Most days Abraham followed his nomadic lifestyle – walking, herding his sheep, pitching his tent.  And most days Sarah cleaned, cooked the food, built the fire.  What was extraordinary about those days?  What can we make of our lives in the ordinariness of the everyday?     

What does the church do?  In the Christian calendar, we find ourselves right at the beginning of what we call Ordinary Time.  We have passed through the seasons of Advent and Lent.  No more advent wreaths, or services of darkness.  No more fiery tongues of Pentecost.  Now we are stuck with 26 weeks of ordinary. You think we could have found something else to celebrate.  But maybe ordinary time is there for a reason.  Maybe it helps us to learn how to live in-between the spiritual highs and lows of the faith.

If we are honest, we all struggle with being ordinary and learning how to talk about the ordinariness of life. One wildly popular new outlet some people have discovered to reflect on their lives are web-long (blogs for short).  Almost like online diaries.  Several of our Wilshire members have them – but you’ll have to figure out who they are on your own.  In reading someone’s blog, you often get a perspective into their daily life.  And it doesn’t take much to get hooked.  I stumbled onto one this week that shared my same fear of the ordinary-and so I kept reading, absorbed into this woman’s life.

The blog is written by a self-described single 20-something Jewish woman in New York City.  She writes, "As I meet more and more people in this crazy city, I keep wondering, what is it that differentiates me from being just another 20-something female living in Manhattan???"

A corollary of this is the challenge of identifying myself. I remember when I was in college, it was quite easy to describe myself to new people I met. I go to X University where I am majoring in Y and Z. These days though, it seems that the first question out of a new acquaintance's mouth is: So, what do you do?

What DO I do? Well, it's a complicated answer. I've ended up in an industry that has nothing to do with what I studied in college, and am now working independently for a very small company... i.e. no office, no benefits... also, no strings attached, which I like! But, alas, it does not provide me with a satisfactory "identity" to appease those "so-what-do-you-do?"-ers.

Anyway, I doubt that it's my "calling," but only time will tell. It is unfortunate that books like What Color is your Parachute just seem to rehash the obvious. I know that I need to find a job where I can interact with people, put my persuasion skills to use and not be chained behind a desk all day. While I don't want to sell my soul to the corporate world, I also don't wish to work for pennies for a cause I support. Nor could I waste the majority of my waking hours on something that is utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.” [website: http://singlegalnyc.blogspot.com/2004/06/curse-of-being-ordinaryand-other.html]

My blogger friend faces the question, what are we to make of the natural ordinariness of daily life that seems so much like drudgery?  From hip New York city dweller to young Baptist preacher in Texas, we are concerned with the same issues.  So is the contemporary spiritual writer, Kathleen Norris, writing from her farmhouse on the plains of South Dakota.

Norris has a short book with a great title, The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and “Women’s Work.”  “Quotidian” means “belonging to the everyday; commonplace, ordinary.”  She discusses real daily tasks like laundry, liturgy, and what derogatorily has been labeled women’s work – things that never end.  But as Norris redefines the ordinary, daily living no longer becomes a curse but a blessing.  As she describes it, “We have tried to do too much, pretending to be in such control of things that we are indispensable.” [Norris, 26].  Sounds like me, taking great comfort in being busy.

Norris challenges us again, “Our culture’s ideal self, especially the accomplished, professional self, rises above necessity, the humble everyday, ordinary tasks that are best left to unskilled labor.”  We tell ourselves that these “little things” – don’t really matter, and that daily personal and household chores are of no significance to us spiritually. [Norris, 40] When we do that: a) we consciously or unconsciously belittle all those workers and our own family members who spend their lives in such tasks; and b) we also relegate God to a select few arenas in life and deprive ourselves of experiencing God in the everyday.  What if instead of simply coping with the ordinariness of life, we opened ourselves up to it?

Norris makes clear that she believes the true mystics of the quotidian are not just monks contemplating holiness in isolation and utter silence.  Instead they are “those who manage to find God in a life filled with noise, the demands of other people and relentless daily duties that can consume the self.” [Norris, 70] Those people might look more like us.  Like young parents juggling child-rearing and making a living.  Or our jobs where we wear three or four different hats because there are more jobs to fill than people or budget to fill them.  If we are wise in our daily living, we will treasure the rare moments of solitude and silence that come, and not use them simply to escape and distract ourselves. Turning on the TV.  Turning up the car’s radio.  Instead take those moments to look for a sign of God’s presence in the beauty of daily life – a moment that has the power to open our hearts to God.  In these moments, we will see the extraordinary work of God.

Ripe cantaloupe. That first fresh cup of coffee. Sitting on the front porch with the whole family. First steps.  The first tomato sandwich of the summer. The kids in the backseat.  Your granddad’s jokes. Homemade bread. Holding hands. Caring for an ailing parent.  Ice cream. The smell of Christmas.  An early morning prayer. 

In his life, British author G.K. Chesterton tried to capture this wonder of life with his winsome wit and his theology.  He said, “We feel no wonder at ordinary things; and so it is no wonder that ordinary things disappoint us.”  In describing the happiness that Chesterton always embodied, his friends said he could be made happy by the sudden yellowness of a dandelion.  But we do not find dandelions delightful if we are constantly comparing them to orchids.  Chesterton’s response, “It is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt.” [David W. Fagerberg, “The Essential Chesterton,” First Things 101 (March 2000): 23-26.] When we are always looking for what is next or what we do not have then we never can appreciate what we have been given.  And dare we not forget that it all has been given - given to us by God’s grace.  “We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment…but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are, not where we wish we were.” [Norris, 12]

God started with Abraham where he was. But God called him from his country and from everything he knew. God sent this ordinary man on an extraordinary mission.  The initial imperative to “go” was crystal clear but after that God leaves a little ambiguity.  We are told the Lord appeared to Abraham at Shechem and Abraham later invoked the Lord’s name in the hill country.  Each time he built an altar, a marker to remind him of the meaningful spiritual experiences he had there.  But in between these times were a lot of ordinary wanderings. 

As Abraham was busy journeying on day by day in the desert, I imagine he stopped every once in awhile to look at his life – to see where he had been and where he was.  To see whether following this call was really worth it.  And only then as he looked back through all the ordinary years did he began to see all the extraordinary experiences he had never seen before.  He saw how God had spoken to him through the million little particulars of life.  And he realized that just as God blessed him in so many ways, he too had learned how to be a blessing to those around him.

So maybe the fear of being ordinary is a little off track.  Instead maybe we should be more afraid of stepping over God’s extraordinary presence at each point along the way.  Each day.  Each moment.  With a God big enough to be in the ordinariness of life, surely we have nothing to fear.