The religion of Christianity is full of extraordinary beliefs: that an invisible God created the entire universe; that this God became a man who lived and died on earth; that this dead man was resurrected to live forever; that we too, through belief in Him, gain eternal life, and can look forward to a heaven with no suffering, only joy and love; and so on.
The reason it is so vital for Christians to focus on the ordinary is that the Christian life cannot be understood in extraordinary terms. Who was looking for the Messiah to be born as a baby in a manger? Or who could have expected that He would die the common death of a criminal? If we’re looking for the extraordinary, we’ll miss the hand of God.
We have this expression ‘living life to the full’. But how can we live life to the full when life is, apparently, so full of mundane things and unremarkable events?
Every year, for nearly 40 years, I’ve written a Christmas story. Some of the best are collected in my book Twenty-One Candles: Stories for Christmas. Now here’s this year’s offering, entitled “The Broken Baby.” Merry Christmas, everyone!
In 1974, a decade before joining the L’Arche community in Toronto, Henri Nouwen made a seven-month retreat at a Trappist monastery called The Genesee. He subsequently published his diary for that period, which ended on Christmas Day. Here is his final entry, dated Wednesday, December 25:
The nice thing about ordinary life is that there’s so much of it. It’s all around us, all the time, so if we can actually learn to like it, we’re home free.
We are marvelous creatures, fearfully and wonderfully made. Yet so much of what we do is utterly mundane.
Everyone has an ordinary life. The Pope has an ordinary life. Movie stars and rock stars have ordinary lives. The person you would most like to be has an ordinary life—every bit as ordinary as yours.
Most of life is ordinary, and God gave us ordinary life as a means of knowing the truth.
I once attended a church conference where a Tent of Prophecy was set up in the parking lot. At some point in the conference we were invited to enter the tent and receive a prophetic word.