Recognizing The Greatness Of An Ordinary Life

 The Greatness of An Ordinary Life

I love to read books, especially true life books like memoirs and biographies and autobiographies.  Real people doing real things.  Sometimes it’s the life story of someone famous.  Other times its an account of an interesting adventure someone took or a challenge they faced.  In most cases these are ordinary people sharing the treasure from their ordinary lives.

Too often we are unwilling to be ordinary and to see the value in being ordinary.  We think that to have a life that has meaning we have to stand out from everyone else in some way and do something more than others.  I’m not so sure about that.

I read about these examples in the Bible that encourage me.

A young boy went up a hillside one day with his little lunch of five small loaves of bread and two fish.  He ended up being the supplier of a meal for many thousands of people when his ordinary little lunch was put into the hands of Jesus.

“There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are they for so many?”  Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated. So also the fish, as much as they wanted.  John 6:9, 11

Ananias was an ordinary man who lived in Damascus.  One day while he was praying God told him to go and pray for someone who couldn’t see.  Now, it would be a kind thing to do that for anyone but this particular person was someone who had come to Damascus to find believers in Jesus and imprison or kill them.

So Ananias departed and entered the house. And laying his hands on him he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on the road by which you came has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”  And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and he regained his sight.

Acts 9:17-18a

We don’t hear anything else about Ananias but the man he prayed for – he wrote much of the New Testament and travelled around the known world at the time sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ so effectively that many came into relationship with God.  Saul, and Paul as he was later called, made the case for outsiders like you and I to be seen as full participants in God’s plan when we put our faith in what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross.  I doubt we would be sharing these thoughts today were it not for an ordinary guy like Ananias doing an ordinary thing on an ordinary day as God directed him.

What might God be able to accomplish with yours and my ordinary lives if we were to offer them to Him today and follow what He tells us to do?

I love this translation of a couple of verses in Romans 12.  It really challenges me to do something today with my ordinary life:

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.  Romans 12:1-2

Loving God, here are our ordinary lives today.  God helping us, we will do the best we can for you today in all the ordinary things we are involved in – as simply as sleeping and eating, playing, working.  We lift it all up to You today God and ask You to make something good of it all.  We want to know and embrace Your will for our lives today.  Help us not to be distracted by the messages we hear all around us in our culture that want us to live immature self-centered selfish lives.

Instead, we want to fix our attention on You, God, knowing that when we do we will be changed from the inside out and that You will bring out the best in us.   We look forward to the day You have planned for us.  Amen