Extraordinarily Ordinary

I have had a book on my shelf forever (I inherited it from my father) called, Extraordinary Living for Ordinary Men, by Samuel Shoemaker. It’s a book about Christian living but it’s the title that has always intrigued me. When I think of the word extraordinary I think of a great adventure, an heroic act, or some amazing talent. The word sounds to me like it should be reserved for people like Teddy Roosevelt or Alexander the Great or Mother Teresa. My life doesn’t feel extraordinary. Most of the time it just feels, well normal, swinging back and forth between boring and dull.

But I do have to admit that periodically it has been punctuated with some things that I guess could be described as extraordinary. Standing at the altar with the most beautiful woman in the world; holding my daughters seconds after they were born; performing a wedding in a hot air balloon; pastoring a church that ended up pastoring me; feeling the strength and power of God when I had neither. These have been pretty extraordinary experiences that have marked my ordinary life.

I think that life shouldn't be looked at as extraordinary or ordinary as if it can be one or the other. I think that life is a combination of both of these. We need each one to define the other. We know when something is extraordinary because we know what ordinary feels like. And things often seem ordinary only when compared to some extraordinary event or ideal.

When I think of Christmas I think of both of these words together. It certainly was extraordinary. Angels singing in the sky, a teenage virgin giving birth, wise men finding a little obscure home in Bethlehem simply by following a star (have you ever tried to follow a star?). But it was also profoundly ordinary. A stable, a donkey, a poor young couple, taxes. The town of Bethlehem didn’t even know what was happening. It was ordinary. But the miracle of Christmas, the miracle of the Incarnation (God with us), is what happened when the truly extraordinary comes into contact with the truly ordinary. When heaven touches earth. When angels sing to humans. When God becomes a man. When thousands of years of prophecy are fulfilled in one single, ordinary night.

What happens when the ordinary comes into contact with the extraordinary? Life! Our life. And when the extraordinary mixes in with the ordinary it’s sometimes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Ordinary things begin to take on extraordinary qualities. We begin to see that our sometimes dull and boring lives are really just a reflection of something much greater. In the ordinariness of human life God sent an extraordinary gift. Jesus was born into the mundane, business as usual, life of a small insignificant village. Most of them never realized that in the midst of their ordinary lives something truly extraordinary was happening.

God help us not to make the same mistake.