Ordinary Time -- A Father's Thoughts

Like most people, my day is usually packed with "to dos" from early morning until late at night. Yesterday was no exception -- I had a full day to say the least. I was rushing from task to task with no time to spare and not a moment to lose -- and Friday is supposed to be my day off! Nonetheless at 4:30, I flew into Grant's school and rushed in to pick him up (most parents of young children know the day really begins when the kids come home). Before I went to get him on the playground I stopped at his "cubbyhole" to pick up his lunch and his daily art (which usually consists of dinosaur colorings or pirate paraphernalia), I was throwing things into his bag when I picked up a yellow sheet of paper with his hand prints on it. I noticed it because it was for "Daddy."

I don't know why "handprints" of our kids tug at our heartstrings, but as a parent, it always gets me. So I stopped and read the paragraph above the hands...it said, "I miss you when we are not together. I am growing up so fast. See how big I have gotten since you saw me last? As I grow I will change a lot, The years will fly right by. You will wonder how I grew up so quick...when and where and why. So look upon this handprint and know this is what I looked like when I was so so small."

I read that semi profound common poem and I was overcome with emotion. I thought about my day..how I had rushed around and rushed into Grant's school and how I would rush home and rush to dinner and rush to bed...I thought about how this was an ordinary day...how we have had thousands of these days and we will have a thousand more. And I realized that most of life is lived in "ordinary time."

Did you know that there is a stretch of days in the early church calendar that was developed in the fourth century called "Ordinary Time." The church year begins with Advent, then moves to Christmas, the twelve days of Christmas, Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, Holy Week, Maunday Thursday, Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost (early summer), and ends with Ordinary Time (which just so happens to be the biggest chunk of the year).

I realized today that most of life is lived in "ordinary time." Charles Poole says that, "Life is punctuated by a few special moments and grandiose events -- a festival here, an anniversary there, a birthday here...a wedding there, but most of life is lived in ordinary time."

One of the signs of a believer who is attempting to follow Christ on a serious spiritual journey of open-eyed, sensitive, loving faith is when he/she begins to see more frequently and clearly the sacred presence of God in the most ordinary moments of life. Celtics understood that, they realized (far earlier than most of Christendom) that the gap between the sacred and the ordinary is mostly imaginary...and it is a gap not of God's making but of ours.

I think that was one of the elements Thorton Wilder was trying to portray in his famous three act play, Our Town. I remember the play well -- we performed it my senior year in high school. Emily, the main character had died at the age of 26 and she is allowed to chose one day of her life to relive. She chooses her twelfth birthday. As Emily watches her day unfold she sees everyone scurry about, consumed with this issue or that matter and she says from her new perspective of death, "I never realized before how in the dark live people are, from morning until night, that is all they are - troubled." Finally she says, "I can't look at everything hard enough...I didn't realize...so much that I never noticed...Do any living humans realize life while they live it, minute by minute?"

All of these thoughts came rushing through my weary mind as I was in the middle of my "ordinary day" doing the "ordinary task" of picking up my son. And I realized that I had slipped into the sin of thinking that I was going through an ordinary day in an ordinary season of my ordinary life. And suddenly, like Moses and the burning bush, my mindset changed and, in the middle of the ordinary school hallway, I began to see the divine and sacred in everything...especially the yellow piece of paper that had my son's handprints on it...in that moment, that paper became a sacred divinely inspired document. I rushed out on the playground (like I have done a thousand times before) and hugged my son (like I had done a million times before), but this was no ordinary hug...not today.

As believers our challenge, our calling is to find the sacred in every day during every "season of our life." To look harder and see better...if we do that then the ordinary will quickly become holy and extraordinary.