Last Updated on February 19, 2013 by
Ordinary days. Laundry, school, lunch, errands, dinner. Laundry, school, lunch, vacuuming, dinner. Laundry, school, dentist, grocery shopping, dinner.
Five loads of laundry every day. Because 7 people means lots of laundry. Tuna fish for lunch. Because it’s easy. All the other stuff. Because it’s part of my job.
These are ordinary days for me. Most of us have ordinary days. We do the same things, every day, for weeks.
“In the midst of our daily lives, it is all too easy to get ground down by our tasks and responsibilities until we become blind and deaf to all but the routine busyness of our lives. But when we are too busy, too hurried or too preoccupied with our work, our schedules, our agendas, we miss out on the ways and places God encounters us—or tries to—in the midst of, say, rush hour on an ordinary Friday morning.”*
Or laundry on a Monday morning.
Or a snowfall in the deep South on a Thursday afternoon. (As I was writing this the redhead knocks on my door and says, “Mommy come look. It’s snowing!” My first response was, “I’m in the middle of something right now.”) I was blind and deaf. My second response: I put down the computer.
In the church year (liturgical calendar) we are currently in the season known as Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time follows Advent/Christmas/Epiphany as well as Lent/Easter/Pentecost. The days marked as Ordinary Time comprise more than half the year reminding us that we live the bulk of our lives in the ordinary days between holidays, vacations, or special celebrations.
In Mark 6:30-44, the story of the five loaves and two fishes is a reminder that Jesus makes our ordinary days anything but ordinary. He invites us into the miraculous of every day life with Him.
“Because God is present and active in the midst of the very tasks that often seem pointless, these tasks can, if I’m paying attention, become means of grace—and of growth in my relationship with God. It is fitting, therefore, that the liturgical color of Ordinary Time is green, the color of growth.”*
Because God is present my Ordinary Days are Extraordinary Days.
*If you’d like to know more about the church year I recommend The Circle of the Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year by Kimberlee Conway Ireton. You can find and print a church year calendar with scripture readings here.