An Ordinary Day

I celebrated a birthday this week. Half of ninety. A nice, solid number.

The thing about birthdays, the thing that makes them kind of tricky, is this. They're supposed to be good.

Not that I'm morally opposed to having a good day or anything. It's just that . . . gosh, that's a lot of pressure. You can't just declare, first thing on a Tuesday morning, that THIS is going to be a good day. No, not just a good day, but a special day. An extraordinary day. A day that is on some level different from all the other days of the year. What Tuesday could live up to such demands?

Most of the day was fine. But then it got close to supper time. I knew the kids would want to know if we were going to go out to eat. That's our family tradition, sort of. As often as it works out, birthdays are celebrated by the treat of hitting one of the local restaurants. I had to decide if that's what I wanted to do, or if I would prefer some sort of nice dinner at home, with the kiddos handling the cooking and cleaning.

The supper question gnawed at me, and I grew gradually more agitated. What did I want to do? I truly didn't know. Nothing seemed right. The family wanted so much for me to have a good day. Surely I could come up with just the right way to spend the evening.

I was starting to panic. I had to please the kids by thinking of something to make the day special. I just had to.

And then it hit me. I didn't want special.

If I could truly choose any kind of celebration I wanted, any way to spend a few hours with my family, I wanted, with all the wants within me, to have not-special. I wanted ordinary.

The rest of the evening, happily, was as ordinary as could be. The kids did homework at the table and ran around in the back yard. I chauffeured the boys to drivers ed and little league practice. The husband and I took the dog for a walk.

And supper? Quite the opposite of fancy. I made a random and unexciting pasta/meat/veggie concoction. The kids and I recited our usual evening dialogue... Kid: "What's for supper?" Me: "Food."

And it was perfect. Absolutely perfect.

I shouldn't say that the day was completely ordinary. We played a quick game of Pit, and I actually won, for the first time ever. And I received a few loving gifts: some dark chocolate, a carton of Mike & Ikes, and a bag of Toasted Pita What Thins - haven't tried one, but they look delicious.

But for the most part, the day was just a day. A wonderfully average day. A day in which to revel in the absolutely ordinary pleasures of life. Balled-up cats snoozing with abandon in a patch of sun. A glass of cold milk. A moment to stand still and just be.

The game of Pit (that I won, you recall - not that I'm gloating or anything) got kind of silly and concluded with a loudly-played YouTube rendition of a Go Fish song (Pop Goes the Weasel, if you must know) accompanied by some pretty snazzy dance moves from around the table. I shooed the kids off to bed with a wide grin and a great internal peace. It had been just an ordinary day. And it had been perfect.

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How often do we treat ordinary days as something to tolerate until the next Big Event on our mental calendar?

We want special. We crave exciting. We forget, we overlook, that ordinary can be beautiful.

I think God knows the beauty of the ordinary. Sure, He sometimes works in magnificent and miraculous ways. But He also comes to us in simplicity. In the everyday. In the ordinary.

In His Word we see God immersed in the ordinary moments of His people's lives. A baby born to a scared young mother. A man sharing a cake of bread with his friends. Sheep, goats, donkeys, eagles' wings. A day out fishing. A tree, a stone, a walk along a dusty road. The simple used to bestow the astonishing.

With extraordinary care our not-ordinary God comes to us day after average day, laying before us a feast of ordinaries. Little joys. Precious moments. Simple, unspectacular gifts. And tucked in and among the cats and the little league practices and the glasses of milk are simple, unspectacular, utterly miraculous truths. You are cherished. You are forgiven. You are chosen. You are loved. Can't you hear the whisper? In a warm chocolate chip cookie, the smell of pine trees in the sun...for you My Son lived, died, rose. For you, my ordinary, average, so-special child.

Our God With Us, so very with-us...in the ordinaries. 

First published in The Alpena News on April 30, 2016.