There are days that announce themselves.
Christmas arrives with carols and candles. Easter comes with lilies and trumpets. Thanksgiving appears carrying a turkey large enough to require both an engineering degree and a prayer meeting.
Birthdays have cake. Weddings have photographs. Funerals have flowers. Anniversaries have cards, provided someone remembered the anniversary in the first place.
And then there is Tuesday.
Tuesday rarely announces itself.
It simply arrives.
You wake up. You make coffee. You discover that someone has left precisely enough milk in the carton to avoid being accused of finishing it. You answer emails. You look for your glasses while wearing your glasses. You put something somewhere safe and immediately create a mystery that may occupy the remainder of your natural life.
Nothing particularly dramatic happens.
And perhaps that is one of God’s great gifts.
Our Addiction to the Remarkable
We live in a culture fascinated by extraordinary things.
Everything must be amazing.
Meals are amazing. Holidays are amazing. Television programmes are amazing. A new brand of toothpaste apparently offers an experience bordering upon transcendence.
Social media has not helped.
We scroll through photographs of sunsets, vacations, celebrations, beautifully arranged meals, remarkable accomplishments, and people standing beside lakes looking considerably more spiritually fulfilled than anyone has a right to look before breakfast.
Meanwhile, most of life is happening somewhere else.
Most of life happens while washing dishes.
Most of life happens driving to work, making lunches, answering telephone calls, folding laundry, buying groceries, waiting for appointments, taking out the garbage, and wondering why there are seventeen unmatched socks in the laundry basket when you are reasonably certain you purchased them in pairs.
Christian faith can sometimes inherit the same fascination with the spectacular.
We love conversion stories.
We love miracles.
We love mountaintop experiences.
We love those moments when God seems unmistakably present.
And thank God for them.
But Scripture suggests that God has never confined divine activity to dramatic occasions.
God also seems remarkably fond of ordinary days.
Jesus Spent a Great Deal of Time Doing Nothing Remarkable
The Gospels tell us about approximately three years of Jesus’ public ministry.
Before that came nearly thirty years about which Scripture tells us very little.
Thirty years.
That is an astonishing amount of unrecorded holiness.
We know about Bethlehem. We know about the visit to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve.
And then the Gospel writers effectively say, “Several decades passed.”
What happened?
Presumably, Jesus grew up.
He learned Joseph’s trade. He ate meals. He attended synagogue. He knew neighbours. He celebrated festivals. He worked with his hands. He probably repaired things that broke.
The Son of God apparently spent most of his earthly life doing things nobody thought important enough to write down.
That ought to tell us something.
The Incarnation does not merely mean that God entered human suffering.
It also means that God entered human ordinariness.
God entered kitchens and workshops.
God entered conversations and chores.
God entered family life and village life.
God entered days when absolutely nothing happened that would ever appear in a history book.
And because Christ entered ordinary life, ordinary life can never again be dismissed as spiritually insignificant.
The Holiness of Repetition
There is something deeply sacramental about repetition.
Morning comes again.
Bread is broken again.
Prayers are said again.
The kettle boils again.
Someone needs feeding again.
Someone needs forgiving again.
Someone needs listening to again.
The Christian life is not usually built from a handful of heroic moments.
It is built from thousands of small acts of faithfulness.
We pray again.
We forgive again.
We show up again.
We begin again.
This is why the Church’s long season of Ordinary Time matters so much.
The liturgical colour is green because green is the colour of growth.
And growth is usually unimpressive while it is happening.
Nobody stands beside a tomato plant at three o’clock in the afternoon and shouts, “Look! It grew!”
You would have to possess both exceptional eyesight and very little else to do.
But return a week later and something has changed.
Roots have deepened.
Leaves have opened.
Fruit has begun forming.
Much of God’s work in us happens exactly like that.
Quietly.
Gradually.
Almost invisibly.
Grace rarely sends a progress report.
Perhaps Boring Is a Blessing
We are inclined to complain when life becomes uneventful.
“Nothing happened today.”
But consider what that sentence may actually mean.
No one called with terrible news.
No ambulance arrived.
No relationship collapsed.
No crisis erupted.
No doctor spoke the sentence you were afraid to hear.
No one you love disappeared from your life.
Perhaps “nothing happened today” is sometimes another way of saying:
Today was held together by grace.
There are seasons when an uneventful day is something we would give almost anything to have.
Anyone who has lived through grief, illness, uncertainty, conflict, or sudden change knows this.
There comes a moment when you no longer long for excitement.
You long for normal.
You want coffee in your usual mug.
You want the dog to need walking.
You want to complain mildly about the weather.
You want to stand in the grocery store wondering why one apparently needs a mortgage to purchase cheese.
You want ordinary life back.
And when it returns, you discover that ordinary was never ordinary at all.
It was grace wearing work clothes.
God Is Already Here
Perhaps one of the great spiritual disciplines of Ordinary Time is learning to stop asking God to appear somewhere else.
We often imagine that God is waiting for us in some future moment.
When life settles down.
When we become more prayerful.
When we finally understand what we are doing.
When the house is organized.
When the children grow up.
When retirement comes.
When the difficult season ends.
Then, perhaps, we will have time for God.
But God has never been particularly interested in waiting for ideal circumstances.
The God revealed in Jesus Christ keeps entering the life we actually have.
The messy kitchen.
The crowded calendar.
The unfinished conversation.
The hospital waiting room.
The commute.
The garden.
The office.
The supper table.
The quiet evening when nobody telephones and nothing remarkable happens.
This is where grace meets us.
Not after life becomes extraordinary.
Here.
Now.
In this ordinary Tuesday.
The Prayer of an Uneventful Day
Perhaps tonight, when someone asks, “How was your day?” you will be tempted to say:
“Nothing much happened.”
Before dismissing it, consider what may have happened unnoticed.
Someone smiled because you were kind.
Someone felt less alone because you listened.
Someone ate because you cooked.
Someone was encouraged because you spoke.
Someone was forgiven.
Someone was remembered in prayer.
A small piece of God’s creation was tended.
A relationship was quietly strengthened.
A burden became slightly lighter.
And somewhere beneath all of it, unnoticed and unannounced, God continued the patient work of grace.
No trumpets.
No headlines.
No heavenly fireworks.
Just another ordinary day in the Kingdom of God.
And perhaps that is enough.
Perhaps holiness has always looked more like this than we imagined.
Because the great mystery of Ordinary Time is not that nothing is happening.
The great mystery is that God is doing something holy in days we are tempted to overlook.
So tomorrow morning, when another apparently unremarkable day arrives, receive it carefully.
Make the coffee.
Say your prayers.
Feed somebody.
Forgive somebody.
Notice something beautiful.
Do the work in front of you.
Love the people God has placed within reach.
And do not be surprised if, years from now, you discover that these ordinary days were quietly becoming your life.
Because they were.
And God was there all along.
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Companion Prayer
God of ordinary days,
open our eyes to the grace hidden within familiar things. Teach us to receive each day with gratitude, to do small things with great love, and to recognize Christ beside us in every quiet moment. Amen.