It’s 5:20 a.m. when the first alarm goes off, but statistically speaking I probably won’t actually make my way downstairs for morning coffee until closer to 6. I grab my usual white mug, the one with all the nicks and dings, and head to a favorite chair where a basket sits with my Bible and journal. I open back up to Exodus where I’ll spend the next chunk of time alternating between reading, taking notes, and praying through a few names I’ve been thinking about. Lately it’s been my cousin who is only a few years older than me and facing a terrifying cancer diagnosis. I pray for her spiritual and physical strength to face another day.
It’s almost 7 a.m. and I can hear the rooster crowing from the coop, reminding me I’m needed outside now. I make my way to start the morning rotation of chores: letting the chickens out, refilling waters, checking on the mama goat who recently lost her twin babies, and giving some attention to the dog. I soon hear little voices from my children making their way out to find me as they start to trickle into the barn and help with the last remaining tasks of filling water buckets and letting the goats out into the pasture. There’s the usual bickering over whose day it is to get the eggs as we make our way back into the house for breakfast before starting another homeschool day.
It’s all so very ordinary.
After Moses ran away from living in Egypt, we find him living in the land of Midian for 40 years. He was no longer living in luxury at the top of the chain, he was learning how to live in a desert and care for sheep. Sometimes when we read our Bibles it’s easy to miss how much time passes between events that are only a verse or two apart. We read the story and think perhaps a few weeks went by for Moses between being the son of Pharaoh’s daughter and returning with Aaron to give powerful signs and leading the people out of Egypt.
But it wasn’t for weeks. His days in Midian, no his decades there, were spent living a very mundane life doing very ordinary tasks. There’s no chapter in Scripture outlining those 40 years. We don’t know what married life looked like for him, or raising children, or much about his day to day existence with the sheep. It was unremarkable enough that when all that time had passed and he saw a bush burning, without burning up, he knew this was an extraordinary moment in time.
Like Moses, many people in the Bible lived large periods of their lives in very ordinary days. These moments we read about: the burning bush, wrestling with an angel, seeing visions of heaven, were recorded for us precisely because they were so extraordinary.
But we live in a culture that struggles to value the ordinary.
Pause with me for a moment and just think about the obsession we have for new, for different, for change. We get asked, and ask others constantly the age-old question, “What’s been new lately?” and find ourselves scrambling with failure when there’s not much worth saying.
Is there supposed to be another new job update, next vacation, latest house project, big change, all the time?
Perhaps Paul Tripp says it best this way, “God works in the ordinary: a basket, a river, a sister, a woman bathing in the Nile, to do what is absolutely extraordinary. This is clearly an Only-God story.”
For God, those 40 years weren’t an interruption in Moses’ life. They were part of the plan all along. Moses learned to care for sheep so that someday he could shepherd people. He learned the wilderness so that some day he could lead God’s people through one. While God’s people continued to wait in silence and slavery for God to speak, God was actively at work, with a shepherd, in a wilderness.
Most of our lives here on this side of eternity will reflect God at work in the commonplace. There may be countless days of children getting sick, laundry baskets that need folded, meals that require preparation, and sticky floors to be cleaned. And yet there will also be passages of Scripture to be read and rehearsed, prayers to be prayed on the behalf of others, and the gospel to spread through dinner conversations around kitchen tables.
I lift the straw and place it in the feeding trough for another day. Mentally I make a note of the tomatoes and peppers to be picked from my tiny starter garden. I never did fold those laundry piles this afternoon after I talked to my friend who is navigating a major transition. Slowly I make my way to the back porch, waiting for the last remnants of the sunset to slip away.
I’ve taken countless pictures, but none can showcase the brilliance of another painted night. In the morning I’ll move to the front rocking chairs where the sunrise will burst over the cornfield. There God goes again. Making the sun rise and set, never tiring of the repetitiveness of it all. It happens every day. It’s all so ordinary, and yet when I look, really look, at the colors splashing across the horizon- they are not.
It’s clearly an “only-God” sky.
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