ORDINARY - Living In The Gaps


Man lying on a chair with a newspaper on his face

 As a teenager I would attend conferences. At these conferences the speakers would tell us that we would grow up to do incredible things. To become great entrepreneurs, to lead big churches, to have large ministries. 

They told us that we would change the world.

In many ways I don't think that this was particular to churches, but was an extension of western thought in general.

As I and others have grown up, I have discussed and witnessed a great sense of underwhelming; that none of us have achieved these great things that were spoken over us.

We were taught to expect greatness, rather than live with the ordinary.

The other day i heard Pete Rollins talk about this very issues. He spoke about the idea that we should try to achieve our dreams and goals, even if only for the express purpose of realising that our dreams will not make us any happier or more content.

It is not that having dreams or goals in and of itself is inherently wrong, indeed I still have things that i want to achieve, dreams that I am working toward, this need to feel like we are contributing to something bigger than ourselves is what makes us human. But when these dreams become our main source of hope, and become entangled with our ability to enjoy life, then we have a problem.

Even if we manage to achieve these things, at some point we must come down, at some point we must retire, at some point we go home, at some point we are just a person trying to make their way in this world.

It is for this reason that we must learn to just be happy with ordinary, to truly enjoy each part of our ordinary life, to live life in the space between the big things, living in the gaps between the highlights.

May we learn to inhabit the ordinariness of life, may we learn to be content, and we learn to enjoy all of life's goodness, wherever we find it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If God is All Good and All Powerful, Why Does Suffering Exist?

Image
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga called the problem of suffering “the only good objection to God”. The often quoted argument goes:  “if God is all good (all benevolent) then God has the desire to end suffering, and if God is all-powerful (omnipotent) then God has the ability to end suffering. Therefore if God does not end suffering, then God is either not all good, or is not all-powerful, and is therefore not God”. As Christians, we need to be able to answer this objection to God, to enable us to “give a reason for the faith that we have in Christ Jesus” (1 Peter 3:15). To this end, I want to try and answer this question to help anybody who finds the problem of suffering to be a sticking point or an obstacle in their faith (an argument to explain the problem of suffering is called a “theodicy”). To begin with, I want to go back to the beginning of it all and look at God. Who is God and what is God like? It is worth noting here that this argument takes as given the fact
Keep reading

The Surprising Truth About The Differences Between The Temptation Narratives of Matthew and Luke and What They Teach Us About Overcoming Temptation

Image
  5 MINUTE READ We are now well into Lent , one of the two great fasts in the Christian Calendar ( along with Advent ). Lent is the time when we contemplate Christ’s sacrifice, along with Christ’s 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. When we give up things for Lent we find ourselves tempted in similar, yet far less extreme, circumstances (Let’s be honest, who wants to hang out in the wilderness by themselves for 40 days and eat and drink nothing; I can barely handle giving up chocolate!). Much writing during this time consists of looking at the temptations of Jesus, and how Jesus overcame them as a template for our own overcoming of temptations. But in this post, I do not intend to look at the traditional views, but rather to look at the differences between how Matthew and Luke told the story of Christ’s temptation and what we can learn from these differences. Let’s look at them now. Why Differences are OK We do not like to discuss differences in acco
Keep reading

SANDWICHES - Enhance Your Reading of Mark's Gospel

Image
As followers of Christ, we look to the Bible as one of our main sources of inspiration and guides in our lives. So it follows that we all want our times reading the Bible to be as rich as possible. Learning more about the Bible is one way to help with this. It is particularly helpful when we know the types of things that the authors of the books used to aid us in this task. To this end I wanted to talk about something that has enriched my reading of the gospel of Mark: Markan Sandwiches (also called interpolations ). Essentially, what Mark does is get one story within his gospel, and inserts it inside another story ; this serves the purpose of giving both stories a greater sense of meaning. It’s purpose is to make the reader stop and think “Mark is trying to tell us something important here”. In practice it looks like this: Story 1 – Introduction Story 2 – Introduction & Conclusion Story 1 – Conclusion We can see where the idea of the sandwich comes f
Keep reading