Ordinary

Ordinary.
Plain old me.
I wanted to be ordinary when I was little and my parents knew I was "gifted" and allowed my teacher to skip me ahead a grade -- a not even five year old attending 1st grade.  I could do multiplication and read at an eighth grade level, but when I went to first grade -- with sweet Mrs. Booth -- the kids there looked at me with a look that told me I was anything but ordinary.  When I had to leave the classroom during reading time because the other kids were learning to read and I was reading chapter books -- big ones -- to go to the library to read to the librarian, I had one longing.  I wanted to be ordinary.

I didn't want to stick out, be different, be "bright" or "gifted."  I just wanted to fit in and be like the rest of those children.

I wanted to blend in.  I didn't want to claim the me He made me to be with quirks and insights beyond my years.  I wanted to fit and meld.   

These days I feel very ordinary much of the time.  I wake up and take care of my children, clean a kitchen (sometimes), do laundry (sometimes) and teach my boys at home.  I have a husband, two cars and a dog.  We're pretty ordinary.

And yet, God steps into the ordinary and calls out the extraordinary that He designed in the beginning. 

The manger was ordinary and obscure.  Riding there on a donkey was ordinary.  Being a boy from Bethlehem, a small town with no notoriety -- pretty ordinary.  Yet, from that ordinary and plain beginning, God Himself came in the form of a baby and rescued the souls of those who would be saved.  He, the extraordinary God stepped into humanity and provided Himself so that any and all as dark and broken as they may be can come and be transformed.

And He steps into our ordinary whenever we invite Him.  He is the God Who stoops to bless.  He'll come into the mundane world of laundry and Candyland and two-year-old tantrums and mommy burnout and touch those moments.  Extraordinary love piercing the ordinary and transforming even now.

STOP.