Summer often ends with a note of sadness, doesn’t it?
This fall finds me heading back into teacher mode, after a three-year foray into other fields. I’m excited to be back: lesson planning no longer feels like the bane of my existence, communication has grown easier, I love to teach writing, and my soul is burning with literature content that could totally change these junior-high students’ lives. (They’re much less excited, I’m sure. It’s fine. I’ll be excited enough for all of us.)
At the same time, I feel the sigh of summer’s end. A flexible schedule, vacations, family visits, sunny days, and (for students and teachers) a two-month break from the routine work of education…all over, for now. We roll back into the mundane. The evenings will be shorter. We’ll set alarms, get up earlier, and work our minds harder. We’ll have to do things we don’t like to do. And the next day, we’ll do the same thing. (Last time I checked, that’s part of everyone’s job, whether we’re students or teachers or mechanics or moms or musicians.)
It’s so ordinary. We do the same things, over and over. While that seems wistful at the end of an exciting season like summer, it’s actually glorious.
Think of how God relates to and works for His people. In the Old Testament, He certainly reveals Himself in extravagant events: creation, the flood, the Exodus. But much of the story highlights what He does in the mundane.
Lightning falls, thunder rolls, and the ground shakes at Sinai when God reveals His law. Extraordinary. Then for centuries, God’s people simply speak to each other, daily telling their children what God commanded and promised. Ordinary.
God tells His people to assault the impossible fortress of Jericho by walking around it. After seven days of this seeming absurdity, He miraculously disintegrates the walls. Extraordinary. And for the rest of Canaan’s conquest, men wield swords and throw spears and shoot arrows and swing clubs and exhaust themselves in hand combat over rough terrain. Ordinary.
Fire falls from heaven to consume the sacrifice on Mt. Carmel. Extraordinary. But for centuries, God’s people daily bring sacrifices to burn on an altar, the flames fed by wood cut with hand tools. Ordinary.
The New Testament is the same. An angel shows up and breaks the 400-year divine silence with a shocking message to a teenager in Nazareth. A virgin conceives. Extraordinary. Then Mary spends the next thirty years loving a Son who was literally the perfect child, but didn’t seem particularly miraculous. Ordinary.
A Healer touches demoniacs and diseased and cripples and corpses, and they rise to new, whole life. Extraordinary. A Teacher travels on foot with a mismatched band of followers, sleeping under tents and eating food cooked over a fire. Ordinary.
Peter walks down the street, and his passing shadow heals the sick. Extraordinary. Paul shows up in Corinth, finds some coworkers, then spends his weekdays stitching tents so he can go evangelize on the Sabbath. Ordinary.
The whole story of Scripture is a combination of God working in extraordinary and ordinary ways…and more often than not, quite ordinary. Sometimes we don’t like that dynamic in our lives. We marvel at the miraculous but mumble at the mundane. But God meets His people as we do the same things, in the same routine, over and over. He’s even chosen the mundane to be steady streams of His grace in the church.
We stand with brothers and sisters to sing. We listen to teachers talk about the Bible. We eat bread and drink the fruit of the vine. We confess. We listen. We hug. We pray. We read. We think. We write. We speak.
And in all these things, God is working in us, for us, with us. Extraordinary grace flows to us in ordinary ways – from the Spirit, through the Word, in the church. It seems fitting for the end of summer to celebrate the rhythm of routine mercy God provides.
There’s nothing truly ordinary about that.