Today is an interesting day, it gives me pause for reflection. Ninety one years ago my mother was born. She led an ordinary life. She was born in San Antonio, Texas and moved around the country, living in Georgia and Florida for a time. Her father, my grandfather who I am named for, was in the army. After graduating from High School, my mother married my father, who was also serving in the army, and began a career with Southwestern Bell Telephone Company. She and my father tried to have children, but were not successful. They decided to adopt my brother from a family who were having trouble providing for my brother’s medical needs. Two years later they received a call from the hospital where a newborn had been abandoned. That’s when they came and brought me into their home and made me part of their family.
I think, for the most part, we all lead ordinary lives where we take it day by day. We form relationships, we form families, we work at jobs that pay our bills. Its all so ordinary, and yet, its not. Every person impacts the people around them in different ways. In impacting others, we impact our community. In impacting our community we impact the world. What can one friendly smile do between two people? How can one kind act do anything, really? Do love, and care, and compassion really achieve anything? These are all such ordinary, every day things. No one mentions them, no one makes a big deal about them, no one gives them even a second thought. Or do they?
Seriously, how can one action, one word, one thought, have any lasting effect? It seems to me, a lot can happen with any one of those aforementioned things. When we step out of our ordinary lives to reach beyond ourselves, God is involved.
You weren’t necessarily thinking when you looked up and met another person’s gaze, and smiled at them. You don’t know how their day has been. You don’t know if maybe they were thinking no one even sees them or cares about them. Then they receive a smile from a stranger, and suddenly the world looks different to them. Hopefully their day gets better from that moment on. Because they perceive the day is better, maybe they too can smile at someone for no reason, other than a nudge from inside of them.
One action on our part, might just start a chain of events that makes all the difference for one, two, five, ten people. Who knows where it ends. All of it though, comes out of our ordinary lives. We may think it takes huge amounts of effort, huge amounts of money, huge amounts of media coverage for anything to really amount to much. That’s so far from what’s really true. Our world is impacted and changed by ordinary people doing one thing, saying one thing, going the extra mile for one person.
We are so quick to focus on the big events happening around us, we neglect to see how ordinary people make our world a better place, every day. My ordinary father and mother did an extraordinary thing. They took into their home and their lives, two children from different backgrounds, different birth families, and they loved them as their own. That’s two lives impacted in an extraordinary way, by ordinary people.
What ordinary things can you and I do or say, to share a piece of the extraordinary God who lives in us with others? Could we say one caring word to someone who needs it? Might we share a moment of time with someone who seems to be alone? Is it possible our indulgent smile at a crying baby might calm them down? These are ordinary things, but when done from a heart full of the love of God, they become EXTRA-ordinary.
My friend, Margaret, shares this birthday with my mother. She too takes ordinary steps to make each of us feel loved and accepted. We know God a little better because of Margaret. I hope this day is EXTRA-ordinary for her. I pray for all of our ordinary lives to impact other lives in EXTRA-ordinary ways.
Your companion on the Way,
Pastor Tom