On balance
Of course the problem with all this is that it can feel a little like counsel in favour of laziness: don’t bother to set aside time for silence, you can worship God just as well at home as at church and there is no need to grow up into deeper and more profound faith – God loves you just as you are. All of these are true and false both at the same time. You don’t need to lay aside time for silence, God is as much present in the hustle and bustle of everyday life as in the silence and tranquillity of prayer, but if we never lay aside time for silence, our inner ear will became less attuned to the still, small voice of God and we will find it harder to hear him in the hustle and bustle. You can worship God at home but unless we make corporate worship an important part of our lives, our daily worship of God can become shallow and thin. God does love you just the way you are but yearns that we all become the fullest and most Christ-like human being that we can.
The point about ordinariness is that it is the proper balance to extraordinariness. Our lives need both. The rhythm of the ordinary helps us to understand and celebrate more fully the festival times like Christmas and Easter; and those festival times help us to identify the things of God in ordinary times. God is to be found in the daily grind of life but it is taking time out of that grind in praise and prayer that helps us to recognize God in the ordinary things of life. God calls us just as we are, ordinary, everyday Christians, and summons us onwards into extraordinariness. We need both the everyday and the special, the ordinary and the extraordinary, and we need to wrestle to keep them in balance. Too much ordinary and we can lose sight of God; too much extraordinary and we slip into assuming that God, like us, does not really cherish the everyday.
This book seeks to celebrate ordinary faith and life in all its forms and as it does so to weave the extraordinary into the ordinary: to recognize that ordinary people, no matter who they are and what they do, are all extraordinary; to celebrate the fact that the extraordinary God we worship is most likely to be found among the ordinary things of life; and to remind us that glimpses of God or glimmers of glory are most likely to be found when, in the words of R. S. Thomas, we turn aside at nothing more extraordinary than a small field, ‘to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you’.
PART ONE
Ordinary People
1. ON TURNING ASIDE
One of the characteristics that allows someone in the midst of an ordinary, everyday existence to encounter God is their ability to turn aside from what they are doing and to notice the daisy or the rainbow or the burning bush in the midst of the mundane. I often wonder, however, what might have happened if Moses had not turned aside at the burning bush. What if, at the crucial moment a sheep had fallen dangerously and needed rescuing so that he didn’t notice that the bush was burning, or what if he did notice but it was a meal time and he thought he might investigate at a more convenient moment, or what if he decided it wasn’t that spectacular after all and not worth turning aside to see? Of course we cannot know, because it didn’t happen. No more than we can know what might have happened if we had turned aside, on those countless moments when the sunbeam broke through, when the daisy mirrored heaven, when someone was ready to talk, and we didn’t notice. Our lives are peppered with myriad potential ‘what ifs’. What if we had done this, not that? What if we hadn’t done that?
Living a faithful ordinary life is not about torturing ourselves with the endless ‘what ifs’, so much as it is about focusing ourselves on the ‘what might bes’. If Moses had missed the moment and not turned aside, he might well have missed his encounter with God at the burning bush, but there would have been other encounters, other times when God broke through and spoke. Reflecting on what we might have missed could so easily become an exercise in regret, in living out our lives in wistful longing for what could have been if only … instead, the calling to faithful, ordinary living is about reflecting on what we might have missed, so that we don’t miss it again; so that the next time the occasion arises we are primed and ready to go.
Part of this is simply training ourselves to be the kind of people who do turn aside. People who are not so fixed on the path we tread that our curiosity cannot be piqued so that we turn off and meet something new. People whose horizons stretch beyond the grind of life’s rat-run, who simply look up from time to time, and see the bush burning, or the sunbeam breaking through. People who when they see these things recognize them for the potential they offer and who turn aside in the hope of an encounter with God. Turning aside is the most ordinary of actions but can have the most extraordinary of consequences, as Moses discovered.
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1. On curiosity and taking time
Exodus 3.1−3 Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.’
For further reading: Exodus 3.1−6
It all started when he turned aside. Moses, it appeared, had been contentedly looking after his father-in-law’s sheep since he fled Egypt years before. His extraordinary existence in the Pharaoh’s palace had been replaced with an ordinary existence, shaped by little more remarkable than finding the next grazing patch for his father-in-law’s sheep. But when he turned aside, his life turned upside down. Of course, we can’t help wondering whether he arrived by accident at Mount Horeb, the mountain of God, or whether he had set his path towards Mount Horeb in the hope that he might encounter God. As with so many of the biblical stories, we are left with as many questions as answers, but whatever he intended when he brought his flock close to Mount Horeb, it was Moses’ willingness to turn aside when he saw the bush burning which transformed his life.
The Hebrew word, translated ‘turn aside’, even more than its English translation has the sense of stepping off a pre-determined path and it is this that seems so important in this story. It was Moses’ willingness to change his plan and to step off the path that he was following for this whole event to happen. In this instance, Moses’ predetermined path was finding the next patch of grass for his father-in-law’s sheep. In our high-octane, high-performance culture this may seem a benign, gently pastoral way of life. In reality it was the opposite. Grazing sheep in what is effectively desert territory is a desperate task, with no guarantees of success. Add to this the wild animals who would stalk the flock ready to pluck off a sheep should the shepherd’s attention be caught for a moment and Moses’ life begins to feel much more pressured and urgent. For him turning aside could have meant the loss of one or more of his father-in-law’s sheep.
In comparison our inability to turn aside may feel a little feeble, though nonetheless real. We spend such a lot of our lives trying to keep ‘on track’ whatever we mean by this. So often my own life involves running constantly from one thing to the to next with my eye so fixed on the next task (for which I’m often late) that I wonder whether I would notice if the equivalent of a burning bush lit up in my life. And if I did notice, would I allow myself the time to turn aside and investigate, or would I, instead mark it down on my to-do list as something to come back and explore more deeply when I’ve got a minute?
Turning aside seems to require at least two key characteristics: curiosity and the willingness to take time to explore. Curiosity is not often held up as a spiritual virtue. As a child, I was encouraged to mind my own business and instructed not to fiddle. Now I am a parent myself I understand this instruction all too well, but a child’s curiosity seems to me to be a vital part of a