Michael Horton has a great article today about the dangers of emphasizing energy and activity in our faith, to the detriment of living an ordinary life in Christ. Here’s an excerpt:
“My target isn’t activism itself, but the marginalization of the ordinary as the richest site of both God’s activity and ours. Our problem isn’t that we are too active. Rather, it is that we have been prone to successive sprints instead of the long-distance run. There’s nothing wrong with energy. The danger is that we’re burning out ourselves—and each other—on restless anxieties and unrealistic expectations. It’s an impatience with the familiar, sometimes slow, and mostly imperceptible aspects of life.”
It’s very easy to fall into the trap that Horton describes. Has “ordinary” become a dirty word in your vocabulary or are you able to delight in the way God works through the ordinary things in your life? Here’s a related thought from G.K. Chesterton where he sees the ability of children and God to rejoice in things that are the same, time and time again:
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Irrigating Deserts 