I had a conversation with my Squad Leader and friend, Alexa, earlier this week. I asked her a simple question a midst all of our reminiscing and laughing out loud about the early days in Africa on our old team: What about this year has been extraordinary for you?
She answered me, sharing her heart for the streets kids we met back in Uganda, about what God had revealed to her about her calling this year.
I should have been expecting to be asked the same question back, but I wasn’t. So when I was asked about what has been extraordinary for me this year, my mind drew a blank and all I could possibly think of was the word “Ordinary.”
My immediate thought was: “This is kind of an anticlimactic word for such a fantastic year filled with Jesus and experiencing love unimaginable…” I picked my brain for a solid moment, flipping through all the different memories I have stored up there and all I could think of were the moments and people that I have spent and had the privilege of doing life with this year — how much I have learned from these people, and what an understatement it would be to say that it’s just been “ordinary.”
Don’t get me wrong when I say it’s all just ordinary. What I have experienced this year is a far cry from the word ordinary. But I believe it was during my first month on the race when I was still collecting clinic stubs and receipts and anything I found to stick in my moleskine notebook that it dawned on me that at home I don’t keep my receipts and plug them inside some notebook. The people in these countries don’t keep all their receipts either — because life the way these people live it is just as ordinary to them as shopping in Hannaford would be to me at home in the states.
So, naturally, my question all year has been what makes the every day mundane moments so extraordinary?
These moments are all culminated and strung together by travel days, team times, feedback sessions, praising the Lord, rest, and being in each other’s lives. We were driving back into Tegucigalpa yesterday and the mountains and homes in the mountains all formed together into this tapestry, an art piece — and driving along in the back of that pickup truck with my team mates and hearing their funny stories and listening to them talk and just be themselves made me feel just as part of that tapestry I saw from the highway we were driving on.
And that’s it.
Ordinary moments are the tapestry and we are a part of it whether we recognize it or not. This year I have learned what a gift it is to be a part of something so huge. Every individual on this planet plays a part in something huge — and it’s not our own stories, but it’s Gods story.
Not only is this world a painting that I’ve been able to see and remember with my own eyes (and will continue to see and remember with my own eyes), but it is a painting I have been able to step inside and be a part of, too. And being a part of a loving, simple, and extra-ordinary painting that’s not confined by any picture frame sounds pretty awesome to me.
