The New Ordinary

Driving home in the rain tonight, I got that weird sense of how familiar and normal this stretch of road is between my Wednesday night meeting and our house. I do it every week. I barely have to think of where I'm going. It's a very ordinary part of my life.

There are all kinds of things like that. Sleeping in my bed. Watching TV with Ken. Sitting across the table for a breakfast with a friend. Working on this week's sermon. Preaching this week's sermon. Ordinary events of my life that I do in the realm of the astonishingly familiar.

It's not that I'm bored. Quite the contrary. I find my life to be full of the abundance Jesus promised. Even within the realm of what I call ordinary, there are various and sundry daily adventures that would keep me quite happily occupied for the rest of my life.

But they are known to me. Things look, feel and smell like I know them.

And it would never even occur to me to even think about this, except that for little slivers of my life, I am completely and totally taken out of the familiar and deposited into a time and space so different, so not what I know as ordinary, that it messes with me some.

So I was thinking of Thailand as I drove home in the rain, on the right side of the road, with left hand steering wheel, and English signs, past mounds of still melting snow past the University of Waterloo, after eating a mildly spiced potato and bacon soup in a restaurant that wasn't outside. I was thinking of the spicy smells and the persistent humidity, and insane traffic, and very large spiders in the bathroom, and trying to bend my mind around the Thai words, and the beautiful faces of people I miss so much who live so, so far away.

One of the "stresses" of the cross cultural experience is how out of your zone you feel when you're there. Nothing, nothing is what you expect it to be. Everything is different. Everything is not ordinary, even the ordinary things.

But I wonder if that's part of what God uses to catch my attention. With my senses on high alert my soul is open wider. While I'm there, it's open to all the new experiences and all that I need to hear and learn.

But the cool thing is, it says more open, even when I'm home...driving in the rain on the way home from my Wednesday night meeting along the ordinary way. And actually, nothing's ordinary any more.

Keep me open, Father, to all the new ordinary ways you want me to be.

Tomorrow we book the tickets for the next trip in May.