Yesterday I woke up, went for a run, ate breakfast, then started my daily routine of work, household chores, and writing. To spice things up, I had lunch with a friend, who gave me a special tour of the hospital where she works. That was the most eventful part of my day. Besides the lunch date, I will probably do the exact same thing tomorrow. It’s nothing too remarkable or profound. It’s just my ordinary life. Or is it?
In a recent article in The New York Times, Alina Tugend asks the same question. Contemplating the accolades of her own children, the NYT columnist writes,
“I wonder if there is any room for the ordinary any more, for the child or teenager—or adult—who enjoys a pickup basketball game but is far from Olympic material, who will be a good citizen but won’t set the world on fire.”
She notes that for some “in this world, an ordinary life has become synonymous with a meaningless life.” These days, success is measured by the extraordinary rather than the mere faithful or honest. As Tugend says, “we have a need to be exceptional.” And she wonders if this is all a good thing. We can’t all be the next innovative inventor, best-selling author, or Olympic medalist. The reality is that most of us will live our lives in the routine and mundane.
This is true as much for Christians as it is for everyone else—a good lot of us will not accomplish the extraordinary or supernatural in this life. Yet we are tempted to feel like we aren’t doing enough for Jesus unless we are saving African villages, writing inspirational books, leading a church with a massive membership roll, or adopting children from Haiti. We tend to measure success in the currency of adventurous mission trips, large ministry followings, and educational accolades. And we can feel like our life is fairly insignificant if much of our time is spent changing dirty diapers, teaching the same students every day, or working a fairly boring job. In a time when many, including well-known evangelicals, build a platform around living a “life with impact,” “changing the world,” and “making a difference”—which they announce through blogging and Twitter feeds—we’re tempted to view the routines and ruts of everyday life with derision.
The desire for the special and the spectacular is rooted in a good seed: Deep down we want to believe that we have worth and value. We want to know that our lives are making a difference. That’s not all bad. In fact, it’s precisely because we are special that we desire these very things. But we are special not because we possess a worthiness of our own, but because we image the special One—our Creator. He created us to reflect his glory to a watching world. Every job we do, every gift we possess, and every seemingly mundane task we complete faithfully is all part of our reflecting his creative majesty. And every life is necessary in God’s economy. This is what gives us significance and meaning, regardless of the tangible outcomes of our efforts.
In reality, an endless pursuit for the next big thing in ministry, career, or relationships only puts us in the same camp as the Jewish people who demanded a sign from Jesus (John 2:18). As people, apparently, we have been craving the spectacular for a long time.
The honest truth is that most of us will spend our lives in the mundane moments. But that is precisely where we often encounter glory and success. As Paul David Tripp has said, “The little moments of life are profoundly important precisely because they are the little moments that we live in and that form us.”
Few of us are given large ministry platforms or successful companies, but every one of us is given a sphere of influence. God has always been a God who loves to display his glory in the seemingly insignificant people or the moments that the world deems unworthy and useless (1 Cor. 1:27).
While Jesus’ ministry often drew a crowd, at the end of the day it was marked not by the spectacular, but by the humble service that eventually led him to the Cross, the most despised of places. Even Isaiah tells us that our Christ was not one that people would see as the next big thing, yet he was and is the Savior of the world. As Christians, our understanding of glory and success must be rooted in our identity in this Christ.
Tugend ended her essay by highlighting a Toronto Star obituary for a woman named Shelagh Gordon, who died in March of a brain aneurysm at age 55. It was only when she died that her impact was seen, evidenced by the more than 100 people who were interviewed about her life. She was not a household name in Toronto, and certainly not in the States. She lived her life not in the extraordinary, but in the mundane—and that is where she made a difference. “A lot of obits read like a rfamp;copy;sumfamp;copy;—an accumulation of concrete action,” noted a Toronto Star writer. But Gordon’s “legacy was in her relationships to people.” She was faithful with what she had been given.
May we learn to do the same, knowing that even the most ordinary mustard seed sown in faith will reap a harvest before the throne of our extraordinary Creator.
I hope you loved that episode as much as I did. Lost has always excelled at delivering mind-bending, game-changing premieres, and “LA X” proved no exception.
So much happened in this episode, I am not even going to attempt to recap it all. Instead, I’m going to focus on the theme that most intrigued me: the question of what happens to us when we die.
(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD. Do not read if you are not completely caught up on last night’s episode.)
After eight months of wondering whether the detonation of Jughead rebooted the timeline or created “The Incident” that ultimately led to the sequence of events chronicled in the first five seasons, we finally got our answer. “Yes.” And also, “yes.” By introducing a new narrative device, which the producers are calling the “flash-sideways,” our heroes now live in two alternate realities. In the first, Jughead’s detonation successfully rewrote significant portions of the past — now, Oceanic 815 never crashes and the plane lands in Los Angeles as scheduled. In the second, the castaways return to the “present” (2007) and pick up just moments after the detonation.
I have a few concerns about this new structure — I don’t want to spend half the season investing in a story that isn’t “true” — but it effectively returned the focus back on the characters in much the same way the flash-backs and flash-forwards did in seasons 1-3. Through the alternate timelines, we return to stories centered on the emotional growth of the characters. And what, this narrative may prompt us to ask, is “truth,” anyway? Astute observers have already noted that on the plane, Desmond reads Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Its famous line: ”What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” I have a feeling we’re about to find out.
But the truth this episode seemed most concerned with was the mystery of the afterlife. “When I die, what do you think will happen to me?” Sayid asks as he bleeds out from the gunshot wound he received in last season’s finale. He believed that nothing good lay ahead for him — the thought of his past misdeeds crippled him as he inched toward death. Locke, ever the man of faith, offers his own opinion on this spiritual reality when he offers a word of hope to Jack in the Oceanic lost and found office. “How could they know where he is?” he asks, referring to the misplaced coffin containing Christian Shepherd’s body. “They didn’t lose your father. They just lost his body.” As she lies in Sawyer’s arms, Juliet’s body seems to disconnect from her soul as she enters into another state of consciousness (“We should get coffee sometime.”). Her final thought, retrieved by ghost-whisperer Miles at Sawyer’s request, confirmed that “it worked,” a seeming confirmation that both timelines are essential to the “truth” of our castaways. I am inclined to believe that when Juliet died, her soul entered into the “alternate reality” timeline made possible by the detonation of Jughead. My theory: the coffee date she spoke of refers to her meeting and dating Sawyer back in the “real” world. Even in this alternate reality their fates, as well as those of the other castaways, are so interconnected that they end up making many of the same connections anyway.
So is the alternate timeline some kind of metaphor for the afterlife? Desmond’s “see you in another life, brother,” suggests heaven or some form of afterlife, but the phrase took on new meanings first when he actually did meet up with Jack again later in that same life (in the Hatch) and now in what appears to be an actual other life. Or, is this alternate timeline just a reroute, a do-over made possible by Jughead, on the way to a completely distinct place, a “heaven,” where the dead go when they die?
What do you think? Leave your comments below.
