A Word with You: Ordinary

It's our second installment of A Word With You! And hold your hat, I'm participating for the second time in a row. I guess if Courtney tells me to do it, I do it. (note to self: hand her a list the next time I see her and maybe she'll print me up a spreadsheet with some deadlines).

This month's theme is the word ORDINARY.

And too bad I missed that Monday deadline for writing this, but I'm plunging forward.


See that photo there, it's anything but ordinary. On the windowsill sits what used to be the handle to our kitchen sink. It prompted Crafty to head to the home improvement store to buy a faucet. But if you tell Crafty she can buy a faucet, she just might come home with a new sink.... and the story continues but for another day as it's still... too soon. Let's suffice it to say that here I am on Tuesday still awaiting a full functioning sink and faucet. {sigh}

Now, where was I? Ordinary, right.


As a scrapbooker, (am I a scrapbooker if I haven't made a page in over a year? Yes, I'm currently a wanna-get-back-to-it-scrapbooker) I think about this word very often. I think about what an ordinary day here looks like and I take pictures of our ordinary. All the craziness and monotony of it, too. And then I turn it into pages of those little memories.

Little moments of our ordinary, captured on paper with stickers and glue and ribbon and journaling spots.

I am indeed an ordinary mom living, what seems to me, a very ordinary life. I do all the same tasks that other ordinary moms do: clean, make dinner, order take out for dinner, grocery shopping, toilet cleaning, yelling at my kids to pick up their stuff for the umpteenth time, tucking little people into bed, getting little people sips of water at bedtime... all of that is my ordinary.

Yet, when I look back on it all and what it adds up to, I can barely say any of this is truly ordinary at all. I've had some insight into this in the past 13 years or so of my life through the writing of St. Josemaria Escriva (his picture is over there on my sidebar!) and more so through my journey as a Christian.

My life (any of our lives, really) is anything but ordinary.

"You, therefore, must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect"- Matthew 5:48

Jesus wasn't just talking to a small group of people here- he was up on the mountain teaching the multitudes - the tax collectors, the homemakers, the rabbis- everyone! He was calling everyone who followed him to holiness. And holiness is achieved by living out our daily lives, the ordinary duties of our daily life, in the presence of the one who has graced and blessed us with our very life.

It is this constant presence of God that redefines my ordinary life... transforms my ordinary life!

It's a beautiful realization to think that my laundry and dish washing has a supernatural outlook. That folding that laundry is a gift that I can give back to God. That I can take that menial (yet necessary) task and turn it INTO a prayer. 

Prayer does not need to be a separate activity from our active life. Yes, it's good to get away and take quiet time before God, but in the grand scheme of it all, I do not have hours, nor even 30 minutes most days to devote to quiet prayer. So, in turn, I must incorporate that into my work. 

work and prayer together.

they're a team.

my work itself is a prayer that I offer to God.

each and every little detail...

from cleaning out the cushions of the couch...

to sharing in snuggles with my husband and children.

Our life... has to be as ordinary as this: trying every day to do well those very things it is our duty to do: carrying out our divine mission in the world by fulfilling the little duty of each moment.

Or rather, struggling to fulfill it. Sometimes we don't manage, and when night comes, in our examination, we'll have to tell Our Lord, "I am not offering you virtues; today I can only offer you defects. But with your grace I will be able to count myself a victor!"

St. Josemaria, The Forge, 616

And in all honesty, that is MOST DAYS. Struggling, failing, trying, learning to be patient with myself, my kids, my defects... but always picking up the pieces and living out my ordinary in relation to how God would truly want me to live it.

And whatever your task, work heartily, 

as serving the Lord and not men. 

Colossians 3:23

"Let me stress this point: it is in the simplicity of your ordinary work, in the monotonous details of each day, that you have to find the secret, which is hidden from so many, of something great and new: LOVE." 

The Furrow, 489

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