It’s Friday again. Time for 5-Minute Friday- we write full tilt for 5 minutes on a word and the word this week is:
Ordinary.
Plain Jane. Vanilla. Sun shines, mild breezes blow the curtains in the kitchen window, nothing but catalogs in the mail, the wash is done, the dishes dried, dinner in the oven, and the children have done their homework. Just another day in the neighborhood.
The extraordinary day stands out in stark contrast-the fatal diagnosis, the empty crib of infertility, the crumbling of a marriage, the announcement of the baby on the way without the blessing of marriage, the call from the police station-they’ve arrested your child with drugs- extraordinarily bad days. All of them.
And then there are those extraordinary good days: The bonus or raise at work, an extra week of vacation this year, the blessing of an addition to the family via a new baby, a wedding or a long awaited adoption, the insurance paid all of the bill on the fender bender from last week’s encounter in the grocery parking lot, the unexpected bouquet of flowers and dinner out with a surprise jewelery box for desert.
It’s the ordinary days that make these other days extraordinary-the unusual, not ordinary at all.
It’s the comfort of the sameness and stability of those ordinary days that helps us when the extraordinary days come along. God has blessed us with far more ordinary days than extraordinary. He has blessed us with the security and stability of the ordinary and I, for one, am very thankful!