Christ: The Treasure of Our HeartsSample

We crave delight, joy, and the extraordinary, but so much of human life is ordinary, routine, and mundane. We get up in the morning, go through our usual morning routines, and then head out the door for the usual things we do each day. Once we finish our daytime tasks, we shift gears and engage in our evening routines before retiring for the night. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. While each day will hold its own surprises, often, our days are variations of the usual. Ordinary daily life is just that, ordinary. It’s so ordinary that we can be tempted to think that “fullness of joy” and “pleasures forevermore” must be promises for the renewed life that is to come when we stand in God’s presence.

And yet, Jesus’s arrival in Bethlehem 2000 years ago occurred through one of the most ordinary of human experiences: birth. Every human—every living creature—has been born. The Son of God left the glory of heaven so that he could walk this earth as an ordinary human being. While he did extraordinary things, many of his days probably looked rather similar to those of his neighbors. His mission, Julie Canlis reminds us, “is to take to Himself and reclaim…every aspect of ordinary human life and turn it back to the Father as a place for communion” (italics mine). Jesus lived an ordinary human life in communion with God. “Fullness of joy” and “pleasures forevermore” do await us in Christ’s eternal kingdom. However, they are also to be found in the rhythm of the ordinary.

Jesus became human so that he could show us the path of life. His life and continued presence through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit teach us how to live our ordinary lives in communion with God. The primary location of the fullness of joy is found not in those extraordinary mountaintop experiences but in treasuring and living in Christ’s life-giving presence in the high, low, and ordinary moments of each day.

Prayer

Gracious and life-giving, Father, today is a new day. Its rhythms are familiar, and its tasks are routine. Open my eyes to the beauty of this ordinary life. Help me see the path of life hidden in its rhythms. Teach me to live this ordinary day in communion with you. Amid the appointments, chores, errands, tasks, and conversations of the day, teach me to do them as Christ would. May I seek the fullness of your joy not as an extraordinary mountaintop experience but in the abiding and comforting sense of your presence in all I do. Amen.

Melissa Davis, Ph.D., serves as adjunct faculty for Regent University School of Divinity.