Finding God in the Ordinary

I’ll never forget our first night in the Bay Area. Almost three years ago my wife, and I had just moved from living 6 years in the beautiful, sleepy, slow-paced, agricultural town of Napa. Boxes were stacked and scattered throughout our small 2-bedroom apartment and after a full day of moving and lugging boxes up stairs we had finally surrendered to letting the mess wait until tomorrow. We laid in bed in what seemed like the first moment of silence in a few days and all of a sudden, as if it was merely a few feet above our building, an airplane flew over head and shaking the walls. After the plane passed the noise immediately shifted to the unending stream of cars rushing down Highway 101 and 280. As I laid in bed that night, I remember the shock of how fast life moved in the Bay Area.

But this wasn’t an entirely new feeling. Regardless of where we call home, our days are filled with noise, busy, hurry, accomplishing, doing, producing, maybe sleep, and then we repeat it all over again. It may be impossible in 2018 to not feel the suffocating tyranny of the urgent. But this chaos doesn’t remain in our calendars. What I experienced that night (and am reminded everyday sitting in traffic on 101) was a metaphor for the all too ubiquitous internal reality of life in 2018; our life is busy, but our minds far busier.

Philosopher and writer Dallas Willard writes,

“The first and most basic thing we can and must do is to keep God before our minds…This is the fundamental secret of caring for our souls. Our part in thus practicing the presence of God is to direct and redirect our minds constantly to Him. In the early time of our practicing, we may well be challenged by our burdensome habits of dwelling on things less than God. But these are habits - not the law of gravity - and can be broken. A new, grace-filled habit will replace the former ones as we take intentional steps toward keeping God before us. Soon our minds will return to God as the needle of a compass constantly returns to the north, no matter how the compass is moved. If God is the great longings of our souls, He will become the polestar of our inward beings.”

— Dallas Willard

Maybe one of the most counter cultural things we can do in our age is find a subtle rhythm of slowing down. 5 minutes here, 2 minutes there, where we simply draw our minds back onto the presence of God in the ordinary. I imagine this is what Paul had in mind when he wrote “Pray without ceasing.” And slowly, over time, the chaos and busyness of our minds are exchanged for a greater awareness of God’s presence in traffic, a conference room, classroom, around the dinner table, and even in the incessant noise of the Bay Area.

Willard Wednesdays - The Vision of the Disciple of Jesus

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“To live in the kingdom means to live within the range of God’s effective will with his life flowing through mine. Another good way of putting this is to say that as a disciple I am learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live my life if he were I. I am not necessarily learning to do everything he did, of course: but I am learning how to do everything I do in the manner and from the source from which he did all that he did.”

— Dallas Willard, Renewing the Christian Mind, p. 22-23

The old adage "what would Jesus do?" is only partly right. It is right in the sense of looking to the way of Jesus and the implications for our life. It is wrong in that it assumes we live the same life as Jesus, but the scriptures do not speak directly of the complexities of life in 2018. There are no texts that discuss internet usage, democracies, genetically modified foods, etc. But this does not leave us without direction. The scriptures do speak, at length, about the kind of person Jesus was, and here is where we find a better question to ask ourselves. As Willard notes, we must subtly re-write the WWJD question as, "What would Jesus do if he were I?" At the other end of this question we begin to wrestle with our own complexities in our own cultural moment. The question for our following of Jesus is not how to do everything Jesus did, but rather, how would Jesus do all the things I have to do if he lived my life. In this way, our apprenticeship is more practically grounded. It becomes a call to embody the everyday practices of Jesus, recognizing that Jesus’ call is to become the kind of person he was. Put another way, to become the kind of person for whom the way of the Kingdom of God is the natural outpouring of our lives, to “learn how to do everything I do in the manner and from the source from which he did all that he did.”