EXTRAORDINARY
Luke 18:41-42
41 “What do you want me to do for you?” He said, “Lord, let me see again.” 42 Jesus said to him, “Receive your sight; your faith has saved you.”
As I think about the recurring theme in Luke’s gospel of a seemingly ordinary Jesus doing extraordinary things, I can’t help thinking of my Uncle David. Uncle David liked to think of himself and wanted others to think of him as just an “ordinary guy”. When he passed away several years ago, this theme was repeated throughout his funeral, especially in this story…
My aunt and uncle had several rental properties, and they were often over there mowing lawn or painting walls or whatever work needed to be done. On one such day, Uncle David came across the father of one of the tenants. In the passing of conversation, this man told my uncle about his grandson who had been sick. Due to the illness, the man’s grandson was now very behind in school and most likely would not move on to the next grade after summer. In his very ordinary, unassuming way, my uncle offered to tutor this man’s grandson so that he could catch up and graduate to the next grade. To my uncle helping this student was something very ordinary, after all he was a teacher for over thirty years, but to this grandfather and his grandson, my uncle made an extraordinary difference. This is so with the teachers and administrators in school districts all across the country and in our lives as parents and grandparents too. In the day-to-day acts of doing what to us are the most ordinary things, we are making an extraordinary difference in the lives of our children and grandchildren.
As part of the preparation for my 20-year high school class reunion (also, sadly, several years ago), someone set up a website that my classmates and I could log-on to and find out what everyone has been up to since graduation. In the course of reading these updates, it struck me on more than one occasion just how ordinary my life is. I am not a senior finance director for Microsoft or an internationally acclaimed sound healer and clairvoyant medium (whatever that is) or a fashion photographer rubbing elbows with the beautiful people or an overseas diplomat who has traveled the world (I have barely been out of the Midwest). I don’t travel the world; I don’t even like to fly. At the time the only fashion I photographed was my daughter’s latest dress-up costume, the only healing I did was with a kiss and a band-aid and I directed the finances of a household of five not a multi-billion-dollar corporation; in short, I am ordinary. But that’s okay. I am a child of God and God does not require us to be extraordinary. He simply wants us to love Him and be in relationship with Him and to love and serve others. And, as my Uncle David taught me, this can be done in even the most ordinary ways. And who knows, we just might make an extraordinary difference.