I told a friend this week, "If I didn't make so many great friends this goodbye stuff wouldn't be so hard." She said, "If you wouldn't have made so many friends, this year would have been miserable!" She is right! Real LIFE is made up of friendship. Friendships don't happen overnight. In American culture we are so quick to "make friends". Yet true friendship doesn't just happen it is worked out though ordinary and even mundane encounters on a regular basis. As I prepare to sleep my last sleep in KC (for a while) I can't help but be amazed and hugely humbled again by God's incarnate presence in the people I've lived with this year. We've experienced an ordinary miracle in human connectedness. There have been Holy spaces in the most mundane events.
Almost every night MaryAnn, Malcolm and I would convene in the living room with popcorn or ice-cream. We'd talk about our days, share what we were reading or what we'd heard on NPR. We'd share about our encounters with people. It wasn't anything to write about. Yet God has been in the small things with regularity. Popcorn and ice-cream led to connection and the building of family. We shared our hearts. Sometimes it was for 5 minutes and sometimes it was for hours.
Today as I spoke with MaryAnn and Malcolm, my KC family, I felt overwhelmed by their gratitude towards me. I'm thinking, "I should be the doing the thanking!" I have. Malcolm began the morning by sharing how sad he feels to see me go. For a moment it reminded me of a conversation I had with my father shortly before my parents drove me off to college. MaryAnn and Malcolm don't have any kids of their own. Yet I glimpsed a father in Malcolm today. Fatherhood comes with great sadness. It must be hard to let a daughter go even if it is an "adopted daughter". Later MaryAnn shared, "God must be letting you go because he knows I've learned what I've needed to learn from you." I felt stunned. This from a woman who has mentored me in so many areas of life. This from a woman who has walked with me as I have grown into listening to LIFE. This from a woman who helped me find the courage to take a year long sabbath! It is amazing to realize how mutually blessed this trio--MaryAnn, Malcolm and I--have been through a year of living together. We've laughed, cried, worked, played and ate together. We've learned something about God and his compassionate love from one another. As sad as it is to leave yet another home I'm so full of gratitude. God has been at work in us. God has been real to us through us.
So often as a Christian I've hoped for God to show up in the special signs and wonders. "God show up in a special way at church today!" "Give us some writing on a wall that you are here." How often have I thought that the real God-work was in that spectacular moment of "the spirit"? In that "moment" everything changes! But that isn't the story of this particular year. In fact this isn't the story of my life in God at all. So often we highlight the climactic God events of life. I wonder, what little, ordinary, mundane, human events and relationships are taking place before those "moments"? And isn't God just as miraculous in the ordinary moments as he is in the "extraordinary" ones? Isn't God holy in the mundane of life? If I didn't think these things to be so before, I know they are true now!
God has been in the un-noted noticeable human exchanges. I'm reminded that God is in the humanness of us all! This is the ordinary miracle we all experience everyday. The "signs and wonders" taken one at a time could be passed off as nothing more than just a mundane and ordinary life. Yet taken all together there is a spectacular witness of God at work in people sharing life together. This year I've witnessed an ordinary miracle through daily connection with people I love more now that I did a year ago. I'm already missing the Holy mundane! I imagine I will have ample opportunity to notice ordinary miracles in the Holy mundane in the next adventure.
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