Ordinary > Extraordinary

If you grew up evangelical in the 90's I can explain why you sometimes feel like a failure.

I spend my days doing very ordinary things.

I keep my toddlers fed and clothed and away from things that could hurt them. I manage my home by making grocery lists and prepping meals and keeping track of when the sheets were last washed. I invest in my marriage through bedtime conversations and holding my tongue and reconnecting after the chaos of all our ordinary days.

I show up to my work for 6:30am Zoom meetings and data spreadsheets and timecard approvals. At church I volunteer in the nursery and lead a small group with my husband and every week we stand next to the cross in the corner of the sanctuary to pray for needs, spoken and unspoken.

If you had described this life to 16-year-old Tabitha, I would have turned up my nose in disdain. Such an existence was far too ordinary for me. Sure, spreading peanut butter and jelly on bread for your kids and setting up for women’s ministry events at church weren’t unimportant, but I was going to do big things for God. I had grown up in the late 90s and 2000s on a steady diet of missionary biographies, short-term mission trips, and the encouragement of adults around me that my generation would be the one to guide America back to God. I was stuffed with what I had been told was “holy ambition.”¹

Several years ago, when absolutely none of the extraordinary, world changing things I was sure I would accomplish had panned out, I was overcome with feelings of shame and embarrassment. It was painful for me to even listen to the presentations of visiting missionaries in church. That was supposed to be me, I would think. Had I not tried hard enough? Did I not love Jesus as much as I claimed? Was I lazy? Selfish? Weak? A hypocrite? 

The faithfulness I was taught to strive for was radical in its form. While one was not necessarily sinning if they chose to focus primarily on raising a family and participating in the local church, they were missing out on experiencing a more exciting life in partnership with God to save souls and impact the world. Of course the most spiritually mature believers would desire to accomplish significant things for God and would never be content to limit God’s work through them to their home or small town. And if you still found yourself stuck as a stay-at-home mom, you could at the very least impact the world by dedicating your life to molding and educating your children to be future church leaders and world changers.

Equating faithful Christianity with some form of radicalism, whether through political engagement, lifestyle choices, vocational decisions, etc. is not new. Throughout church history there have been movements to take the words of Jesus more literally or to return to a certain perception of the practices of the Early Church or to live in a way that is more obviously distinct from the surrounding culture. Taken to extremes, these movements morph into cult-like expressions of Christian faith.

The form of what I have come to call “radical Christianity” with which I grew up as a millennial raised in white American evangelicalism was usually quite subtle. But minor differences in the soil can completely change the health of the plants grown in it. At first glance many people might not be able to tell that this dirt is different from any other, but if you were nurtured in it like I was, you won’t be able to deny how it has shaped you.

It’s taken years, but slowly I’ve begun to peel back the layers of what I was taught and to see that my ordinary life is not just beautiful, but is actually biblical and faithful. Bigger is not better. Harder is not holier. Changing the world was never my job. I have not failed.

We grew up under a heavy burden. But there is hope.

We can find contentment and confidence in believing that the small lives we’re living are enough.

We can set aside the exhaustion of striving to do radical things for the rest that comes when we embrace Christ’s easy yoke of ordinary faithfulness.

We can finally silence the haunting voices that whisper failure to our hearts and trade them for the peaceful refrain of “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

In pursuit of beauty,

1. I was first introduced to this phrase in the writing of John Piper, but I’m not sure if he originally coined it.