An Ordinary Tuesday Morning

I am lingering in the waiting room at the car dealer this morning with a tepid cup of coffee, getting the oil changed in my car.  With 121,000 miles on this faithful vehicle, I am hoping that nothing else will be added to the tab. 

It is an ordinary Tuesday morning, doing ordinary things. 

And it is not lost on me, another ordinary Tuesday morning not so long ago, when I packed lunches, found missing shoes, and hustled the girls off to school. As soon as they left, I went for a six mile run with a fabulously blue sky soaring above.  I could have run forever that morning.  The beauty of the day astonished me.

Before I even changed out of my sweaty clothes, before I jumped into the work for the day, the phone rang – you know, the kind of phone still attached to the wall, the kind of phone where you actually had to be home to answer it – and it was my mom. 

Her frantic words stumbled over each other, so rapidly, I could not understand.  “Slow down, Mom.  What’s going on?”

“Turn on your tv,” she said as she hung up the phone.

It was an ordinary Tuesday morning, doing ordinary things.  And then, it changed forever by the images on a screen.

Someone once told me that at the news of any catastrophic event, one’s senses surge into high alert.  I remember such vivid details. I was wearing an old cotton t-shirt and royal blue running shorts, sitting with my feet up, my running shoes still on, the shrill of the phone startling me, the immense red of September ripe tomatoes lining the counter, waiting to be canned, their deep earthy aroma penetrating the air.

The very first image on the television screen was a newscaster running into the controlled pristine newsroom.  The other journalists were obviously both shocked and shaken.  A really deep abyss faced them, much deeper than could be condensed and captured in headline news, the dark unknown gaping in front of these seasoned professionals, who were speechless in the face of a vast evil, beyond the easily explainable or reportable, with no commercial breaks.

Seventeen years later, there are still no ordinary days.  There never were.  Peace and strength and God’s faithfulness are not dependent on blue skies and favorable circumstances, but manifest even in the hard stuff, the really really hard stuff.

God never promised us that life would be easy,

but “I am with you.”

Churches that Sunday were packed to overflowing, as if suddenly, quite suddenly, people realized that God is real.

Even though the fig tree should not blossom,

nor fruit be on the vines,

the produce of the olive fail

and the fields yield no food,

the flock be cut off from the fold

and there be no herd in the stalls,

yet

I will rejoice in the LORD,

I will take joy in the God of my salvation.

GOD, the Lord, is my strength;

He makes my feet like the deer’s;

He makes me tread on my high places.

                                Habakkuk 3. 17-19

On that particular September 11, I read Oswald Chambers’ devotional that morning, words that had been transcribed by his wife in the early 1900s and published in the 1920s, words that took my breath away, words calling for faithfulness in the ordinary:

“We have to go the “second mile” with God.  Some of us get played out in the first ten yards, because God compels us to go where we cannot see the way, and we say –‘I will wait till I get nearer the big crisis.’  If we do not do the running steadily in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis.”

God does not compel us to be fearful of the future,

    but to be faithful on the most ordinary days.

Even today.

Even in this.