When we were first married a thousand years ago, I would pack a brown bag for my husband Bill to take for lunch at the manufacturing plant where he worked. A couple sandwiches on store-bought bread, a piece of fruit, a cookie or two, if we had any. Nothing special but a lunchbreak in the middle of the day.....until I started slipping in a hand-written poem, a Bible verse on a scrap of paper, or a piece of chocolate wrapped in aluminum foil at the bottom of the bag. He never knew what to expect. Once he was really surprised when I wrapped in foil, a tiny plastic gorilla we had found under our hot-water radiator.
According to my late father's dictionary published in 1931, I was bringing something exotic to Bill's meal, which the dictionary defined as "anything not native to a place." It is those additional five letters of anything that turns the ordinary into the extra-ordinary.
What if our habits included a bit of spontaneity, something fun, out of the ordinary, a small kindness, or a smear of Nutella, perhaps, on a plain vanilla wafer?
It doesn't take much to adorn the unadorned. Or to unfold the beauty God has woven in what is all around us, uncovering the exotic in unusual places and unexpected ways -- both inside and outside our normal bounds.
As our beloved Mr. Rogers used to sing, "What is not like the others?" This is the day that the LORD has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. Psalm 118. 24 None like any other.
When we see God differently, everything changes. May we see something exotic in this stretch of hours, plant something different in it, and get our hearts up and running to think and respond with a fresh perspective.
God specializes in surprising us. And He uses us to do exactly that for others, more often than not.
Author and house specialist Joanna Gaines practices and pursues what brings unusual treatments to homes and recipes, as simple as adding a can of green chilies to a casserole or swapping out throw pillows on the tired couch. In her Magnolia Home cookbook, she describes one of her go-to's for an exotic touch: homemade whipped cream. Four simple ingredients in four minutes flat transforms the ordinary into something glamorous, the stale or store bought into a last minute special treat. She keeps whipping cream in her fridge as a tool in her toolbox for such a moment as this. "It makes everything it touches better."
Thinking exotically makes us more aware of the creative mandate God has endowed us. What am I doing with this little patch of time today? Mundane does not appear in His dictionary. But doing all things with a new heart does.
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