A New Ordinary Year

Once again, three days to go.  The sixteen soon will replace the fifteen.  As creatures living in the realm of time, we tend to sync the seconds, mark the minutes, and even halve the hours.  Depending on your perspective and/or personality, you view our shared time-focused habit as valuable or incessant.  Join me, whether you desire to break or feed that habit, in changing it for the Ordinary.  As we close out 2015, prepare yourself to use 2016, all of it, to live the Ordinary.  I find the profound, yet understated, words of the Apostle Paul quite helpful.

Stay calm; mind your own business; do your own job. You’ve heard all this from us before, but a reminder never hurts.
1 Thessalonians 4:11 (The Message)

Stay Calm
You are familiar with the original and altered versions of this image originating in the UK during World War II.
By all means, if you like, wear the shirt.  Live it as well.




Mind Your Own Business
As a father of three exceptional children (Check back next week for more detail on that.) and a student of the great Text, I often feel the urge to quote Jesus’ words to Peter.

Jesus said, “If I want him to live until I come again, what’s that to you? You—follow me.”
John 21:22 (The Message)

“What’s that to you,” the Lord says.  Peter received the kindly-yet-firmly-stated reprimand because he was more concerned with prying into John’s future than focusing on God’s plan for his own. 

Do Your Own Job
The following is key to living the Ordinary Life:  live your life; not someone else’s.  Examples to the negative abound.  The budding musician who hangs it up to pursue athletics.  The spouse who allows the dream to cloud, even kill, the reality; thus weakening his/her marriage.  The author who abandons her own style in an attempt to sound like another.

Last century’s novelist and Nobel Prize winner, Pearl Buck, suggested -

“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.”  (goodreads.com)