When the Ordinary Shines Again

The windows are open today.

The rain has stopped for now, and through the gray, little cracks of blue are beginning to break through the clouds. The air coming through the screens feels cooler somehow—washed clean, perhaps—and for the first time in what feels like a very long while, I am sitting still enough to notice it.

It has been a busy season of preparing.

Preparing for conversations. Preparing for interviews. Preparing to answer questions about what I have built, what I have learned, what I am capable of, and perhaps even who I have become.

There was very little ordinary about it.

For a while, life seemed to exist just slightly outside its usual borders. There was anticipation and uncertainty. Doors that might open. Decisions that might change things. I was looking forward so often that I hardly had time to look around.

And then today, the rain stopped.

The windows opened.

And home felt like home again.

And I wonder if perhaps there is a gift hidden inside our occasional departures from the ordinary.

Perhaps stepping outside the ordinary—those seasons that stretch us beyond the familiar—is sometimes what allows us to return to ordinary life and recognize that it was never ordinary at all.

Perhaps we need, every once in a while, to step beyond the borders of the life we know in order to remember the quiet mercy of having a life that feels safe and familiar enough to return to.

A favorite chair.

A familiar room.

Rainwater still gathered on the leaves outside.

The hum of a house that asks nothing of you except that you live inside it.

No interview.

No preparation.

No need to explain your value or tell anyone what you have accomplished.

Just an open window.

A patch of blue sky.

And the astonishing gift of being home.

I think of Jacob waking from sleep and saying, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.”

Not because God had suddenly arrived.

But because Jacob had finally awakened to what had been true all along.

Maybe that is part of what it means to cherish the ordinary.

Not to make the familiar more sacred than it is, but to recognize the holiness already woven through it.

To notice the life we know by heart.

To hear the rain soften against the house.

To feel the breeze move through an open window.

To remember that familiarity is not the absence of wonder. Sometimes it is simply wonder we have grown accustomed to.

And perhaps that is one of the quiet mercies of stepping outside the ordinary for a season.

We come home seeing differently.

The rooms have not changed.

The rain is still rain.

The chair is still the chair.

But something in us has awakened.

And for a little while, the life we almost stopped noticing becomes luminous again.