Courage in the Ordinary
Tish Harrison Warren
Everydayness is my problem. It’s easy to think about what you would do in wartime, or if a hurricane blows through, or if you spent a month in Paris, or if your guy wins the election, or if you won the lottery or bought that thing you really wanted. It’s a lot more difficult to figure out how you’re going to get through today without despair. —Rod Dreher
I
was nearly 22 years old and had just returned to my college town from a
part of Africa that had missed the last three centuries. As I walked to
church in my weathered, worn-in Chaco’s, I bumped into our new
associate pastor and introduced myself. He smiled warmly and said, “Oh,
you. I’ve heard about you. You’re the radical who wants to give your
life away for Jesus.” It was meant as a compliment and I took it as one,
but it also felt like a lot of pressure because, in a new way, I was
torturously uncertain about what being a radical and living for Jesus
was supposed to mean for me. Here I was, back in America, needing a job
and health insurance, toying with dating this law student intellectual
(who wasn’t all that radical), and unsure about how to be faithful to
Jesus in an ordinary life. I’m not sure I even knew if that was
possible.
I
am from the Shane Claiborne generation and my story is that of many
young evangelicals. I grew up relatively wealthy in a relatively wealthy
evangelical church. Jesus captured my heart and my imagination when I
was a kid. I was the girl wearing WWJD bracelets and praying with her
friends before theater rehearsal. It did not take long before I began
asking questions about how the gospel impacted racial reconciliation and
poverty. I began to yearn for something more than a comfortable
Christianity focused on saving souls and being generally respectable
Republican Texans.
I entered college restless
with questions and spent my twenties reading Marx and St. Francis, being
discipled in the work of Rich Mullins, Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo,
learning about New Monasticism (though it wasn’t named that yet), and
falling in love with Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. My senior year of
college, I invited everyone at our big student evangelical gathering to
join me in protesting the School of the Americas.
I
spent a little while in two different intentional Christian
communities, hanging out with homeless teenagers, and going to a church
called “Scum of the Earth” (really). I gave away a bunch of clothes,
went barefoot, and wanted to be among the “least of these.” At a
gathering of Christian communities, I slept in a cornfield and spent a
week using composting toilets, learning to make my own cleaning
supplies, and discussing Christian anarchy while listening to
mewithoutyou. I went to Christian Community Development Association
conferences, headed up a tutoring program for impoverished, immigrant
children, and interned at some churches trying to bridge the gap between
wealthier evangelicals and the poor. I was certainly not as radical as
many Christian radicals — a lot of folks are doing more good than I
could ever hope to and, besides, I’ve never had dreadlocks — but I did
have some “ordinary radical” street cred.
Now,
I’m a thirty-something with two kids living a more or less ordinary
life. And what I’m slowly realizing is that, for me, being in the house
all day with a baby and a two-year-old is a lot more scary and a lot
harder than being in a war-torn African village. What I need courage for
is the ordinary, the daily every-dayness of life. Caring for a homeless
kid is a lot more thrilling to me than listening well to the people in
my home. Giving away clothes and seeking out edgy Christian communities
requires less of me than being kind to my husband on an average
Wednesday morning or calling my mother back when I don’t feel like it.
Soon
after college, one of my best friends who is brilliant and brave and
godly had a nervous breakdown. He was passionate about the poor and
wanted to change at least a little bit of the world. He was trained as
an educator and intentionally went to one of the poorest, most
crime-ridden schools in our state and worked every day trying to make a
difference in the lives of students who had been failed by nearly
everyone and everything — from their parents to the educational system.
After his “episode,” he had to go back to his hometown and live a small,
ordinary life as he recovered, working as a waiter living in an
upper-middle class neighborhood. When he’d landed back home, weary and
discouraged, we talked about what had gone wrong. We had gone to a top
college where people achieved big things. They wrote books and started
non-profits. We were told again and again that we’d be world-changers.
We were part of a young, Christian movement that encouraged us to live
bold, meaningful lives of discipleship, which baptized this
world-changing impetus as the way to really follow after Jesus. We were
challenged to impact and serve the world in radical ways, but we never
learned how to be an average person living an average life in a
beautiful way.
A prominent New Monasticism
community house had a sign on the wall that famously read “Everyone
wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.” My life is really
rich in dirty dishes (and diapers) these days and really short in
revolutions. I go to a church full of older people who live pretty
normal, middle-class lives in nice, middle-class houses. But I have
really come to appreciate this community, to see their lifetimes of
sturdy faithfulness to Jesus, their commitment to prayer, and the
tangible, beautiful generosity that they show those around them in
unnoticed, unimpressive, unmarketable, unrevolutionary ways. And each
week, we average sinners and boring saints gather around ordinary bread
and wine and Christ himself is there with us.
And
here is the embarrassing truth: I still believe in and long for a
revolution. I still think I can make a difference beyond just my front
door. I still want to live radically for Jesus and be part of him
changing the world. I still think mediocrity is dull, and I still fret
about settling.
But I’ve come to the point where
I’m not sure anymore just what God counts as radical. And I suspect that
for me, getting up and doing the dishes when I’m short on sleep and
patience is far more costly and necessitates more of a revolution in my
heart than some of the more outwardly risky ways I’ve lived in the past.
And so this is what I need now: the courage to face an ordinary day —
an afternoon with a colicky baby where I’m probably going to snap at my
two-year old and get annoyed with my noisy neighbor — without despair,
the bravery it takes to believe that a small life is still a meaningful
life, and the grace to know that even when I’ve done nothing that is
powerful or bold or even interesting that the Lord notices me and is
fond of me and that that is enough.
I’ve read a lot of really good discussions lately about the recent emphasis on "radical" Christianity (see one at an InterVarsity blog and one at Christianity Today).
This Radical Christian movement is responsible for a lot of good, and
I’m grateful that I’ve been irrevocably shaped by it for some fifteen
years. When we fearfully cling to the status quo and the comfortable, we
must be challenged by the call of a life-altering, comfort-afflicting
Jesus. But for those of us — and there are a lot of us — who are drawn
to an edgy, sizzling spirituality, we need to embrace radical
ordinariness and to be grounded in the challenge of the stable
mundaneness of the well-lived Christian life.
In
our wedding ceremony, my pastor warned my husband that every so often, I
would bound into the room, anxiety etched on my face, certain we’d
settled for mediocrity because we weren’t “giving our lives away” living
in outer Mongolia. We laughed. All my radical friends laughed. And he
was right. We’ve had that conversation many, many times. But I’m
starting to learn that, whether in Mongolia or Tennessee, the kind of
“giving my life away” that counts starts with how I get up on a gray
Tuesday morning. It never sells books. It won’t be remembered. But it’s
what makes a life. And who knows? Maybe, at the end of days, a hurried
prayer for an enemy, a passing kindness to a neighbor, or budget
planning on a boring Thursday will be the revolution stories of God
making all things new.
Wednesday, April 3, 2013 - 12:49
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