The Blessing of the Ordinary

As many churches do, we have a time in our worship service every week where we take prayer requests.  It’s called “Joys and Concerns” or “Prayers and Praises” or whatever an individual church happens to call it.  Most of the time, it’s requests for prayers for people who are dealing with health concerns or with the loss of a loved one.  There are, of course, other types of prayer requests, too.  And there are sometimes praises of various types as well.

But sometimes, when we come to this time, nobody has anything to say.  Nobody has anything they’d like to request prayer for.  And nobody mentions anything they’d like to praise God for, either.

Now of course, this does not mean that no one there is going through a tough situation.  It also does not mean that no one has anything to praise God for.  It may be that someone has something major going on in their life, but they just don’t feel like talking about it publicly.  I can respect that.  And it also may be that people know there are all kinds of things they could praise God for, but it just doesn’t seem right to say them in front of everyone.  I can respect that, too.

But I suspect that sometimes, what it means is that most people have had what we would consider just an ordinary week.  Nothing great happened, and nothing terrible happened.  Life went on more or less as they expected it go.  They did what they usually do, they did not have any unusual problems, whatever problems they did have were once they could solve, and for the most part things went relatively smoothly.

And you know, we all need weeks like that sometimes.  In fact, sometimes a week like that can be a blessing from God.  We don’t necessarily want every week to be that way--we’d run the risk of being bored.  But sometimes we need a week where things just go kind of okay.  Not outstanding, but not awful, either.  A chance to catch our breath, a chance to relax a little, a chance to regroup before the next really good or really bad thing happens.

So if you’re having an ordinary week, thank God for it.  But know that it’s not going to last forever.  At some point, something is going to happen again.  It might be good, or it might be bad, but it will happen.  So, while you’re thanking God for the ordinary week, ask God to help you be ready for the next time something not-ordinary happens, whether it’s good or it’s bad.  Ask God to help you deal with it.  And ask God to help you find a way in every week, the ordinary and the not-ordinary ones, to use it for the glory of God.