It's Only Life After All

A look back over my most recent posts is kind of discouraging. A quote. A list. A one-line review of a CD. The words to a song I didn't write. It’s not that there hasn’t been time for a longer entry--and I like those better-- it’s that I haven’t had much to say lately. Or at least not much worth saying. I’ve been a bit dry and rather than appear to have abandoned the blog altogether I’ve tried to keep at it with the brief and seemingly less important (or at least less interesting) stuff. But here’s the thing: This is my life. It is what it is. It’s not a novel and if it were a movie very few people would go to see it. If I approach my life like I’m tempted to approach this blog--if I allow myself to believe that it’s the big stuff that matters--then I miss all of the “ordinary” reality that makes life life. A quote. A list. A one-line review of a new CD. The words to a song I didn't write. I wonder sometimes if the disappointment that so many people (perhaps especially people doing the American Christian Thing) feel about their lives has to do with their constant craving for the spectacular. For something that seems significant. For something that feels big. Are we so programmed to want to do “big things for God,“ to want to “dream dreams so big that they’ll fail if God is not in them” that we blind ourselves to the vital pulse that beats in the day-to-day? What I think is that maybe there is no little stuff. That maybe Tasha’s right about The Ordinary. That the every-day, unimpressive bits of life--a Sunday afternoon nap with my wife, the latest $14 slice of beauty I’ve picked up at Media Play, the turkey and bacon sandwich today with Gary and Burton, my giggly excitement at the fact that we’re 42 days from the beginning of baseball season, a night at The Comet with friends, lunch with Kevin, a running email conversation with a friend whose voice I only hear once a year, an evening on the couch in my underpants (or out of them)--this is my life. Dramatic or not, interesting to anyone or not, purpose-driven or not, this is my life It is what it is. And I kinda like it.