My boring life
Photo by Sepp Rutz on Unsplash
I have a boring life.
This doesn't bother me in the least.
I'm not an adrenaline junkie or someone who thrives on drama.
What about you?
I'm happy to answer Dickinson's famous question in the affirmative. I'm a nobody, just like her.
I'm quite content leading an ordinary life.
However, I'm realizing that there really is no such thing as an ordinary or boring life.
This is also true for the people around me.
I'll be thinking about Steinbeck's words today, this week, and for the rest of the month.
I hope to look at the people I meet with fresh eyes and ears.
Who knows where a simple conversation might lead.
All this bring to mind something that C.S. Lewis wrote in his essay, The Weight of Glory:
It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbor.
The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.
It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no ordinary people.
You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.
But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.
We must play.
But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.
And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.
Lewis gives me much to think about as we move deeper into Lent.
Lewis and Lent remind me that there are but two roads in life. One leads to death. The other leads to life.
Everyone that we meet today is on one of these two roads.
From God's perspective, there are no ordinary people. We are fearfully and wonderfully made. I need this reminder. Perhaps you do, too.
For those of us who are Christians, there is no such thing as a boring testimony, even if it often feels this way.
For the past dozen or so years, Christianity Today has included brief testimonies as the final article in each issue. Almost all of these stories are dramatic accounts of how Christ saved a long-lost soul. However, my favorite one of the bunch is a very boring one. Here is a link, in case you'd like to read it for yourself.