The Magnificent Mundane
Chapter One - The Theoretical
By John Boda
A unique look at the paradoxical world of the ordinary to the amazing, the dull to the glorious, the mundane to the magnificent-- and how Christ-followers can soar within it’s intricate fabric.
Table of Contents:
1. The Mundane is Magnificent
A Theoretical View,
2. The Macro to the Micro
A Technical View
3. The Miraculous Mundane
A Theological View
4. The March of the Mole People
A Typographical View
5. Minute By Minute
A Transitional View
About the Author
John Boda is currently one of the worship leaders and small group leaders of Community Christian Church in Romeoville, Illinois.
He is a full-time singer/guitarist and a prolific recording artist with many CDs.
He has been involved with church ministry and leadership, specifically in teaching and music, for over twenty five years in several churches and areas, and is also a former associate pastor.
He
is an avid reader of science and theology and welcomes comments or
questions.
Introduction
We all live in a very mundane world, but we have to be nearly blind to ignore the significance, beauty, diversity, and pure magnificence surrounding us every day! The Magnificent Mundane is more than a play on words, or a clever oxymoron, it is a living reality for all of us Homo sapiens alive on planet Earth, spinning around in the suburban, outer arm neighborhood of our galaxy.
Before I go further, I think a definition is needed:
Mundane: Worldly, temporal, mortal, carnal, secular, earthly, uneventful, ordinary, dull.
Magnificent: Grand, splendid, noble, gorgeous, superb, glorious, beautiful, majestic, spectacular.
How could anything mundane be magnificent? How could anything magnificent be mundane? To most of us, these two words are opposites and too foreign to be joined together in reality. Yet, I believe that these two words, the mundane and the magnificent, are both one and the same for us and for everything around us from the tiniest quark or string inside an atom, to the near infinite, beyond imagination, size of the stellar universe.
This E-book is written for everyone, but especially for:
1. Anyone searching for depth and meaning in life.
2. Christ-followers, pilgrims already on their spiritual journey.
3. The creative and imaginative -those who dare think outside the box.
Let me state here that I am a Christ-follower. This E- book, by God’s grace, can spark an amazing new “practicing the presence” mentality in your life. If you are simply curious and searching, you are welcome too. I sincerely hope this can help you in your quest and enlighten your journey. As Captain Picard from Star Trek says, upon entering out into the vast unknown, “Engage!”
*Note to
readers: Every Bible passage, unless stated, is from Eugene Peterson’s
vivid interpretation of the bible, called, The Message.
Chapter 1: The Mundane is Magnificent
A Theoretical View
While walking around in a hot, Middle Eastern landscape in sandals with twelve guys who need to eat, sleep and go to the bathroom, Jesus says,
“You’re tied down to the mundane, I’m in touch with what is beyond your horizons.”
John 8:23
What makes the mundane magnificent? Why isn’t it just that the mundane is mundane and the magnificent is magnificent?
“What a wildly wonderful world God! You made it all with wisdom at your side, made Earth overflow with your wonderful creations.”
- Psalm 104
“He counts the stars and assigns each a name, our Lord is great, with limitless strength, we’ll never comprehend what he knows and does.”
- Psalm 147
The Paradox of Creation
Throughout the Bible we are told of the beauty, glory, and wonder of God’s creation. We are also told to be aware of God’s creation. Everywhere we look, from an anthill, to a spider’s web, to a rainbow, to a sunset, to a bird in flight, to a butterfly basking in the sun, the created, natural world clearly reflects the original, creative, amazing and magnificent God who created it. Consider two snowflakes that are never exact, to the many thousands of varieties of any common bug you can think of, and the humbling scientific fact that there are far more stars in the universe than grains of sand of all the beaches on Earth! We live in the midst of awe and magnificence!
Yet at the same time, everything around us, including ourselves, seems dull, ordinary, and common! This is what I call the paradox of creation. I will explore this great mystery more in depth in the next chapter, hoping to reveal a new undiscovered universe right before our eyes.
But for now, just stop for a moment and think of the many times you watched a butterfly go by, but never paused for even a moment to consider the amazing process of metamorphosis that transforms it from a crawling caterpillar to a free flying beautiful butterfly. As I am writing this now, I am outdoors, during the dog days of summer, and I just tossed one of my backyard squirrels a piece of corn. He is sitting just a few feet in front of me, chomping away at it. Have we seen these backyard acrobats so often that we don’t even take a serious look or give it a second thought? Do we ever consider the awesome, creative, diverse work of the Creator God? Here‘s how Brennan Manning in his book, The Ragamuffin Gospel, describes God’s magical creation:
Our world is saturated with grace and the lurking presence of God is revealed not only in spirit but in matter - in a deer leaping across a meadow, in the flight of an eagle, in fire and water, and a rainbow after a summer storm, in a gentle doe streaking through a forest, in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, in a child licking a chocolate ice cream cone, in a woman with wind-blown hair. God intended for us to discover his loving presence in the world around us. We must rediscover the gospel of grace and the world of grace.
Carl Sagan, writing the introduction to Steven Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time, says this about our lack of awareness of God‘s world: (Amazingly, Sagan was an atheist!)
We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that gives us to an Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to atoms of which we are made of and on whose stability we fundamentally depend.
I am aware that this idea of seeing the magnificent work of God through the created world around us is not new.
It has been said that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, but don’t ever believe it. The world’s oldest profession is clearly revealed in Genesis Chapter 2, verse 15:
“Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.”
The
word’s oldest profession is gardening! What a job that must have been! I
don’t believe for one minute that the garden of Eden was a little back yard
garden. Most likely it was enormous. Adam and Eve must have enjoyed their
day communing with God surrounded by a beautiful garden full of trees,
rivers, and a great variety of animals. This was paradise on Earth, and it
was all God’s idea! Even though we sweat and grow tired at times in our
working lives, we must never forget that God ordained and prepared work for
Adam before sin’s curse, and called everything, “very good.”
The
College of St. Job
“I’m in charge of all this -- I run the universe!”
- God said to Job in Job 41:11
Let’s forward to the Bible character named Job. Mention Job and nearly everyone is aware of his great suffering and trials, but did you ever wonder at God’s response to Job? Beginning in Job 38:2, God actually shows up in a whirlwind and, instead of explaining to Job the reasons why he suffered, God does an amazing thing, seemingly out of context to the whole story. God begins to grill Job about the Earth. God asks Job question after question regarding the stars, life and death, thunder and lightning, darkness and light, the sea, the lifecycle of mountain goats, wild donkeys, oxen, ostriches, horses, locusts, hawks and eagles. God also talks about other creatures we know little about, like the behemoth. Plus, all of chapter four is devoted to the leviathan, which sounds a lot like a huge, real live fire-breathing dragon!
God doesn’t give Job any answers explaining why he suffered or what God’s motives were for putting Job through this ordeal. God takes Job to school and tests him on the created world around him (four chapters full, Job 39-41). (Interestingly, four is the day God created Earth, and is also the number of the Earth and created world all through scripture.)
God sets
out the entire creation as a science classroom and using birds and beasts to
teach wisdom.”
--Elihu to Job in Job 35
If you or I were God (like Jim Carrey in the movie Bruce Almighty) we probably would have been more direct with Job, saying, “Ok, Job, here’s the deal, sorry about all those trials, maybe I went a little overboard on that, but you caught me on a bad day! I just wanted to knock you off your high horse a bit, you’re a good servant, but you were getting a little too cocky. Are you ok now?”
So, Why did God respond to Job in a series of questions, mostly about the created world around him? It’s evident that although Job was a righteous, God-fearing man, he still had his faults (like we all do). Namely, it’s clear that Job had a disease that many of us have, the “running of the mouth” disease. In other words, he talked too much.
Also, he might have lost a personal sense of his own sinful corrupt heart, that all of us have no matter how close we get to God. In fact, it seems the closer we get to God, the more we are aware of it! These two issues are gleaned from many passages in Job, especially in Job’s response to God’s first round of questioning in Job 40:4, 5;
“Behold, I am vile what shall I answer you? I lay my hand over my mouth. Once I have spoken but I will not answer; twice but I will proceed no further.”
But, as with most scripture passages, God may have been addressing a more subtle issue. Could it be that another one of Job’s faults was that he also somehow lost his ability to see God in everything around him, especially the created world? Why else would God ask so many questions concerning the Earth?
Maybe Job was like many of us. We can easily feel and love God through reading His Word, while sitting in church, and by hanging around others like-minded. However, we have somehow placed God in a box, where he is only seen and enjoyed within our prescribed parameters. Job himself is painfully aware of losing a sense of God’s presence by a statement he made in Job, Chapter 9:11.
“Somehow though he moves right in front of me, I don’t see Him; quietly and surely he’s active and I miss it.”
In John Fischer’s web site, www.fischtank.com, one of his articles is entitled “God on the Loose,” where he says:
The mere fact that we set Christian things apart from the world is evidence of our inability, and perhaps, even our refusal, to find God in everything. If God can be found in the average activities of an average day, then we have no one but ourselves to blame for our inability to see him there.
Consider Debra K. Farrington’s words of caution in Living Faith Day By Day:
By recognizing God’s presence only in particular environments, and by forgetting God’s presence in the workplace, the streets, the movie theatre, the grocery store, or wherever we go, we limit our own experience of the sacred and cut ourselves and others off from the presence of God as it flows through us all day long.
- - - -
In Ben Campbell Johnson’s book, Living Before God, he admonishes us to see God in the mundane.
Driven by the conviction that life has depth and everything in our lives has meaning, we are compelled to look at the unfolding experiences of a typical day with expectant eyes and receptive hearts. The God who speaks, speaks in the ordinary events and interactions of the day. What excitement this adds to a routine day! It’s not that the material worlds is unreal, but it is incomplete.
Now I am not suggesting worshipping nature! That is called pantheism. My brother is a missionary in India, and tells of a daily scene outside of his window each morning. He sees a man heading to a particular tree at sunrise, bows down to it, and worships this tree as some kind of deity! That is not the response I am advocating. Author and speaker Tony Campolo addresses this issue in his enlightening book, Carpe Diem (Seize the Day), and says,
God is not nature, and nature is not God, to think that would be to think like a pantheist and not a Christian. But God is in nature, he permeates it. He comes through it like electricity, but it can be a vehicle through which the electricity flows.
Job is one of the oldest saints in the Bible, and the book named after him is the oldest book of the Bible, possibly written by Moses. However, Job’s lessons are as relevant to us today as they were to him. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What’s old is new, what’s new is old -- there is nothing new under the sun.”
Maybe Job’s greatest fault was that he simply lost his awareness of the magnificently created world, amidst his seemingly mundane surroundings! Maybe Job’s issues are our issues, especially in our computerized post-modern world. At least consider such a conclusion as you prayerfully read through Job the next time.
David’s Heart
One of the descriptions of David in the Bible is that he was “A man after God’s own heart!” David was passionate about knowing God, and enjoyed going deep into a beautiful daily awareness and intimacy with God. God wants of all of us to be aware of him and his creation, but sadly, it seems so few aspire to pursue God this way. Consider some of David’s own words:
How magnificent your work God! How profound your thoughts! Dullards never notice what you do, fools never do get it. (Psalm 92: 5-6, )
- - -
The world’s a huge stockpile of God-wonders and God thoughts (Psalm 40:4, )
- - -
The young lions roar for their pray, clamoring to God for their supper…All the creatures look expectantly to you to give them their meals on time. You come and they gather around, you open your hand and they eat from it. If you turn your back, they’d die in a minute (Psalm 104:17:22 )
- - -
Every cloud’s a flag to your faithfulness. (Psalm 108:4b)
- - -
God, my God, how great you are! Beautifully, gloriously robed! Dressed up in sunshine, and all heaven stretched out for your tent. (Psalm 104: 1-2, )
- - -
Remember the world of wonders he has made. (Psalm 105:6)
Could there be a connection between David’s passion of seeking God’s own heart, and his keen awareness of the created world around him? Personally, I would say yes! (I write more on David in Chapter Three titled the “Miraculous Mundane.” )
Other Awakenings
Take a moment to read the statements of some other Christ-followers, some long ago, some recently, and begin to see a common thread of a new grace-filled God awareness in things previously seen as mundane.
If you look at a grain of wheat very closely, you will be overwhelmed by the glory of God.
- Martin Luther
- - -
The signs of presence just beneath the surface of the natural, the ordinary, and the expected will appear when we pause to listen. Suddenly we begin to hear the sounds of another land. We discover a vaster, more sublime language that communicates meaning. Best of all, we come to know that the sounds we hear are a mere echo of the true and lasting sound, and the perceptions we have are images of the invisible, hidden in the unfolding day.
- Ben Campbell Johnson in Living Before God
- - -
To see and experience the beauty of nature is a wonderful thing. But to see and experience the beauty of God through nature is infinitely more wonderful.
- Ric Ergenbright in The Art of God
- - -
When I look at God, things in the world don’t become dim, they become clear. The more clearly I see God, the more clear and valuable everything else becomes to me, simply because it is God’s creation.
-Jerram Barrs “Are We Afraid of Leisure?” www.antithesis.com
“Consider the lilies of the field” -- is the only commandment I’ve never broken.
- Emily Dickinson
- - -
Every person, every tree, every flower, every color is alive with God for those who know his language.
- Richard Foster in Freedom of Simplicity
- - -
Earth’s crammed with heaven and the common bush is afire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes, the rest sit around and pluck blackberries.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- - -
Time space come together as we look at the stars, as we worship silently together in the most massive cathedral of the summer sky.
-
Michael Card in his song “Scribbling in the sand.”
Second
Awakenings
One brilliant Harvard psychologist, William James, was so intrigued by this renewal to God by so many people, that he wrote about it extensively in the classic “Gifford Lectures” at Edinburgh.
In those lectures, these renewals were called, “Second Awakenings,” occurring some time after people have opened their hearts to Christ.
However, for others, these awakenings begin immediately after they accept Christ, and suddenly everything becomes new - birds, trees, rain, etc. Then sometime later, it happens again--a renewed , deeper awakening-- usually part of a grace awakening. Philip Yancey talks about his awakening in his book, Rumors of Another World:
Along with many Christians, I have undergone two conversions; first from the natural world to discover the supernatural, and later to re-discover the natural from a new viewpoint.
This is exactly how it happened to me. Upon my conversion to God through surrender to Jesus, which occurred in the spring of 1976 ( when I was 19 years old), I had a very dramatic, joyful, and exciting awakening. For the first time in my life, I was conscious of the incredible experience of forgiveness and immense love from a personal living God who cared about me. In addition, everything around me seemed to completely change and come alive! I remember that it was raining the day after, and previously the rain was an annoying inconvenience to me, but that day, all of a sudden it was simply beautiful! Not only the rain, but every tree seemed shoot from the ground with their branches lifted in praise to God; every bird was a magnificent piece of art. I marveled at butterflies, ants, squirrels -- they all were a small part of a previously unknown, created fabric of life, all reflecting the exquisite, creative, loving God who created it all!
Sadly, my awareness to God’s creation faded, but my love and desire for God increased and grew. I continued to grow as a new Christ-follower, through studying the Bible and joining with others like-minded. Unfortunately, that intense awareness of God through nature became a pleasant distant memory which I concluded must only happen to people like myself right upon conversion to Christ. I thought that my intense experience then must diminish and I must learn to walk by faith.
Recently, God was pleased to grant both my wife and myself a grace-awakening. This prompted us to make a lot of changes. One of those changes included leaving our formal church where I was one of the pastors. Once again, a new awareness of God came! It came through his creation, and the magnificence throughout the mundane! Many of the initial simple joys and wonders have returned of enjoying God through his creation. But the recent grace-awakening was bitter-sweet, along with all the good things it brings, it also can overturn much of the status quo and bring painful changes!
No wonder Steven Curtis Chapman and Scotty Smith call their book, Speechless: Living in God’s Disruptive Grace. Steven Curtis Chapman says:
God's grace is often as disruptive as any hurricane. In his commitment to free our hearts from legalism, little dreams and self-centered living, sometimes God first must dismantle old structures in our hearts so that his new creation can emerge.
Tony Campolo, in his book, Carpe Diem tells of going to a retreat in Michigan and encountering a strange Franciscan monk who was leading the group in meditation and worship. The monk talked about experiencing the “sacrament” of nature, a very alarming word to the Baptist Campolo! Tony tried and tried, but nothing happened until God broke through with a second awakening. Here are his own words:
The next night I went to the garden alone. I sat myself down on the side of the hill by the edge of the stream. There was no moon, only stars over my head. I waited and prayed for nothing but God. I wanted to taste him and smell him, feel him and enjoy him. And I waited and waited and waited - I have no idea how long it was before I fell into a deep sleep. Nor do I have any idea how long I slept. What I do know is that when I awoke, everything around me was ablaze with God. As I opened my eyes, I found I had been transported into another world. There were stars and hills and a babbling brook in this new world, and although they resembled the stars, hills and brook in the world I had left behind, they were totally new. Life was coming at me from all these inanimate creations. I felt myself being bombarded by the Holy Spirit. Holiness was coming from under and over and around everything. Even the ground on which I sat was holy, and the glory of the Lord was burning in the bushes around me. The things that were in the world were not of it. Everything had changed, and yet nothing had changed. It was I who had changed. Before I even realized what I was doing, I was on my feet and running. Never did my feet move faster or my body feel lighter. Never before did I run with such abandon. Up the side of the hill I ran, faster and faster, and I reached for the top. Stronger and stronger I grew as my arms pumped with joy. It was only my lungs that hurt. The air seemed thin, and I grew short of breath. When I reached the summit, I threw myself to the ground and stretched spread eagle before my God. I could hear the pounding of my heart and the rush of blood to my head, I thought I would die and I did not care. I was already raptured, and I was already tasting the world that is to come. As it was for some men of old, I was on top of the mountain, and I would have stayed there forever, but I didn’t.
Campolo ads,
Such things do not happen to everyone, and when these moments of spiritual aliveness do come, they are only for awhile. The ecstasy does not last forever. All who experience it must come down from the mountain. There is always the mundane on the other side of the silence that speaks - but for t hose who have been invaded by the presence and have tasted the boundless joy, there is an aliveness that pervades the body and a heightened awareness of how precious all of life really is.
His experience seems pretty wild, pretty crazy, and pretty radical, yet I can’t dismiss it as something just from a wild imagination or slightly demented and warped mind! I am also one of these crazy people! I can join the clubs of the people whom Leonard Sweet writes about, (including himself) in his book, Jesus Drives Me Crazy. It’s crazy enough for Tony Campolo’s wild romp in the hills and wild enough for him to title the next chapter in the same book, describing his awakening, “Hugging a Tree is Not as Ridiculous as it Sounds.”
At the level of chemistry, life is curiously mundane - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements - nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary drugstore - and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you - is that they make you! That of course is the miracle of life.
- Bill Bryson in the into to his book A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Celtic Christians in Ireland seemed to have an acute awareness of God all around them. Many years ago, when they would see a large cat capture it’s dinner with a quick swipe of it’s paw from a stream, they would say, “The Power of God is in the Paw of the Cat.” They also spoke of “Thin Places” where the natural and supernatural worlds came together at their narrowest with only a thin veil between them. Where and when did we lose that sense?
THE PARADOX OF PEOPLE
I have spoken of the amazing paradox of creation, now I would like to shed some light on another paradox, the paradox of people. Consider the following words:
A man should carry two stones in his pocket, one should be inscribed, “I am but dust and ashes,” On the other, “For my sake the world was created.” And he should use each stone as he needs it.
- Jewish proverb
It is extraordinary how extraordinary the ordinary person is.
- George F. Will
- - -
Each of us is an original.
Galatians 5:26
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 can 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, in a nightmare. All day long we are in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations - there are no ordinary people.
- C.S. Lewis in The Weight of Glory
- - -
When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and I get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal. I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.
- Brennan Manning in The Ragamuffin Gospel
Like Brennan Manning says, “We are a bundle of paradoxes.” Sly and The Family Stone sang about “Everyday People.” That’s what we all are, ordinary, everyday people. We are white ones, black ones, brown ones, yellow ones, short ones, tall ones, fat ones, skinny ones, young ones, and old ones!
My everyday career involves socializing with the elderly, both the sharp, independent, active retirees, and the sick, invalid, dying and the Alzheimer- stricken. It is of this latter group that I can see the paradox of people more clearly. Many of these sick, very old people in nursing homes were once people of great significance…doctors, professors, lawyers, teachers, inventors, sculptors, and politicians. But through their advanced age and sickness, either physical, mental, or both, they have lost independence, and a sense of self-worth. Many have lost all personal wealth and possessions. Even more painfully, some have had family desert them, leaving them all alone to die apart from the staff working in the home. Many of them are totally dependent on the health care staff for cleaning, eating, and are unable to physically go to the bathroom, which requires the humiliating usage of diapers.
What worth or significance do these people possess? Some would say none, but God sees great worth and huge significance. There is eternal significance in every individual, from a helpless fetus in the womb to a helpless old grandma or grandpa alone in a nursing home room. It doesn’t matter what the age is, or what we have or haven’t accomplished, or if we have kids or not, or if we are rich or poor, or if we live in America or the slums of India, every one of us as human beings have incredible eternal significance!
We who are made in God’s image are also subject to baldness, hemorrhoids,
presbyopia, osteoporosis and every other ailment in the medical
encyclopedia, not to mention our moral defects. And the human body, a
dollar’s worth of chemicals, becomes, according to the Apostle Paul, the
temple of God’s own spirit. - Philip Yancey,
Rumors of Another World
Guess
What? You Are a Phenomenon!
When God made Adam and Eve, they were his crowning work of creation. He declared at the end of creation, “It is very good!” God created people in his image, which is totally unique in all creation. Never is this spoken of concerning any of the animals, no not even the monkeys or chimps!
Although our cells may carry traces of stardust, we also bear the image of the God who made those stars.
- Philip Yancey, Rumors of Another World
Not even my cat was made in God’s image (although my cat thinks she IS God!) I can hear your response, “Oh, that’s all well and good, I believe God created us, and loves us, but he only really bothers with the big, important people, I’m just a nobody, I somehow slipped through the cracks, I came in through the back door and God doesn’t really notice me too much.” Consider the bible’s answer,
God’s love is meteoric -
His loyalty is astronomic -
His purpose titanic -
His verdicts oceanic -
Yet in his largeness - nothing gets lost.
Not a man, not a mouse slips through the cracks.
Psalm 36:6-7
- - -
You know me inside and out, you hold me together. You never fail to stand me tall in your presence so I can look you in the eye.
Psalm 41:12
- - -
Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds.
Jesus speaking in Matthew 6:26
Would you agree with the statement if someone told you, “You are a phenomenon”? You may think you are average, ordinary, and even dull and uninteresting, but if you are a living, breathing human being, you are created in God’s image and are an incredible phenomenon! Leonard Sweet gives this story to help clarify this statement in his book, Jesus Drives Me Crazy:
An Eighth-grade teacher was asked to explain the meaning of the word, “phenomenon” that he had just used. The teacher explained as follows: If you see a spiny cactus plant, that is not a phenomenon. If you see a bird that sings, that is not a phenomenon. But if you see a cow sitting on a spiny cactus plant singing like a bird - that is a phenomenon! Each person God created is a phenomenon, an original, one of a kind nutso - a cow sitting on a spiny cactus plant, singing like a bird! Jesus taught that every single “you” is infinitely precious, hugely valuable. You’re not like anyone else who has every been or ever will be. It’s not enough to say “You’re one in a million.” If that’s so, there are about 6,000 others out there right now just like you.
- - -
We are all a phenomenon, and every person matters to God. But we usually go about our lives thinking otherwise, hollering at the stupid jerk who just cut us off in traffic, or getting up and moving from our seat in Starbucks from the disgusting sorry excuse for a human being who sits next to us and chatters non stop in loud decibels into his cell phone!
We forget we are a phenomenon, and we lose our sense of worth to God. (God doesn’t need us - but he loves us!) Maybe we have never felt God‘s immense love for us. Statistics say we tell ourselves how worthless were are at least 200 times each day, in negative and cynical self-talk. This sense of worthlessness is the breeding ground for insecurity and resentment and many times can surface in the form of inflated egos and pride, bringing with it a host of other problems in dealing with people.
Tragedy Changes Our Mindset and Ignites Our Humanity
Sometimes, it takes a terrible disaster or event that effect all of us together as a nation, and world, for us to stop and pause, and realize how fragile and important people are -- you, me, and everyone.
People are holy. They are every one of them, in the image of God, no exceptions! To touch someone is to touch the sacred. We are so seldom aware of this, but it remains true nonetheless.
- John Fischer in Finding God Where You Least Expect Him.
The first time I remember the world stopping like that was the year I turned six years old. It was on a normal, average Friday, in the normal average month of November, during a normal, average lunch hour across America. One event stopped the world, and seemingly brought everyone together in shock, grief and sadness. On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was shot and murdered in broad daylight in Dallas. This event was even broadcast in living color for all to see! Although I was only at the tender age of six, I vividly remember that day and how everything changed from that terrible moment. We seemed different, and we all shared that transforming event together. It made the entire world seem so small and people’s priorities, at least for a while, suddenly changed. Life, freedom, and family all seemed more important.
Another terrible event caused the same thing, this one we all know too well - September 11, 2001. Philip Yancey writes about 9-11-01 in his book Rumors of Another World:
As a side effect, as an act of monstrous evil exposed the shallowness of an entire society. Professional sports ground to a halt, television comedians went off the air, as did all commercials. In a flash we saw the comparative meaninglessness of much of our lives. That three thousand people could go to work as part of their daily routine and never come home made us all aware of our fragile mortality. Married couples cancelled divorce plans, mothers and fathers trimmed work hours to spend more time with their children. We found a new kind of hero: firefighters and police officers who gave their lives for people they never knew.
Over the next few months after 9-11-01, the New York Times ran a separate article commemorating every single person who died, not just the famous or the newsworthy. This article seemed to convey the message that each person killed on that day had a life of value and meaning, a life that mattered.
Why does it take something like that terrible day to cause people to realize that every life has tremendous value, and every life does matter?
Both these events that seemed to stop time and give people a changed sense of themselves and surroundings were out of the ordinary, terrible events, - a crisis. Eugene Peterson offers some great insight into this from the introduction to Malachi in The Message :
Most of life is not lived in crisis - which is a good thing. Not many of us would be able to sustain a life of perpetual pain or loss or ecstasy or challenge. But crisis has this to say for it: In time of crisis everything, absolutely everything, is important and significant. Life itself is on the line: no word is casual, no action marginal, and almost always, God and our relationship with God is on the front page. But during the humdrum times, when things are, as we tend to say, “normal,” our interest in God is crowded to the margins of our lives and we become preoccupied with ourselves. “Religion” during such times is trivialized into asking “God-questions” - calling God into question or complaining about him, treating the worship of God as a mere hobby or diversion, managing our personal affairs (such as marriage) for our own convenience and disregarding what God has to say about them, going about our usual activities as if God were not involved in such dailiness.
So this idea or mindset that I am hoping to bring to the forefront, what I call the magnificent mundane mindset, is seen clearly within the marked and changed outlook following a terrible crisis. The magnificent mundane mindset could also be called the “PCM” - the Perceived Crisis Mode. We don’t want the terrible crisis, but we do want the forthcoming result of a new focused perception of God, ourselves and others around us.
Perhaps this is why David seemed to be so aware of God in the mundane; he practically lived everyday in a crisis mode as king!
Job may have lost this “God in the mundane concept,” but when his whole life became a huge crisis we see a different Job with a new and different outlook! Is it possible to live within the everyday mundane and have a perceived crisis mode mindset that allows us to see the big picture? The only answer I can give is “With God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26) (In other words, I really don’t know - but God is able to do the impossible and often does!)
Perhaps another ripple effect of 9-11-01 is the segment that runs on CBS News, entitled “Everybody Has a Story.” Reporter Steve Hartman chooses people at random from phone books across America and profiles them with the belief that everybody really has a story. His theory is that every person is an interesting person, with an interesting life, if we could just pause for a moment to get to know them! From a Chicago Sun Times article, dated 8-7-03, entitled, “CBS Reporter Finds the Drama in Ordinary Lives,” Hartman says,
Too much of the news is about the extraordinary, it’s either what people in power are doing, or ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.”
Hartman profiles neither, he spotlights ordinary people living their ordinary lives and when he gets into their lives, no matter how ordinary they were, suddenly they now seem interesting, having value and meaning…why? They didn’t change, only we got to know them, we paused from our daily lives to see value and meaning in someone else.
But what’s difficult and only happens occasionally for us, God does automatically, without blinking. Every person is magnificent, every soul has eternal value and in God’s sight. Do we also believe this? Are we growing and moving in that direction by God’s grace?
It’s through immersion in the ordinary - the apparently empty, trivial, and meaningless experiences of a routine day that life is encountered and lived.
- Brennan Manning in Ruthless Trust
To have faith is to see everything against an infinite horizon.
- Ronald Rolheiser, Against the Infinite Horizon
Two Hindrances to the Magnificent Mundane Mindset
Over the years I’ve seen Christians shaping God in their own image - in each case a dreadfully small God.
- Brennan Manning in Ragamuffin Gospel
Hindrance #1: GOD IN A BOX MENTALITY
Some book titles are more memorable, and say a lot more than their contents. Such a book is Your God is Too Small by J.B. Phillips. I first discovered it while on a musical tour in southern California when I was 29 years old. I’ve read, and forgotten, the book’s contents more than once, but it is the title that I’ve never forgotten, and constantly arises to haunt me whenever I succumb to attempting to somehow put God in a box. We all put God in a box, and have done it many times. It is probably the biggest hindrance to living in a magnificent mundane mindset. (Of course no one can actually put God in a box - but I speak of our attempts to limit God based out of fear, unbelief or ignorance)
Another book title that reminds me to practice God’s presence was written hundreds of years ago. Brother Lawrence, a monk, wrote several letters to his friends and some short writings. After his death, a fellow monk put them together, and these brilliant words are now published into a book called, Practicing the Presence of God. It is one of the most amazing and practical little books ever written and if you search a bit, you can find it posted on the internet for free.
Can we all do something now? Let’s all stop for a moment and imagine how big and powerful almighty God is. Think of him as the largest, most powerful thing you can imagine - ok, got it? Now pause for another minute, and humbly and honestly realize that however big and powerful your concept of God was in your mind, it didn’t even come close to God’s actual bigness and power!
So to whom will you compare me, the incomparable? Can you picture me without reducing me?
God, in Isaiah 46:5
Even an actual transportation into God’s presence in heaven would still not be sufficient, unless we can get out of our limited human bodies and minds, which will be the case in eternity to come for Christ - followers.
So for now, all of us wobble somewhere between terrible and poor as far as having an accurate perception of God. The very best way to make headway in our understanding is by knowing him personally through his spirit. When Philip wanted to see the father God almighty in all his largeness, Jesus stated that when they look at him, they are seeing God. “To see me you see the father” (John 14:9) In the book of John, Chapter One, verse 1 it says :
The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one of a kind glory, like father, like son.”
By his Son, God created the world in the beginning and it will all belong to the Son at the end. This Son perfectly mirrors God and is stamped with God’s nature. In John chapter three, when speaking with the Pharisee Nicodemus, Jesus says that the spirit is like the wind, you hear it’s sound, and see it’s effect, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. There’s another quality about wind: if you try to capture it and contain in a box, you may think you have it, but later, when you open the box, whish - there’s nothing there! Likewise, the spirit of God and God himself cannot ever be contained ‘in a box.’
King Solomon, David’s son, was the wisest and richest man who ever lived. He understood that he could not contain God in a box. After building God an awesome temple to dwell in, he said. “…the cosmos itself isn’t large enough to give you breathing room, let alone this temple I’ve built.” (I Kings 8:27) God’s presence did dwell within the Ark of the Covenant (which was a box!). But it was always symbolic of God’s dwelling with his people and repeatedly the Bible makes it clear that God cannot be limited or contained.
If the entire universe is a box, and God doesn’t and can’t live in that, why do many of us continue to constantly want to put him in boxes of our own limited dimensions? God is not in a box! When we attempt to put him there, we lose awareness of his presence, we lose effectiveness as agents of grace in society, we misrepresent the kingdom of God, and we hinder the work and moving of the spirit through our lives. As John Fischer says in Fearless Faith,
God is already out of the box. In reality, we are just catching up with him. He and his messengers have always been outside the boundaries of existing religious establishments.
Hindrance #2: Sacred Vs. Secular Mentality
It is fairly common among people who get interested in religion or God to get proportionately disinterested in their jobs and families, their communities, and colleagues - the more of God, the less of the human. But that is not the way God intends it. Wisdom counters this tendency by giving witness to the precious nature of human experience in all it’s forms; whether or not it feel or appears “spiritual.”
- Eugene Peterson in the Introduction to the Wisdom Books in The Message
The sacred vs. secular mentality, or the separating of what we deem as holy from worldly, is a big hindrance to the magnificent mundane awareness. Yes, I am aware of scripture verses such as Romans 12:1, which speak of not becoming conformed to this world. I talked about these commands, taught them to my flock, and tried to live by them. I have since come to believe that the “world” spoken of in these passages is much more difficult to interpret as it has more than one meaning in the original Greek. (More on that a little later) I have since come to believe that the idea of the “world” is more an internal awareness than an external parameter to be defined.
What if the world isn’t entirely secular? What if the world can be a holy place where God can be found?
John Fischer in Fearless Faith
By overlooking many other scriptures and by not seeing the larger picture of things in context, I did exactly what the Pharisees excelled in I made up my own set of rigid “accepted/not accepted “activities, and not only frowned upon others who didn’t follow them too, but judged them as worldly, shallow and immature.
I’m not speaking of the obvious things we all know as wrong for Christ-followers, like getting drunk, being involved in extra-marital sex, or any kind of illegal activity. I’m speaking of the many gray areas that we avoid, and preach avoidance to others simply because we assume God cannot be found there. God is certainly found in church, in prayer meetings, and in Bible Studies, but what about in the local bars? Can God be found at a non-Christian rock concert? Can we glean spiritual principles and God- awareness from non-Christian movies and books? (I’ll answer these with - Yes!)
In his book, Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning answers this question:
How do we live in the presence of the living God? In wonder, amazed by the traces of God all around us. Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, he may be in a Woody Allen film or a Bruce Springsteen concert.