Do it Again
Recovering the Joy of Repetition in the Ordinary Christian Life
Most of us have it exactly backward: we treat ordinary life as a prison sentence, mistake our boredom for spiritual hunger, and baptize our restlessness as holy ambition. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
Perhaps we need to recover something of our childhood joy in repetition.
There is money in restlessness. An entire industry has been built for people who want to be radicals. Buy the backpack and the plane ticket, learn to eat a few bugs, and surely you will change the world. Your life will finally count. An ordinary person, in an ordinary town, in an ordinary church, with an ordinary job, has somehow failed God. You have been convinced that you were made for more. The world needs you to make a mark, build a legacy, create a brand, and live a life that matches the version of you that exists online.
But what happens when a young man who thinks he’s going to take the world with a Bible and an iPad finally realizes the world declines to be taken by his valiant efforts? The job applications have to be filled out, the children arrive, the bills come due, and the grass keeps its Saturday appointment with the lawnmower, whether or not he made a significant impact on the world that week.
The reality is that the ordinary Christian life is the main event, and it’s far more radical and challenging than a 10-day mission trip or being a photographer in a war zone. Try being patient with a 5-year-old who cries because they got one more yellow Skittle than red in the bag, or those strange creatures called teenagers leave a sink full of dishes all day when you’re at work. That’s radical. Otherworldly, in fact.
John Witherspoon, president of Princeton and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, once had a neighbor burst into his office to report a rescue. The horse had bolted, the buggy lay in pieces on the rocks, and the man walked away without a scratch. Thank God, he said, for so extraordinary a providence. Witherspoon told him he could do better. He had driven that same road hundreds of times, and the horse had never bolted, the buggy had never broken, and he had never once been hurt. Nobody throws a banquet for a successful trip to the grocery store. God shows up in the disaster and the headline, and just as surely in every grain of wheat that has been ground to flour. The fickle human heart will watch one airplane fall from the sky and shake a fist at heaven, but never give a word of thanks for the ten thousand that landed that afternoon exactly as advertised.
Most of God’s gifts come in the generic hours of the day: a child’s health, a paycheck that clears, a road driven a thousand times safely. David knew where the credit belonged. The greatness and the power and the kingdom are the Lord’s (1 Chron. 29:11). Even the knife meant for our back, he takes up and uses as a scalpel. “You meant evil against me,” Joseph told his brothers, “but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). God provides. That’s what providence means.
The space where God works is where he grows you. We keep waiting for lightning, but He works more slowly and plainly than that. He hands out grace through ordinary means: His Word, prayer, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper. You can go to a stadium, lift your hands in the fog, weep at the bridge of the song, and fly home exactly as immature as you left, because God appointed the Table, the Word, and the prayer, and he did not coordinate it with a production team.
Paul says, “Aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands” (1 Thess. 4:11), which is the least marketable sentence in the New Testament. Be calm. Be unremarkable. Do your job, and quit pretending honest labor is beneath a man or woman of your “obvious” destiny. The world swears it will rescue us: break free, chart your own course, get rich, and above all, never be ordinary. We run on “what if” and “if only.” It’s the whole business model of advertising and the only reason a company pays a few million dollars for thirty seconds in February. But someone always has the better job, the brighter kids, the church with the slicker music and the better preacher. The wanting never closes the gap. The apostle Paul got off the treadmill. “I have learned, in whatever situation I am, to be content” (Phil. 4:11). Abased or abounding, he ran on Christ, who supplied the power (Phil. 4:13). The man desperate to be extraordinary is the man who is bored. The man content to weed his own garden has found the adventure.
Even in church, the ordinary can feel like a waste of a good Sunday. In Army basic training, the point was to keep us moving, so we waxed floors that already shone and remade beds that were already made. It is hard to feel useful doing that. You have felt it in a pew: “I show up, and that is about the size of it. What am I for?” Paul’s answer is the body, and the body has no bench (1 Cor. 12:14–21). The foot does not get to resign on the grounds that it is not a hand. Your part can look small and still hold weight, because the Lord uses it to grow his people, and because it is spent in love on somebody other than yourself. A faith of “me and Jesus,” with the rest of the congregation as stage props, is the one arrangement the New Testament flatly rejects.
Embracing the ordinary Christian life is no excuse to settle, keep your head down, and aim low. It’s quite the opposite. Kill godly ambition, and you bury every missionary task and Kingdom endeavor. The ordinary is the training ground for everything that lasts. Embrace it, and you will be built into someone whose faith can outlive the next mountaintop experience. Paul reminds us, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). The dishes are included. Do the ordinary things, and do them with the excellence of a professional, because it is God whom you serve.
Lay down the ambition to be a hero. The church is not holding auditions. It already has a hero, and his name is Jesus Christ. We are not told to dare to be Daniel, because the bravest man in the book, on his finest day, falls a mile short of the Savior we need and goes home needing rescue himself. Heaven did not send another man in a cape. God came down the ladder himself, hauled us up out of the mud, and pointed us down a road that looks, from the curb, almost entirely ordinary. Walk it. The destination is extraordinary.
I founded the Institute of Pastoral and Theological Training, a seminary in Nigeria that trains rural pastors at no cost to them, since most of the men we teach live on less than a dollar a day. It is about as ordinary and unglamorous as ministry gets, and it is some of the best work I’ve ever done. If you’d like to learn more, let me know. I’d love to share it with you.