The Great Life and the Ordinary
When my daughter Lilah was young, her favorite in a collection of Advent stories told of a star with an inferiority complex. The star felt “outshone” in the universe. She was dim, small, and overlooked. Then one day, after thousands of years and some plot developments I don’t recall, the star found herself settled over Bethlehem, shining upon the stable of the Christ Child on Christmas morn. The book concluded with a line like this: “And then, all eyes finally beheld the glory of that little star. Finally she was seen!”
I hated the story. I tried to steer Lilah to the others in the book, but she kept returning to that one, tracing the illustrations with her index finger, begging me to read it again. So I took a black marker, crossed out the final line and wrote, “That star had found her true calling—not shining for her own glory, but helping others to see Jesus!”
Lilah was satisfied. So was I. But it turns out embodying that lesson is much harder than defacing a book with a Sharpie.
REDIRECTING THE SPOTLIGHT
For a time in his ministry, John the Baptist had an impressive following. When Jesus began baptizing at the Jordan and attracting even larger crowds, it’s possible John might have struggled with the intrusion. He may have felt threatened or inferior. But he knew his role. He wasn’t the Christ, he told his disciples—as he’d been telling them all along. He’d only been sent to proclaim the Christ. Then in famously stark words John said, “He must become greater; I must become less” (Jn. 3:30 NIV).
The implications of this verse cut through every life circumstance. They find us wherever we are in the roles, hierarchies, and passions that govern our lives—professional or domestic, failed or flourishing, content or striving—and challenge us to prefer God’s glory to our own.
Since childhood (I only sheepishly admit), I’ve cherished some vague notion of achieving “greatness,” whether in a career or some position of prominence as a Christian. When I quit my job at a Washington, DC thinktank to begin having children, I did not consciously abandon these dreams. My husband and I simply believed the demands of infant care would be hard to juggle with my eight-to-five job. Then along came more children; infancy and toddlerhood turned into school age and adolescence. Before I knew it, 15 years had passed, and still I was writing “homemaker” on any form that required me to state my profession.
I may have deferred my dreams of achievement, yet they lived on within me, changing shape with the seasons. As a young mother I compared myself to other stay-at-home moms who surpassed me in maternal ambition, domestic gifting, or simple patience. Now that my children are older, I’m tempted to envy my female friends who’ve successfully managed both family life and professional commitments. My friends work in academia, politics, law, advocacy. One is a Senate chief-of-staff, another a CEO. My envy is wistful, not grudging. I admire them and praise God for the opportunities he’s given them. I remind myself that his metrics of success, if such a phrase even applies in the spiritual realm, are the very opposite of our culture’s. The “blessed” are the poor in spirit, the meek, they who hunger and thirst for righteousness. His power is perfected in weakness. He chose “what is low and despised in the world . . . to bring to nothing things that are” (1 Cor. 1:28 ESV).
Still, I struggle with having failed to distinguish myself as remarkable. Like the star in the Advent story, I don’t like being ordinary.
REORIENTING THE HEART
In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis gives us a woman who’s at once ordinary and remarkable. Sarah Smith was a nobody on earth. But when we meet her in heaven she’s a luminary attended by a procession of singing and dancing spirits, children, and animals. The lady herself is marked by such resplendent purity that the narrator can’t recall if she’s naked or clothed.
Sarah’s significance on earth was simply this: she was a woman of profound love. “Every young man or boy that met her became her son . . . every girl . . . was her daughter. . . . Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.”
The guide continues: “It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? . . . there is joy enough in that little finger of such a great saint as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”
I first read The Great Divorce twenty years ago. Till I reread it last summer, this scene was the only one I remembered. For two decades as I alternately sought and renounced “greatness” in various forms, Sarah remained a striking picture of the earthly last becoming the heavenly first.
In rereading the book lately, two other powerful lessons stand out as well. The first, shown in the image of the spreading waves, is that the influence of a life of love extends further than we’ll ever know. Who’s to say which of our small unseen acts God will magnify or multiply? Possibly not the ones we’d expect. We’re in no position to measure true greatness. God alone sees. God alone measures.
Second, this upside-down “greatness”—exquisite, Christ-like, self-emptying love—is marked not by self-pity but by joy. John eagerly welcomed Jesus to the scene, even though Jesus’s following had surpassed his own. When his followers expressed concern at Jesus’s growing reputation, , John still said with confidence, “this joy of mine is now complete” (Jn. 3:29 ESV).
It’s not surprising that the first two fruit of the Spirit, love and joy, are inseparably entwined. I must consider: are they entwined in my service to Christ, in my stewardship of the gifts and opportunities he’s given me, however ordinary they may seem?
And what if the answer to that question is a resounding No? Where do I go with my ambition or disappointment if I can’t say, with as much conviction as John, “He must become greater; I must become less”?
REJOICING IN HIS GLORY
Surely David, anointed king of Israel as a teenager, was ambitious. As a young man he slayed a giant. As king he conquered national enemies and brought peace and prosperity to Israel. He even aspired to build a temple for Yahweh. Yet he reconciled his ambition with godly contentment. He cultivated a quiet heart. “Oh Lord,” he writes in Psalm 131, “my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high. . . . I have calmed and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and forevermore” (v. 1a, 2-3 ESV).
Childlike contentment begins exactly where David’s psalm begins: in addressing oneself to God and in bringing all our aspirations, anxiety, envy, and fears of failure to our heavenly Father. In sitting with him until he quiets us. Then, we allow him to do what he will—whatever he will—with our dreams.
David’s image of infant and mother evokes another: not a simile or abstraction but a real flesh-and-blood baby, fully God and fully man, nursed, swaddled, quieted by a young mother. At Christmas we welcome this King, greater than David, who “though he was rich, yet for [our] sake he became poor” (2 Cor. 8:9 ESV) and “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8 ESV). It was in setting aside his supreme glory that Christ saved us. It is in looking to him—newborn in his mother’s arms, crucified Savior, reigning King—that our own dreams of glory are recalibrated. So we can say with John, honestly and from the heart, not only “He must become greater,” but also “this joy of mine is now complete.”
Heather Ferngren Morton is a writer based in Cheverly, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., where she lives with her husband and their three children. Her work has appeared in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, Fathom, Front Porch Republic, The Gospel Coalition and other publications.