Today, I'm honored to share for the first time at The Mudroom, a site that describes itself as a "place for stories emerging from the mess."
Life is so different from what we expected, I thought, folding my teaching clothes and placing them with my husband’s dance shoes in the bag for Goodwill. Before marriage, I imagined I would live a radical life through overseas missions, inner-city teaching or ministry to refugees. My husband was determined to follow his call as a stage actor in Chicago.
And now? We rent a three bedroom home with a fenced back yard in Colorado. I stay home with our kids and the most radical thing about us is that I used to live in China and my husband is currently an audio book narrator. Apart from that, life is rolling along much like interstate driving on cruise control: fast, smooth and predictable.
A few weeks ago, my husband suddenly began praying for “a vision for our family,” which dug up some soul questions I had hoped to bury.
In the past few years, I’ve inwardly rebelled against the way the church promised me Big Dreams and a Big Life. I’ve discovered the truth: that most of life is made up of mundane moments and tasks sprinkled with splashes of delight. There seem to be a selective few who get to be world changers.
My generation of 30-somethings is wrestling with the incongruity of the youth group and Christian college messages of living a “sold out and radical” life for Jesus in contrast with our cheerio-decorated, mortgage-paying realities. We’re finding that following Jesus is not quite as glamorous as we expected...
Labels: calling, Mudroom, ordinary moments, published articles
