Louise resides in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. She has been married to Allen Hughes for twenty-four years and they have four sons ages 21, 20, 19, and 10.
You were made for more, more than your circumstances, more than what you see, more than what the world offers, more than the ordinary. You were made for extraordinary relationships and adventures.
In C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, ordinary children are transported to an extraordinary world filled with talking animals and trees. They are made kings and queens and commissioned to ransom others from evil and witches. Their experience in Narnia shifts their perspective. Once they encounter Aslan and live the adventure, they realize that the extraordinary exists. They needed to experience Narnia. They needed to learn to expect the extraordinary. Only then could they experience the extraordinary in their “ordinary life” in England.
Likewise, we were made for an extraordinary life. We were created in the image of a relational God for relationship with Him and others. The Father, Son, and Spirit exists in an extraordinary state of intimate connection, love, and joy, mutual giving and receiving, mutual respect and adoration. We were created for that kind of relationship with Him and with others. We were made to walk and talk with the Lord as Adam and Eve walked and talked with God in the cool of the Garden, to delight in Him as He delights in you, to enjoy His Presence. He longs to be with us.
We were created for adventure. Adam and Eve were given authority over and responsibility for all of creation. Similarly, you were created to be kings and queens of the earth. But, with position comes responsibility. We have been charged with battling the devil, the flesh, and the world. But as Christians, we are encouraged to take heart because Jesus has overcome them all. We are called to abide in the Lord, be filled with His Spirit, and advance His Kingdom on earth as victors in Christ.
So as victors in Christ why are we left with a pale reality of the life envisioned for us? Why do we wonder where the hope of the Gospel is in the present moment?
The hope is in the Great I AM, Immanuel, God with us, all that He IS transforming all that is ours and all that we are into all that He purposes. He comes to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
At the end of the first book in the Narnia series, The Magician’s Nephew, the boy Digory returns from Narnia to his dying mother with the promise from Aslan that she would be healed. She would be healed by Aslan, not by magic as he thought. The day after his return, “whenever he looked at the things about him, and saw how ordinary and unmagical they were, he hardly dared to hope; but when he remembered the face of Aslan he did hope” (181). He knew where hope could be found – in Aslan. And sure enough, when the doctor returned to visit his mother, he remarked that hers was “the most extraordinary case” of his medical career (182). In fact, he said, “It is like a miracle” (182). Aslan came in the ordinariness of sickness and did something extraordinary.
My first three sons were born within three years of each other. I was exhausted and overwhelmed. The days blurred one into another. I felt like I was swallowed whole by motherhood.
One morning, I had just taken a load of laundry out of the dryer and knelt on the floor to change three sets of diapers… again. Tears flooded my eyes, spilling over and trickling down my cheeks. I could not have expressed in that moment exactly what was wrong. I loved my sons, loved being a mother. Yet, here I was.
Suddenly I heard words that were familiar but with fresh power and new perspective: “Whatever you have done for one of the least of these, you have done for me” (ref. Matthew 25:40). The Lord spoke tenderly as a Father longing to comfort a beloved daughter, His voice as real as if He were sitting next to me. The Lord saw me; He heard me; and He validated me.
In that moment, He altered my perception. The Lord was with me as I changed diapers. He transformed something so ordinary into the extraordinary. Nothing I did escaped His notice, and nothing I did was insignificant. The secular became sacred. The ordinary became extraordinary.
When the ordinary clouds your vision of the present and dims the future, remember the hope is in the Presence of the Great I AM. Ask Him where He is in your circumstances. Look and listen with expectation that He will speak and act. Lift your eyes to the face of Aslan, listen for his roar, and expect extraordinary happenings.
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