Wonder disappears

I've had a tough time finding the courage and time to write in the last two months. To be honest, I've missed it. There would be rumblings, but I never brought myself to bring it to the page. Last week, I learned a favorite blogger of mine (Ralph Milton) with a gift for words is retiring. In one of his final posts, he offered a beautiful justification for "noticing God in the ordinary stuff." It's inspired me to return to my blog and so I share his words with you. Enjoy, and don't let the wonder of ordinary moments disappear!
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When I was 13 or 14 years old, I decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. In middle age, I concluded I was too ordinary to be a writer. Now at a somewhat frailer 75 I realize that ordinariness is the essential quality of a writer.
When I first took up this craft, I didn’t realize how much time you have to spend alone. And that’s exactly how it has to be, because it takes a long, long, time to discipline promiscuous words into an approximation of what you have in your head.
Or what’s in your heart. And that’s where the best writing always comes from. And it often involves intense emotion.
On one occasion Bev came into my office to locate a book. “Why are you crying?” she wanted to know.
It was a reasonable question, but I didn’t really have a reasonable answer. The particular tears on that occasion came when I was trying to capture in words the picture in my heart of Bev and Zoë, in the middle of a quiet afternoon.
Bev was sitting way back in an easy chair. Zoë was on her lap sitting way back into her grandma. And the two of them were singing, one song after another, quietly, unconsciously, simply being there with each other, their eyes half closed.
And as they sang “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” I finally understood the difference between religious music and non-religious music. It has nothing to do with the music at all. It has to do with who is singing what to whom and why.
“Mary Had a Little Lamb” can be a far more powerful hymn of praise and beauty than anything Luther or Wesley or Wren ever penned.
So I sat in the glory and the beauty of that holiness, and tried not to blow my nose too loudly.
At one of the interminable book-signings authors have to endure, a young man asked me, “What are the essential characteristics of a writer?”
I have no idea. All I could say to the young man is that noticing God in the ordinary stuff is what makes me want to write. If I don’t write about it, the wonder and the glory of those ordinary moments disappear. When I write I remember them and sometimes learn their sacred secrets.
The power of the ordinary almost overwhelm me sometimes when I read stories such as that of the woman who poured oil over Jesus’ feet. Somebody who was there saw what happened, heard Jesus’ reply, and recognized it as a holy moment.
The story got told over and over in the early church, and people understood the holiness of that moment, even though they got all mixed up in the details and argued about whether it was Mary of Bethany, or Mary of Magdala, or some other Mary who did the pouring. And what Judas said and why he said it.
But there was someone there the time it first happened – someone who could see the holiness in the ordinary – who had the soul of a writer. Or better yet, the soul of a story teller.
And for that someone, I thank God.