Nothing Times

It's been one of those weeks when nothing much has happened - a nothing week.  Last week the weather was like summer and so I got loads done and sorted in the garden.  By the weekend I felt that I had achieved a great deal.  This week has seemed quite the opposite.  Right from Monday, the storms came with horrendous wind and rain.  Although since then we haven't had the strong winds, the rain has persisted on and off all week, raining at some point every day so no gardening for me this week.  (I do it for pleasure, not out of obligation!)  You know there are times when you've been busy all day and yet looking back, you can't really see any difference.  It's as though you haven't done anything at all.  Well this week has been like that!  I've been as busy as last week but I can't see where.  There is no big sigh or relief or sense of achievement just the usual -  cleaning, washing, ironing, shopping and cooking..


I guess you could say that life has just been plodding on as usual - much of the same, ordinary, non-spectacular, hum-drum life activities.  Why is it that the ordinary seems so boring and unappealing?  Why do we crave the spectacular?  I am as guilty as the next in this.  I look at the facebook posts of friends and read the main heading of an article, looking for something that grabs my attention.  It's the same with newspapers and magazines.  Editors know that clever headlines can very often raise their readership figures, the more sensational the better it seems.  Films or TV programmes show the most intriguing bits in their adverts and trailers, making us curious and drawing us in, whetting our appetite and teasing us to want to see more.  Inevitably programmes that are part of a series, leave us with a cliff-hanger so we'll be sure not to miss next week's episode.


Most of life is not the sensational, headline-grabbing experience, yet we want that more than anything.  We yearn for some out-of-this-world experience believing somehow that it will give us some special insight into some life mystery.  Religious people search out events that might give them a spiritual edge over others, a sort of spiritual one-upmanship.  The truth is that plodding along in the ordinary is so often what shapes us and hones our senses to what goes on around us.  The spectacular is 'nice' and 'good' and yet somehow distant, way out there, with no or little connection with what we need to do on a daily basis.  It reminds me of Jesus and his disciples on what has become known as the Mount of Transfiguration.  The disciples had a great experience.  WOW!  What an experience - like touching the immortal, so much so that they wanted to stay there.  They wanted to build shrines so they could go back again and again to relive the experience.  How many of us have felt like that after some great meeting where there has been a great presence and outpouring of the Holy Spirit?  Jesus' reply was that now they had to go down from the mountain top experience and deal with real life where people were desperate for help and hope.


Special events, visitations or spiritual encounters are wonderful but don't let's get carried away.  They are not the norm or to be lived perpetually in a state of 'other-world'-iness.  So I thank God for the ordinary.  That's where I need to be - at least most of the time.  That's where life is really lived, in the hum-drum, sometimes boring, unspectacular plodding on.  As my mother used to often observe - we shouldn't be so heavenly minded that we're no earthly good.