The idea of an ordi­nary life being extra­or­di­nary first began to gel in me as I bemoaned my lack of a plat­form. In the writ­ing world. pub­lish­ers are very keen on writ­ers who have a built-​​in plat­form, or mar­ket, like a celebrity min­is­ter, or a high-​​profile per­son­al­ity, or a megachurch pas­tor. Good writ­ing is impor­tant, and a bril­liant con­cept will get a publisher’s atten­tion, but the ques­tion of “What’s your plat­form?” invari­ably gets brought up as well.

As this harsh real­ity became clear to me I began to exam­ine my life. What’s my plat­form? Acad­e­mia? Nope. The only degrees I have are the ones I earned from junior high and high school. Min­istry accom­plish­ments? Well, noth­ing spec­tac­u­lar. Just run-​​of-​​the-​​mill church vol­un­teerism and a few years with YWAM. Um, what about my blog? Ok, it’s a start. But it’s not really a bona fide plat­form. It’s more like a soap­box in the woods, a place where I sound off to vagabond trav­el­ers who have got­ten off the main road.

And then, one day, it dawned on me. I fig­ured out what my writ­ing plat­form was.

Maybe you don’t feel that your pur­pose in life has been pre­de­ter­mined like a bul­let fired from a gun headed for the target…there’s not much you can do about the tra­jec­tory of the pro­jec­tile after your Cre­ator has pulled the trig­ger at birth. Per­haps your life expe­ri­ence has been more like a ric­o­chet, bounc­ing off one expe­ri­ence into the next. You’re not an exception.

Maybe you don’t feel dri­ven all the time by some sort of burn­ing pas­sion, the need to suc­ceed or a dis­tinct sense of unwa­ver­ing pur­pose. If this is the case, relax. You have loads of company.

These sim­ple words rever­ber­ated through my inse­cure heart and caught my atten­tion. They floated in my head for a while before land­ing, like seeds, on the soft earth of my inner world.

When I got to my job site I bumped into Larry. Larry is a pro­fes­sional cleaner who runs his own ser­vice. We’ve talked a few times. A jovial man, Larry shared his tes­ti­mony with me one of the first times I had met him. He was a new Chris­t­ian. He worked nights and week­ends so attend­ing church was not work­ing out for him. But he man­aged to find a mid-​​week men’s bible study that suited him and his sched­ule. When­ever I talked with Larry I felt like we were hav­ing church! We’d talk about the good things that we were learn­ing about God’s love and grace; we’d tell each other what we were cur­rently read­ing in the bible, or what Chris­t­ian truth was mak­ing an impact on our think­ing and living.

Larry spoke with a sim­ple dialect. A bright man, he spoke with the vocab­u­lary of the every­day man. This is my heart lan­guage and I enjoyed talk­ing with him very much.

The night I got to the job site, feel­ing low, lis­ten­ing to PDL about not hav­ing an unwa­ver­ing sense of pur­pose, it all came to a head. And Larry was right in mid­dle of it. We began to talk and I told him, ‘I don’t have a pur­pose in life.” Larry became ani­mated. He began preach­ing pas­sion­ately to me. “Don’t say that! Yes you do have a pur­pose! God cre­ated you and you’re here to have rela­tion­ship with him!” Larry refused to let me leave the park­ing lot until I could tell him that yes, ok, I do have a pur­pose in life, and though that pur­pose may not seem pro­found, the fact that God cre­ated me to know him and his Fatherly love is pur­pose enough.

For the rest of the evening I reflected on that. As I dusted and vac­u­umed and mopped what seemed like miles of floors, I soaked up the words of Bill Dahl’s PDL, and Larry the Park­ing Lot Preacher.The lie that my ordi­nary life does not mat­ter began to fade. It was being weeded out of the soil of my heart as those seeds of hope and truth took root. I can cel­e­brate my ordi­nary exis­tence sim­ply because I exist in a world cre­ated by a lov­ing Creator.

An ordi­nary life is an extra­or­di­nary life. Even the life of a writer who smells like bleach.

**thanks to all who have read all of the Ordi­nary blog posts. Your response and feed­back has helped me tremen­dously in con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing a larger work on this topic. You are my extra­or­di­nary ordi­nary blog read­ers!!!!!!!!!!!