Living in the Ordinary Podcasts

The life that Jesus has welcomed all of his followers into is available to everyone exactly where they are. Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Wonderful to have you along. I’m Matt Kauffman. I have Isaac Funk with me. 

Great to have you here, Isaac. Thank you. It’s great to be here. As most of you know, Isaac is a member of our team here. Isaac has really brought to the table a passion for discipleship. How would you define discipleship? Sure. Well, first of all, we just think of what a disciple is, and you think of the disciples that Jesus had, and they’re just people who are with him all the time, 24/7. They ate with him, they slept with him, they listened to his teachings, they learned to do what he did. And so that’s how I think about discipleship. I’m with my master, learning to live my entire life in his way, in the way that he would do it, and then helping other people to do that too. 

There’s a sense of ordinariness. If that’s such a word with being a disciple, isn’t it? As you mentioned, sleeping and eating and walking, right? Yeah, our spirituality is not separate from our humanity. We’re learning to be more fully human through a process of discipleship. The reason why I think that’s so important and powerful, Isaac, is very often in the trainings that we get is for the moment. 

I was in training for an educator, and I was training for the moment. I was training for the classroom. I would imagine a surgeon has that similar experience, where they’re always thinking about the surgery and being ready for that moment. It’s all about the moment. It’s all about that future moment, right? I get a sense the discipleship is a bit different, in that you’re training for the actual moment that you are in. 

Yes, big moments to come, but mostly insignificant moments that are present, right? Yeah, I think there is a way of thinking about it where that does make sense. But by the same token, I do think that the people who are best at those particular things, who are best at their jobs, are not only people who are trained to do them at the time that it’s needed to be done, as obviously important that is, they also learn to just think differently through their training. It actually changes the way that they think about their life and the lives of other people. And in that sense, I think just the way that we view discipleship can be paired up with well, yeah, there’s training involved in that, training that will change the way that I do my life, change the way that I think about my life, the way I think about how God interacts with my life, and how other people are a part of that as well. And by way of that training, I will be able to perform in the high stakes moment. Exactly. Right? But I will not be able to perform in the high stakes moment if I haven’t learned to perform in the low stakes moment. 

That’s exactly right. Like learning to do anything. Well, if I’m going to learn to play the piano, I’m going to practice the things that are going to allow me to play the music that I’m trying to play. Not for the sake that I can practice well, but for the sake of being able to play it as well. I really like that set up, Isaac, to today’s topic, because today we want to talk about this ordinary menial life that we all live and sometimes we chafe against. 

And how should I be feeling and thinking about my menial tasks? And, am I pleasing to God in these tasks because they’re so ordinary? I think there can be a discontentment that arises sometimes in our lives when we think, you know, all of the quote, super Christians who’ve gone before or that we’ve heard of or that perhaps we know. 

And it’s like, wow, their experience just seems really different than mine. I’m just here taking care of my kids, you know, a stay at home mom, or I’m folding laundry today, or I’m just getting the paycheck to bring home to provide for my family, whatever it is. And we can see those things as less spiritual than perhaps someone who’s had great experience of the presence of the Lord, or maybe they are missionaries overseas doing amazing things, or if we can redeem, Isaac, the menial, normal, ordinary parts of our life, there’s a tremendous hope and potential, I believe. And that’s really what we want to point towards in this podcast. 

That there is a great deal of hope in a believer living in the ordinary in extraordinary powerful ways. Right. Jesus has welcomed all of his followers into this life of love and joy and peace. All of these really beautiful aspects of life with Christ are available to everyone exactly where they are. 

There’s a lot of stunting of growth that occurs when we have that sensationalist mentality that the stars have to be aligned in this real particular way, or the moment has to be just right in order to experience a relationship to God or the presence of God or his Spirit. And I think, with that idea, you end up missing out on a good 80 percent or more of your life with God, which is just simply taken up with those humdrum, everyday, ordinary routine sorts of things that he very much, I believe, wants to meet us in. 

And that is something that I think I’m excited to talk about because it fits really well into this idea of discipleship and learning to live my entire life in the way of Jesus and learning to live that out in the way that Jesus himself would do it if he were me. Isaac, I am so struck at the ordinariness. 

It must have struck the angels odd for their Lord and King and Master and Creator, whom they knew in the heavenly realm, to take on an earthly, bodily, normal, ordinary human life down to the birthing process and the rest, right? God has got to be saying something really powerful in his methodology of bringing himself to us. 

What, in your perspective, is some of that message? Right? Well, yeah to your point I think Jesus was a master of the ordinary and part of his work I believe in coming that way was to reveal the extraordinary reality contained in the ordinary, I mean, the way that he came, obviously in the humility, the humble birth that he had, and then through the back roads of his people through Nazareth and grew up, spent a long time, 30 ish years as a carpenter and people would say as a contractor, just working your blue collar job, taking care of his family, being the man of the house when his father had died, like very, ordinary life circumstances surrounding Jesus and yet he was able to do it all alongside or in communion with God. 

I read a quote, something that’s going to be terribly paraphrased, but the message is captured that says, I don’t struggle with the sensational parts of my life. I struggle with the ordinary parts of my life, the obedience in the boredom or seeing God in the boredom. Does that sentiment make sense to you? 

Yeah, well, and do you think there’s a temptation? Do you think it’s common among people that we can question God’s realness when things are painfully boring? Right. I think there’s a temptation to just let boring be boring. But I don’t think that we necessarily have to do that. I think that’s part of the work that we engage in as Christians is cultivating the eyes to see beyond what’s seen if that makes sense, cultivating a heart that can really listen, that’s really able to see beyond the few paint strokes on a canvas into the deeper meaning that the artist the Creator intended there to be in those things. And there are things that we can do to help ourselves learn how to see better and how to listen better to God and to others in those ordinary moments. 

So, let’s start with that mindset. I perceive that a mindset of maybe expectation or a mindset that needs to be set in order to do just as you said. Speak to that mindset. Well, yeah, I would start with this idea that the whole world is God’s and that he inhabits every corner of it. I mean, you think of Psalm 19 or Psalm 24 that speak to this reality that exists beyond the seen reality. 

And it is the most real thing that all of this is God’s and that he’s holding it all together. And if we can start from that place, from that understanding, it makes the rest of it a lot easier because then we realize. Well, you don’t have to work so hard to manufacture a feeling or an experience, but that you can more easily rest into the reality that really does exist. 

And so, I think just cultivating that mindset. That in every moment that you possibly can is going to open you up to life that exists beyond the ordinary. So, I’ve got a question for you. And I think people are asking this question. Can I be fully pleasing to God right now? Like right now. Do you see what I’m catching? 

What am I getting at? Right. If you were to ask me. Matt, what’s it mean to be fully pleasing to God? I can make a list of those things that please God. In fact, we’re instructed in the Scriptures to learn how to please God. But a lot of those things that I would list, Isaac, couldn’t be right now. I think we need to perhaps redefine how we think about spiritual success or the spiritual life. 

Not so much as one done in performance, but out of posture in the way that we approach our life, the way that our heart is open to God. Paul talks about this when he talks about walking by the Spirit and keeping in step with the Spirit. To me, that’s what spiritual success looks like, is that communion. 

And that simply can be done anywhere, at any time. And, in fact, I think this was part of the message that Jesus came to give that he has made every arrangement to deliver his life to you exactly where you are right now. There’s a quote I love by Christian writer Dallas Willard, God has yet to bless anyone except for where they actually are. 

And if we just dismiss moment after moment or circumstance after circumstance is the place where God can’t bless. Then we’ll miss it. I think there’s a tremendous amount of hope in that. Oh, absolutely. So, let’s put some real meaning to that moment that you’re speaking of. That the moment of changing a diaper can be a holy moment. 

Yeah. Is that what you’re saying? I’m trying to find that myself, but yeah. Or running the kids to swim practice can be a holy moment. Or balancing my checkbook can be a holy moment. mowing the lawn can be a holy moment. These are very menial tasks. There’s no acclaim to these things. And that spiritual in a sense, speak to those ordinary moments. 

Yeah, I think we need to be careful not to separate the spiritual from the activities of life from physical things as well. Right? Like those are inextricably linked together and cannot truly be separated. And so doing anything of worth, doing anything that is valued or done in service or in stewardship, those are all really good and beautiful things. But sometimes you’ll have to take the time to, again, cultivate a heart and a mindset that’s able to see that beauty that’s intrinsic in those ordinary activities. Now, even if you don’t see it or understand it, it doesn’t mean that it’s any less beautiful. 

But it’s an invitation for us. Oh, is running my kids to their swim lessons? Can this be a holy moment? Well, I think you could find it to be that if you maybe pause and took the time to consider what is the invitation here for me? I want a key in a word that you used, and you used beauty. 

And I think that is a word that’s got a ton of power and a lot of purpose. And if people are like me, we miss that. The beauty in what? In mowing the lawn? The beauty in balancing the checkbook? The beauty in getting the kids here and there? What is the beauty? I think the beauty is that anything that we are engaged in, there is a way to do that with Christ. 

There is a way to do that with His Spirit. And that opportunity of learning to do something, the opportunity for something that is limited, like my flesh, to be joined up with something that is eternal and divine. It’s a beautiful marriage, and that in itself, I just think there’s intrinsic beauty and value to it. 

I think beauty plays on some really key principles that I think you’re right on about in the sense the way God would view some of these ordinary things. Let’s take the perspective of a person who owns a fish tank. As they peer into that fish tank and they watch the fish swim, there is a beauty that a person beholds, but from the fish’s perspective, pretty ordinary. In fact, not extraordinary at all, doing just everything that they’ve been created to do. But on display for the pleasure of the owner. Does that make sense? Yeah, there is something intrinsically beautiful about something doing exactly what it was designed to do. 

Yeah. And I think our problem as humans is that we aren’t very good at doing exactly what we’re designed to do and in fact we can’t do those things alone. And so, the only time that we could be found beautiful is when we are found in Christ and being able to join up our work with the work that he’s doing. 

Would you say then that part of Christ’s purpose in coming and living the ordinary life is somewhat of a show us how to do it, to show us how to be human? Oh, fully, yes. Jesus was the most perfect human who ever lived. As much as he came to teach, and to serve as a sacrifice, and all of these really, really important things. He came, I think, just as important in his coming was to show us how to live. Jesus was just a master at the slow, like he noticed things that nobody else would have noticed. I think of that story of the poor woman who walks into the temple to give her two mites. Something nobody else was seeing. 

Right? He’s like, well, all these people go and with, you know, trumpets blaring. So, everyone sees it. And it’s like, but this one came, and nobody would have seen it. But Jesus frames that up for his disciples and it’s like, notice this. And he saw something so far beyond the ordinary act, which even this woman herself perhaps thought it wasn’t very significant. 

Exactly. And yet he saw something massively valuable and incredibly beautiful. I think you’ve captured a couple things with that illustration. One is just case in point that we love sensational, and the large pronouncement and demonstration and Christ is pointing out this very simple, basic, local ordinary. 

But then the larger point you made is that Jesus noticed these things, and you also mentioned that he was very slow. Is that part of the remedy? Is that part of the instruction for us as believers who want to grow in Christlikeness is to slow down? I believe so. I believe it. As you said that Jesus knew the best way to live. 

I think you see him oftentimes noticing the things that everyone else was missing and taking his time in one place and just being with people and times of being alone to be sure. But even trying to carve out time and space to find that quiet time for yourself and God and as vital as that is, and as difficult as that is, even more difficult and even more vital than that is finding a quiet heart, that peaceable heart, and bringing that into the bustle of your everyday life, into those ordinary spaces and into your communities. 

So, Jesus is our ultimate example of doing that well. I love how accessible the Spirit led life and communion with Jesus has been made in this conversation, Isaac. Thank you for that. And thank you each one for listening in. Have a great day. 

It makes it really enjoyable, actually, to practice noticing things, because God inhabits this world. You’re in a God bathed world, and you’re going to find him. When we look for him, we’re going to find him in some pretty surprising ways. Greetings and welcome, everyone, to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. 

Very glad to have you along. In the last episode, Isaac Funk and I had a conversation on living the ordinary life. I am really happy in this episode to bring to you a continuation of that conversation where Isaac helps us see the beauty that can be found when we slow down and walk the pace of Jesus, even trying to carve out time and space to find that quiet time for yourself and God. 

And as vital as that is, and as difficult as that is, even more difficult and even more vital than that is finding the quiet heart, that peaceable heart, and bringing that into the bustle of your everyday life, into those ordinary spaces, and into your communities. So, Jesus is our ultimate example of doing that well. 

I really like that. In fact, that even raises a provocative point that says, are we increasingly unnatural in the way that we live life. I think it’s a pretty common phrase that we hear. Life is so busy and we’re moving at faster speeds than ever we have, which is true for most of mankind. Even going from point A to point B at 70 miles an hour was not possible. 

And when I do move at that speed. I have to forfeit certain senses. You know, my sense of smell is absolutely meaningless at 70 miles an hour down the road. There’s very little that certain senses mean. Yeah. And that’s just one little illustration, but just even in our minds of how much we can possibly compute of all of the stimulus coming into us, right? 

Yeah. Now we can extrapolate this to the way that we peruse social media sites and the way that we take in a thousand stimuli, right? It makes me wonder, Isaac, would slowing down help us get back to how it is and living according to our frame and according to our creation? It’s really hard to say, well, let’s get rid of our cars and all of our technology and things like that, which, some people do that, and for a purpose maybe like this, but I think it just speaks more to the point that it’s more difficult now than ever, probably, to cultivate that heart of quietness amongst that quickness and speed that you’re talking about.  

It just reminds me of how vital the training is, really. We talk about things like spiritual disciplines that become the practices, the training that people can engage in deliberately that would enable them to more easily bring that sort of life, that sort of a quiet heart into these perhaps over simulated environments. 

A technique, what would be a way that a person could, in the hustle and bustle, in the craziness, live closer to Christ’s pace and be a better observer and noticer of his surroundings. Yeah. What would that technique, or what would that learning practice look like? There are two that come to mind pretty quickly when trying to form a heart of awareness towards God and towards others.  

One is that a grateful heart leads to that pretty directly. And so, if you reengage, say with a practice like whether you’re a journaler or not, some people have engaged with this practice of gratitude journaling where maybe every morning or maybe at the end of the day, they’ll look back on their day and they’ll just write down all the things that happened that day that they’re thankful for. 

And just trying to remind themselves of all of the ways that God has been with them and blessed them and the people they love and know. And you’re being a noticer in that moment. Right. You’re taking the time. You’re taking deliberate, paused, perhaps even scheduled, time to train your mind to be tuned to those things. 

And the more you do those, the easier it becomes to have a grateful heart. You’ll find that starts to settle into you more naturally. Another activity that you can engage in deliberately would be something like silence and solitude, where you really are going off and being alone, as Jesus himself did. 

And just finding time to just rest and be with God and realizing that you don’t have to make things happen. Your value, your worth, your being loved, is not contingent upon your work or your action. You, as you are, are valuable to God and have a place of belonging in his care. Isaac, when it comes to silence and solitude, I think one of the pushbacks that people give to those particular disciplines is they can turn inward, in fact they are somewhat inward, and perhaps turn selfish, right? 

I need my time. It could be quickly characterized as my time. So, certainly you’ve thought through that. Help us think correctly about this. If we want to be people who can take a heart of solitude, a heart of silence, a heart that is quieted and able to be aware of God and of others, you’re going to have to practice that somewhere because very rarely you’re just going to be able to just do that by direct effort in the moment of your ordinary lives. 

If you understand it as, well, this is just a training for my heart to experience what is it like to be in quiet before God. So, then it becomes easier to bring that with you wherever you are. And another part of it too is that it really enables you to serve other people far better than you ever would have been able to otherwise without having a quieted heart. Because there’s just this very thing, we’ve been talking about it. It’s really hard to be aware. It’s really hard to notice people unless you have a heart that’s able to slow down to notice, to linger, to pause to honor, to respect other people and their humanity in the way that Jesus did. So, being able to practice something like silence and solitude, carving out that time, enables you to love people better in the way that Jesus himself did. 

That’s so well said. And Jesus is that example. Because you saw his silence and solitude, which he engaged in was for the sake of others and it wasn’t an end in and of itself but was a means to that end. Precisely, it’s a means to an end. Silence and solitude. I think we know those at a high level, and they explain themselves. 

Right. Silence. What more is there to say, right? Solitude. It only means one thing. But when we engage in these things, as I have tried, I find that I’m not silent at all inside my head, or I’m not in isolation inside my head either. I find all kinds of things are present with me. Is that wrong? Am I not doing it right? 

What needs to be done in these moments to practice these things? Well, I think especially at the beginning, times of practicing these things, that is the experience of nearly everybody. It’s like, wow, there’s a whole lot going on here that is perhaps, to some people, really troubling, actually, and it’s like, I’m worse off now than before I ever tried this. 

I think the key is just not to work yourself up about it, but then to notice, what are those things that are controlling my thoughts right now or taking my attention? And then just make an effort to deliver those to the feet of Jesus. Set those aside and see if you can do that for a time and just do it one by one, call out what it is, and if things continue to return, maybe God’s trying to speak something through that. 

Right? And you can uncover what that is and have a time of communion with God over that particular issue that keeps arising in your mind. But regardless of what that experience is like, it’s an opportunity for communion. It’s an opportunity for engaging in that relationship with God, engaging your senses, engaging your awareness so that you can just notice even your own heart, even your own self before God. I like that, engaging the senses to notice. And I do think it’s a skill that can be grown. Is that a true statement? Oh yeah, absolutely.  

This past spring, I was out hunting mushrooms. And that is an exercise of slow. It is an exercise of notice. It is an exercise of inspection to a painful level for any of us who move quickly or who quickly get bored. The scanning of the timber floor. But what I was blessed by, Isaac, is all that surprised me by what I noticed that I could have never noticed without the process. I learned, Isaac, that for every 1000 blue bells there is a white bluebell, a white bell, I guess. 

And for every thousand white ones, there’s a pink one. Something that I couldn’t have ever seen at that rate. I’m curious, Isaac, from that analogy. Do these disciplines open up into a world of wonder that might be surprising to us? The way that God surprises his people, it just never stops. He is endlessly creative and imaginative in the way that he meets us in his own creation. 

And the more that we can have eyes to see that. It almost takes the spiritual life. And if I can put the word like fun to it, like it makes it really enjoyable actually to practice noticing things because this idea that we started with that God inhabits this world. You’re in a God bathed world and you’re going to find him when you look for him, seek and you will find. That’s just a basic law in the world that we’re living in. 

We’re going to find him in some pretty surprising ways. And coming back to our point, this can happen now. Is that a true statement? This very moment. Which is so redemptive in a world of chasing after grandeur, right? And chasing after, whether it be mountaintop experiences, or euphoria, or huge superhero moments, right? 

We live in a superhero crazed society. That God might have something in plan for us today. In fact, He does. And as you mentioned, you captured a picture there of this density of space that so much goes without our notice, but it’s a very God dense world that we live in, and we’ll find him everywhere we inspect. 

Absolutely. Yeah. He holds it all together. And so, you’ll find his imprint on it all. There’s something you said too about some people might be listening to this and be in like a really dark time or like there’s a real trial going on. There’s a real weakness that’s been revealed. You know, how do we think about that in terms of like God seems really distant right now. 

The beauty seems really hard to find in the pain. But even in those moments when we think again about Jesus who was really good at living ordinary and revealing that extraordinary reality behind it all, who experienced immense suffering. And then he turned to his followers and he’s like, I’m going to experience that with you. 

You’re going to go through a lot of things and it’s going to be really hard at times. Right. And this speaks back to that expectations idea. Like there will be hard things and hard times and it will seem dark at times, but your communion with me will remain. I will be there with you to the end of it all. 

What I’m hearing you say here, whether it’s ordinary or whether it’s dark, whatever today is, holiness is possible. Blessing is possible. Bringing pleasure to God is possible. Is that right? Oh yes. In our weakness, his power is made manifest. He meets us in our weakness in all of those times, his power is seen, and he is glorified. 

Jesus talks in John 15 about having us abide in the vine, abide in me. And he ties this with doing. He’s like, if you keep my commandments, you abide in my love, right? So, there are things to do. And so that really leads us to think about it in terms of I’m learning to be in two places at once where I’m eating my bowl of cereal in the morning, and I’m In the Father’s presence, I’ve made my home with him, I’m abiding with him there, or I’m on my morning commute to work, perhaps I’m stuck in traffic, but I’m in the presence of the Spirit, or I’m having coffee with a coworker, or I’m calling my mother in law on the phone, on my way home from work, whatever it is, I’m doing all of those things, in the presence of God. 

I’m doing email, right? I’m doing work, learning to do that in the presence of God. I love that concept of two places at one time. A lot of it has to do with posture. Absolutely. In fact, that might be the switch in our head that helps us understand this. When we switch from performance to posture, a lot falls into place about how we can live in the now. 

Right. When we’re engaged in performance, we’re pretty outcome focused. I think that we often find that we don’t have a whole lot of say over outcomes in reality. But when we’re focused on our posture of heart, if we can stay in that communion with him, then our posture’s right. We can’t control outcomes, but we can control posture. 

You know, Isaac, I love in the Psalms, I think a couple of times God says he remembers that we’re dust. God is so aware of our frame. He understands our human experience. After all, he created us. But we have Christ who lived it. Right? Who took on that frame, that is a, I think, a powerful sanction of our human experience. 

Even as frail as we are, we don’t necessarily need to see it as oppositional to God. Yeah, that’s true. I think those opportunities, again, of seeing our frailty and seeing our own weakness are our drivers. To lead us back into communion with God, to find his strength in our weakness, to find his life, to inhabit us. 

But that alone isn’t as an amazing that it is God’s plan for him to inhabit us to enter into us. And that’s what the Holy Spirit does. And there’s another powerful way I guess where God lives in the ordinary doesn’t he wherever you are. He’ll be there. 

 Isaac, thanks for this time together in discussing this matter which applies to every single person because we all live ordinary lives. So, thanks for bringing some clarity to that, giving us a framework, helping us with a mindset, helping us kind of pivot our thinking in helpful ways. What parting thoughts do you have in encouragement for the ordinary life?  

I think I would just close with a quote from another Christian writer, William Paul Sell, who said, There is nothing that will enrich our lives more than a deeper and clearer perception of God’s presence in the routine of daily living. 

I really like that, and all of us will have some routine today, so we’ll be able to put that to practice. I’m thankful for each one of you.