Tired of the Same Ol' Routine?

It was quiet except for the song of crickets. I stepped out onto the brick walk, mentally preparing for the drive home. The trees were backlit by the blue-grey glow of the setting sun, and fireflies were floating just above the grass. The air, though still laced with the humidity of a hot July day, had become a little cooler, relinquishing most of its oppressiveness. An hour of driving was before me, on winding country roads, at a time of day I would normally be asleep; but it was not unfamiliar terrain or heavy eyelids that disturbed me. It was the familiar; it was weariness; it was leaving the serenity and fellowship I'd known for the last few hours and heading back to responsibility, work, and the busyness of urban life. I felt burdened. "Why can't I...?" Go here. Do that. "Why isn't my...?" Life like this. My family like that.

Maybe you've thought something similar from time to time. Not a shallow ingratitude or jealousy, but a weariness, a heaviness that immediately leads us to wish we were somewhere else, someone else. James K.A. Smith said, " Sometimes the difference between drudgery and epiphany is just seeing things from the right angle." And that ideology appeals to my inner optimist, but what happens when your inner optimist has run out of steam?

"God shows up." It's an expression our pastor loves to use. God is there all the time, each day, in the extraordinary and the mundane. And sometimes it's in the extraordinary we see Him best: the brilliant sunrise, the cry of our first child, the money that "arrives" to the pay the taxes, the hardened father who comes to know Jesus. When there is "simply no other explanation," God is effortlessly revealed to us. And who among us has not sought and deeply known God in the impossible and hopeless moments of life? But what about the ordinary? Is God in the routine and frustration of caring for a disabled child each day? How do I find God when I've answered the same question or made the same request multiple times? What is God doing when doctors are telling you the same thing over and over and none of it seems to make any sense? Where is God when you are nodding to the same guards week after week, and you know you will be until you die or she does? God shows up.

Not that He wasn't there all along -- He was; He is. But, if we look, if we seek, God will become just as evident in the all too familiar as He is in the strange and insurmountable and wonderful. It's more than just an internal optimism, a "looking on the bright side" that comes from within ourselves. It's more than just searching for purpose and fulfillment in our commitment to that purpose; seeking a gift or looking for answers. Our search is a search for God, a search for the Giver Himself, the Way, the Truth, the Life; our search is to know Jesus and who He is, in abundance. Our quest is not a quest for relief from the weariness and sameness of our life; but a search for Strength and Life Himself.