“Was today typical?” That is the site prompt today. (The website/app that hosts this Bridge site asks a prompt every day. They figure that, the more anyone posts, the more people click, the more eyeballs, the more advertiser revenue. I post once a week. Maybe I should be a better content/revenue generator…) It’s a great question, isn’t it? What is typical? What is a typical day, to you? Actually, this question makes a pretty big presupposition: that typical exists. Is that true? Is there any such thing as typical?

Maybe today is typical. I woke up, went to the gym, met with a very good friend/mentor, got the groceries, went to the bank, picked up my creamed pearl tapioca at the tapioca shop, and have been working since then. I’ll play Scrabble with my son as soon as I finish this post. That sounds typical. But my heart, head, mind, spirit are in all sorts of different spaces that are anything but typical. This summer is, actually, wildly atypical, if I am honest. Maybe, if we are all honest and present, the idea of typical is a joke.

Before I saw that prompt, I opened this computer to write about Sunday morning. Well, to be more specific, the 2nd half of the message on Sunday morning, the half I didn’t give. The half in which a young woman gave her first sermon.

Now. No one sees the past several years of meetings, of study, of humble searching for her identity in Christ. Her humble, teachable spirit. Her struggle with her own nerves. Her growth. Her steady, consistent participation. We see her standing up there, maybe some of us guess that she stumbled up there, willy-nilly, just to “see how it goes.” We don’t see the hours and hours and hours that went into her foundations, her formation, the prayers, the second-guessing and doubts.

Is that typical?

Of course, we are called to show up to our lives, called to lean in. We are made to be on some kind of path, moving forward. It’s probably not the best thing to be the same person that we were 5 or 10 or 20 years ago. Even the same person we were yesterday. We are created to become, everything is. Trees & plants grow, reproduce. There’s a rhythm to creation. The most natural thing is to transform.

So, that seems to point to her journey as “typical,” doesn’t it?

It seems that way, but sadly, this becoming is not at all typical. It’s quite extraordinary. We stay firmly, (in some cases) stubbornly, exactly where we are. We are afraid to take a step. OR we are comfortable. OR we are lazy. OR we simply confuse contentment with complacency. Who knows why we do it? To try to quote The Most Spiritual Film Ever, Fight Club, from memory, “we work jobs we hate to buy stuff we don’t need.” Why? Because we always have, I guess. Because it’s what culture tells us is important. We say things like, “it is what it is,” and we justify our bad habits & behavior, just to try stay the same, desperate and bored. We might not even like it, we just know the roads here.

Is her growth typical? Maybe it should, or could, be, but it is decidedly not. Maybe we could make it more typical.