normal people

what extraordinary thing might you do if you saw an ordinary person doing it?

The summer after my freshman year of college, I tripped and fell into my first mission trip.¹ I thought I was going to spend my summer doing what all the good, trendy, Christian Aggies were doing and work at a summer camp, but God had a different idea and lassoed me not to East Texas, but to nearly the exact other side of the globe—a rural and sparsely-populated island in Southeast Asia.

I am embarrassed to admit that prior to this adventure, I thought mission trips were solely construction-based. My understanding was that you went to a far country and dug a well or built a wall or painted the new wing of an orphanage. Your ticket home was the one-two punch of a social media post showing the shiny new thing you helped construct, and a stereotypical photo of you with some village children (preferably orphans.)

To my surprise, that was not the kind of trip that God saw fit to take me on. There was absolutely zero construction. The only building was the metaphorical building of relationships, as we looked for people who were open to spiritual conversations.

God did a lot in my heart over those six weeks, but I unexpectedly found that my biggest takeaway was this: the missionaries we served with—the long-term team who had traded their lives of air-conditioning and Target runs for squatty potties and bucket showers for the sake of the gospel—were….normal.

It was honestly jarring. They were just ordinary people, like me.

I had thought that missions=construction, and (again, to my embarrassment) that missionaries=weirdo Jesus freaks with no style, no hobbies, and who never even cared about Target in the first place.

But they were just…people. We liked the same basketball teams and tv shows and laughed at the same jokes. They wore makeup and even cussed sometimes. They were wonderful and fun and I liked them a lot, but they were not that special. They did not pray for six hours a day or have Jesus’ Farewell Discourse memorized. God had not appeared to them in a burning bush to audibly call them to this island. Instead, it was quieter—a faithful following of a loving Father, step after step.

It’s a similar story for my family’s journey into foster care.

Three members of my extended family started fostering at different points when I was a teenager, so I grew up with it in my periphery. While I didn’t see these families all that often, I could see the beauty of what they were doing, and knew I was interested in stepping into that world one day.

When my now-husband and I were dating and began to seriously talk about getting married, we agreed that we wanted to foster one day—but I thought it would be sometime in our late thirties, after having a few biological kids first, because that’s what I saw my cousins do.

Then, a few years after getting married, we got to know a couple at our church who became foster parents in their mid-20s. They were only a few years older than us, and were pregnant with their first daugher when they said yes to taking in their first placement, a precious 4-year-old girl.

I was once again caught off guard: on paper, they were doing this extraordinary, crazy-hard thing. But just like my missionary friends, this couple was great, but very ordinary! I thought only the super-Christians did this kind of stuff?

To paraphrase Bilbo, “it’s a dangerous business, Frodo, realizing ordinary old you can do extraordinary things. Once you understand that, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”²

You see an average person doing something remarkable, and next thing you know you start getting ideas: maybe I could do something like this too?

This is how Daniel and I find ourselves having loved three separate foster placements before turning 30. The “maybe we could do this” that sprang from one example of faithful friends grew into a “we probably could do this” which bore the fruit of “we are doing this.”

And now here we are, doing it. Strangely enough, it doesn’t feel that remarkable. It just feels like life. I imagine my friends on mission would say the same.

All of these normal friends had a few things in common: they trusted that God loved them, they paid attention to how God’s love is moving in the world, and they had a willingess to jump in and play a part in it.

Now, I certainly believe there are valid reasons not to step into foster care, mission work, or whatever hard and unusual thing catches your fancy. There is such thing as a wrong time. But I wonder if we live too long in the waiting room, expecting someone to call our name and tell us the time is finally right, that we are finally ready to step out of our comfort zones and into a peculiar, wilder life with God.

We all know some people who truly are extraordinary. But I reckon that many of the world’s extraordinary acts are done by ordinary people, who are open to an extraordinary God.

It calls to mind the closing lines of George Eliot’s Middlemarch:

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Consider this: God is with you. God loves you. In love, he is moving in the world. And you, normal person that you are, are invited to be a part of it. You can step out your door and live faithfully a hidden, extraordinary life.

1. I say it this way because it was not my idea at all. It’s a long story that involves one of the world’s most effective rounds of Bible roulette. Maybe I’ll tell it one day.

2. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/137661-it-s-a-dangerous-business-frodo-going-out-your-door-you