Pedestrian was the word of the day a few months ago. Ordinary. Commonplace. Or sometimes Dull. I feel like my life of recent has been nothing if not pedestrian. Normal, though in disorganization. Common, though so in-between. Ordinary, glaringly so. Even embarrassingly so. Filled with all of these great ideas and plans and hopes and visions, seeds I planted deep in my heart-soil--things I purposed I would see bear fruit with immediacy and power. Seeds which were planted too close to one another, choking out each other's need for space and soil of their own.

Before I moved back to New York a friend from Tennessee gave me a small book by a shared favorite author. It's been one of the few consistent things in my life in the past month--I carry it almost everywhere, soaking up the words that speak so directly to my psyche and my current place. She writes this:

"It is a scriptural principle that the divine energy acts upon the stuff of this world. Jesus had the servants fill the stone jars that happened to be standing there when he made wine from water at the marriage in Cana. He used a boy's lunch, instead of starting from nothing, to feed five-thousand people. His own spittle and the dirt at His feet were the remedies for a blind man's eyes. Common things taken into the divine hands accomplished eternal purposes."

Elisabeth Elliot God's Guidance

And I remembered the sermon that propelled my move back home into action. He spoke about loaves and fishes and making a very big something out of a very small almost nothing. And I decided that Potsdam, New York was a very small pond for this very hopeful big fish, but that I would take commonness and pedestrian and see what dirt and spittle could do to these blind eyes.

I'm not promising sight and I'm not pretending twenty-twenty--I know my blind spots and suffering from a severe case of the doldrums is one of them--but here's what I learn more every day: He takes something pedestrian and makes it accomplish eternal purposes, not just miracles, not just power and zing and pizazz. He says to pray His kingdom on earth as it is in Heaven--and what is Heaven if not completeness in every way?