If you’ve read here long enough, you know Beau and I each work at a church.
What a wonderful opportunity to be able to be used by God to reach others with the Gospel every day with what talents God’s put in our hands. I never thought I would be doing what I am doing. Now, let’s not fool ourselves and think that working at a church is perfect. It’s not. But, it can definitely be rewarding. I’m so thankful that God is using us in such a way.
Because we work at a church, we tend to be there all the time, including most services. That’s pretty much the way it goes at every church.
I always had concerns about this for my children, having to be there a lot. I never want their hearts to grow cold and hard towards God. We have to check ourselves constantly to make sure that they are not being neglected in any way, which all parents with any job have to do regularly.
I continuously pray that their hearts will remain tender to the things of God and their relationship with Him won’t become mundane or just something they do because of us.
I pray for hunger and passion and zeal.
This past weekend I asked La Petite Belle how her church service was. She said, “Ordinary.”
I said, “Ordinary?”
She said, “Yeah, not extraordinary.”
At that moment, I realized a few things.
First, my kids are spoiled.
Our church has an awesome children’s ministry, with games, puppets, and lots of other fun stuff. The kids of our church love going to service and visitors are astounded at how much fun it is on their first visit. All fun while planting the Word of God inside them. Awesome, huh?
There are children all over the world that don’t get the chance to learn about God in such a way; some don’t even have the freedom to do so. Yet, some of these children hunger for God more than my own kids.
So, her statement kind of irritated me in that sense.
Secondly, her saying that was almost like God issuing a challenge to me personally. Ordinary? He has not called any of us to be ordinary.
Ordinary – non-interesting; commonplace; with no special or distinctive features
We are so not to be like that … just the norm … not standing out. Remember … we’re supposed to be “set apart”? I recall the Bible saying that.
I don’t want to be ordinary. I don’t want anything I do to be ordinary. I don’t want my children to be ordinary. None of us should be content with being ordinary.
That’s the scary part.
It’s way easier to be ordinary than extraordinary.
Extraordinary – remarkable; exceptional; unusually great; phenomenal
But, we’re already there. We have that in us. God created us that way. We are created in His image and I don’t know anyone else who could best define the term “extraordinary.” Not only who He is, but everything He’s done for us has, is, and will be extraordinary.
And, because my English teacher always said you have to have three reasons or points to anything you write, La Petite Belle saying that made me realize that our kids’ expectations are ridiculous these days.
Impressing kids … that’s tough stuff. She could have come back from jumping on trampolines made of cotton candy, while playing laser tag, while watching “The Chronicles of Narnia” in 3D and I still think after the third weekend, she’d say … “Eh … it was ordinary.”
You're right, it's way hard to impress a kid nowadays. Up here in the cold-hearted 😉 North, most churches are little, struggling financially, and they don't have lots of workers. It's hard to put on children's programs that engage the child, keeping their interest for the full 40 minutes or so. We are competing with a very fast-paced, high-tech children's world.
I heard this Sunday in church that we are not fighting for victory, but out of victory. The victory is already ours. I think we could live more extraordinarily if we kept that in mind.
Good post!
-FringeGirl
the bottom line is we just can't compete with the world, we're not supposed too, yet our kids expect the church to "bring it", they want entertainment. When my husband was a youth pastor our senior pastor told him "I want you to make the Youth Group 'FUN' because I want my kids to 'want' to come, if they don't want to come your not doing your job"! crazy huh?