Then he (Jesus) said, “Throw out your net on the right-hand side of the boat, and you’ll get some!” So they did, and they couldn’t haul in the net because there were so many fish in it.(John 21:6 NLT)

We often complain about the mundane circumstances of our lives.  Jesus did his best teaching in the commonplace venues of peoples’ lives. Never despise the ordinary.

Someone once said that the thing that is difficult about Christianity is that it is every day.  Some of us are always looking for that spiritual pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and we miss those spiritual lessons right in front of our nose. We look for God in the unusual or spectacular events of our lives.  At times they do occur, yet most often God is in the ordinary or mundane experiences of our existence.  Jesus spoke to people where they lived.  The scene in our scriptural reference had been replayed by his disciples’ numerous times, yet Jesus invaded the natural with the supernatural.  This appears to be how God works. In the feeding of the five thousand (Matthew 14:13-21) he asked his disciples for what they had, five loaves and two fish, and then he gave them what they did not have, enough food to feed the multitude.  Miracles are a combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary.  At a common event like the wedding at Cana, they gave Jesus water, and he gave them wine.  God asks us to do the possible, and then he does the impossible.

We may miss God in the ordinary because we are not looking for him to show up in the details of life.  God does not just live on the mountaintop, but in the valley also.

I worked for seventeen years as a missionary with Youth With A Mission.  My missionary work has taken me to Mexico, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Spain, and Ukraine.  I hold a Masters of Education in curriculum and instruction from Virginia Commonwealth University.  [email protected]