Guest speaker Rusty Rueff shares about how God can use our ordinary to bring about something extraordinary.
This morning I was reflecting, as I was driving in from the peninsula where my wife Patti and I live. It was, how many times, how many years? We both teach in the children’s ministry. The way I gauge it is if your kids are in college, we taught them. We’ve been around that long in the children’s ministry. Now we have some that are graduating from college. Whoa, wow we’ve been doing this a long time.
It’s always fun to speak. I get asked to speak at corporate things. I do a few of them a year. I do less and less because the most exciting day is the day that I commit to speak. Every day that it gets closer and closer, the more I don’t look forward to it. Except for church. Pastor Terry will text me and he’ll say, “Are you available on this weekend or that weekend,” and we go back and forth, back and forth. I say, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” Then it just gets better and better and better. I get more excited about spending our time together here. Not only do you maybe get something from this moment. I get a lot from it. There’s that old adage that says, “He or she that teaches, learns twice,” which is part of why I love being in the children’s ministry. I get to teach children in a very child-like way, which we all should be very child-like in our faith. I get to learn again.
This morning has been a blessing for me already. Thank you for being here on this ordinary Sunday, just an ordinary Sunday. It might turn out to be an extraordinary Sunday. It might turn out to be that this is the beginning of an extraordinary week. The chances are that today is the beginning of an ordinary week for most of us. Tomorrow will be ordinary, Tuesday will be ordinary. We’ll go through. The reason that I say that is because there is nothing wrong with ordinary. Look at the definition of ordinary. It says, “With no special or distinctive features, normal. Normal. “What is commonplace or standard.” There’s nothing wrong with ordinary, except that what we try to do is make everything extraordinary. Our culture, our society, celebrates, lifts up, says to everybody, we want extraordinary. Correct? Everybody tries to get into the game. Everybody thinks they have to be extraordinary. Our media and everything around us just keeps trying to push something, even silly stuff.
I’m going to put a picture up here. Does anybody know who that is? Yes, that’s Punxsutawney Phil. Now if you’re not from the Midwest, you have no clue probably, but you saw Groundhog Day right? Over and over and over we saw that movie. That’s a joke. He had a little bit of a resurgence last week on the Super Bowl, him and Bill Murray, Punxsutawney Phil. Years ago, Patti, my wife, and I were driving across the country. We stopped in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. How could you not? Right there, in the town square, you look over to the side, and there’s a little glass cage and Phil is in there every day, 24 hours a day. There’s a light on, shining on him. They say Phil is 180 years old. He’s not. Don’t go, “Wow.” He’s supposed to be some mythical, magical creature. He’s a groundhog. I don’t know how long groundhogs live, but they don’t live 180 years. He comes out every February and he came out. He makes news. They try to take an ordinary groundhog and turn him into something extraordinary. He did say it was a short winter, by the way. That made news.
Yes, we love out of the ordinary in our culture. Here’s what got me thinking about this ordinariness of life, and what can happen right smack in the middle of living in the ordinary. If you come from any liturgical church background, particularly Catholicism, they have a time of the year. Does anybody come from the Catholic church? It’s called ordinary time. Ordinary time, it’s the time between the end of Christmas, the Epiphany, which I think is January 16, to Lent. It’s called ordinary time. Those Sundays are ordinary Sundays. It’s the transition time between two special seasons. It got me thinking about, yes, just over a month ago plus, we had Christmas, the most extraordinary, most special time. The time that we celebrate the most extraordinary birth in our history. A very unique time when the shepherds came to see the birth of Jesus. That the star came into the sky that the wise men followed from the east to come and find Jesus. Where did they find him? They found him in a pretty ordinary place, in an ordinary stable at the back of an ordinary inn, laying in an ordinary manger.
There was nothing ordinary about the birth of Jesus, except that it was extraordinarily ordinary. Jesus entered the Earth just like any other little baby, not at some amazing place, not at some fancy facility, but right there in an ordinary stable. That’s not what got me thinking about ordinary times. What got me thinking about ordinary times, and I’m going to ask you to imagine this. It’s really hard to imagine. I want you to imagine what it must have been like after the shepherds left, after the wise men left, after all of the celebrations were done. It’s Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. They had to go back to ordinary life. They heard from God, “You know what? You need to make sure that Jesus is safe.” They had to leave their home, leave their country, to go and find a place that He could be secure. Then they had to make sure that Jesus could be fed, that Jesus could be clothed, that Jesus would have a secure place to be. Mary and Joseph, they had to provide. Likely, Joseph had to work. Mary might have worked too. We don’t know. That work had to be reliable. They had to be predictable. They had to be good at what they did in order to get the money to be able to pay for those things.
Does that sound familiar? All at the time of raising a baby, a new baby. Now, it is quite possible that Jesus was an extraordinary baby. We don’t know. He might have been the kind of baby that slept through the night. He might have been the kind of baby that never needed toys to play with. He’s the kind of baby, might have been the baby that never needed extra attention, that never cried and said, “Ahhh.” He might have been the baby that never needed to be changed. I don’t know.
I don’t think so. I think he was ordinary. He had ordinary times, Mary and Joseph had ordinary times with Jesus. Jesus had to be raised in an ordinary way so that he could learn and be schooled. We know that’s the case because when he was 12 years old, the next time he shows up, he’s going toe to toe, mind to mind, with the best scholars. They’re amazed by him. How learned he was. We don’t know how he was taught, but we know Mary and Joseph didn’t shirk that responsibility, couldn’t have, otherwise he wouldn’t have learned. I’m pretty sure of this. He had to be extraordinarily curious. He had to be extraordinarily curious about, ‘how does that work?’ “When you plant that in the ground, how long does it take it to grow Dad? How do you build that? Who are those people Mom? What do they do?” By the time He did show up and He was ministering, He knew more about the ordinary life than any other person.
What are the parables? Why are the parables so powerful? Because they speak into the ordinariness of life, those things that the common person would understand. We know that Jesus was fascinated by the ordinary and that he came from an ordinary place, which brings me to my first point, that I want us to chew on if you will.
It could be that our ordinary time, our ordinary time, is actually a time of preparation. Could be that we’re being prepared for something extraordinary but we don’t know what it is. In our ordinary times, if we look at it that way, we could be getting readied for something. If we look at our ordinary time as drudgery, or somehow we feel resentful, or some type of punishment, or generational thing that I can’t break out of, some kind of negative response. I never got to be who I really could have been. I could have been a contender. Then we don’t feel like we reached our full potential. That’s not what God wants us to do. God doesn’t want us to feel that way about our ordinary time. It might just well be, and I think it is, that our ordinary time is just getting us ready. It’s just getting us ready.
It’s probably a good time to actually talk about time for a second because here’s the thing. God didn’t need to create time as a convention for himself. What’s a year, what’s a day, what’s a minute, to God. We need it. We need it to be able to look at it and set ourselves in context, to be able to figure out, how should we spend our time? How should we invest our time? Time is a gift, a gift from God. We’re all each given the same amount. We’ve all heard this before. We all got the same amount of time, yada yada. The truth is, there is no distinction between the time we’re given. There is no privilege of time, or not privileged of time. How we have to spend it is a different story.
Needless to say, it would be great, it would be awesome, if it all worked out, if we could just spend our time any way we want. Right? But we can’t. Each of us carries our burdens. Each of us carries our responsibilities. It causes us to spend time, maybe, doing the things that we don’t want to do, maybe too much time doing something that we don’t want to do. There is a word for that. What do you think it’s called? Work. We may not want to spend as much time working. It would be awesome if we didn’t have to, but we have to. Now it’s about, how do we think about that? How do we think about that ordinary time, that ordinary work that we do?
Work is a topic in and of its own self. If you wanted to, I got no place to go. We could stay here all afternoon and talk about work. That would be extraordinary. You wouldn’t be too extraordinarily happy about that. We are going to have something coming up soon for you, March first. You’ll see it on your handout, where we’re going to do another tight rope talk series, about that intersection between our faith and our work. I would encourage you to come to that. It will talk more about how we can bring our faith, have a purpose of bringing glory to God in our work, in our ordinary time.
Work is a good way to dovetail into my next thought. I want you to look into your handout. We’re going to read the first couple of things I’ve got here for us. Let’s start with Mark 1:16 through 20. I’ll just read it out loud. “One day Jesus was walking along the shore.” That would be ordinary. “He was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. He saw Simon and his brother Andrew throwing a net into the water, for they fished for a living.” Remember that? “Jesus called out to them, ‘Come follow up and I will show you how to fish for people.’ Then they left their nets at once and followed him. A little further up the shore, a little farther up the shore, he got there through walking, and he saw Zebedee’s sons, James and John in a boat repairing their nets. He called them at once and they also followed him, leaving their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men.” They were working.
Anybody fish here? Does anyone like to fish? Fishing is kind of fun, sort of, if you catch fish. Otherwise, those are going to be some long days, some long hours. Let’s read on to Matthew 9:9. “As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at his tax collectors booth. ‘Follow me and be my disciple,’ he said to him. So Matthew got up and followed him.” In our expanded series Pastor Terry has been taking us through, he’s talked to us about Matthew. Matthew was named Levi, he had two names, Matthew and Levi. He was a tax collector. He was sitting at his tax collecting booth and along comes Jesus. I’m pretty sure back then there was no April 15, kind of thing. I think about it this way. It was a little bit like that stand in Charlie Brown that Lucy had, that for a nickel she’d tell you something. I have this vision of Matthew, sitting at this table or a little stand, collecting taxes every day, every day. Today is kind of like yesterday. Today is like what tomorrow is going to be, and the next day, pretty ordinary. Right smack in the middle of his ordinary tax collecting day, Jesus, Jesus finds him.
We know from the other verse, James and John, Simon, later to be named Peter, and Andrew, just going about their work, fishing, and Jesus found them. He found them. I think what God is trying to tell us in this is really something. It’s the fact that he found his disciples within their ordinary work time. I guess he could have found them in other ordinary times. They had mornings. They had evenings. They had other times that they did things. He found them doing their work, which is what each of us has had to do. They did their ordinary work in their ordinary life, just like the rest of us.
There’s something about historical figures, especially biblical figures, that it’s hard to imagine or place them in the times that we don’t know what they were doing. It’s like they just fade away and we don’t really think about the rest of their 24 hours. It’s like that never really happened. The truth of the matter is, it happened. They had times where they were energetic. They had times when they were tired. They had sleeping time. They had up emotions, down emotions. They were bored sometimes, like all of us. They were hungry. It’s hard for us to think about those things. It’s almost like watching television. We all watch TV. We see these characters on TV. We only see a little sliver of their life, the best moments, the extraordinary moments. On TV, we never see someone sitting there scrolling Twitter for 30 minutes. We do it. We never see it on TV.
We have those times. They’re just ordinary times. On TV, it’s always amazing to me, apartments and houses are always so well furnished. They’re always so clean. We never see them cleaning them. We never imagine. Nobody ever stops and says, “Excuse me, I have to go clean this.” We never see any of that stuff. My mother-in-law, who has been with us for the last couple of months, we were watching This Is Us. It’s a really good show for us all to watch together. She’s from New York, so you’ll love this even more. She’s from New York, from the Bronx. She goes, “Do you ever notice how there’s always a parking spot waiting right out in front of the house?” She does that because, where she lived in the Bronx, sometimes it took an hour driving around trying to find a parking spot. We never see any of those things, but that’s the real-life that we live.
Suffice it to say, that the disciples, had their time too. Before they were found by Jesus, they had their ordinary time, time spent, daily work time, daily time just like the rest of us. We should be encouraged because the next point for us to think about, is God will find us in our ordinary times. He’s always looking for us. He’s always seeking us. We think we’re just doing our ordinary stuff. He will find us.
I also want to look at a verse in Mark 1:9. It says, “One day Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and John baptized him in the Jordan River. As Jesus came up out of the water, he saw the heavens splitting apart and the Holy Spirit descending on him like a dove. A voice from heaven said, ‘You are my dearly loved son. You bring me great joy.'” Wow. John the Baptist, do you know why we call him John the Baptist? Because he was a baptizer. In the water, out of the water, baptizer. John is just going about his work, called to be a baptizer. All of a sudden, whoa, up comes Jesus. Not planned. He didn’t call ahead. He didn’t text and say, “I’m on my way.” There he is. He asks John, “John, you should baptize me. I need you to baptize me.” John goes, “No you should baptize me. No, you should baptize me. You should baptize. Jesus won out. Jesus won out because Jesus had a different plan for John.
He was showing you and me, as he showed John the Baptist, that not only will he find us in our ordinary times, he will put us to work for him. He will use us for His purpose. He wants to utilize us for what He wants and we have to be open to accept that. Because, as we’re imagining today lots of the things. Imagine what it would have been like if John would have said, “Hey Jesus, nope, can’t do it. I’m an ordinary guy going about my ordinary thing. I’m just really not up to it. Why don’t you just come back tomorrow and I’ll be ready.” Imagine what John the Baptist, imagine what all of us would have missed out. This brings me to a point to think about. In the ordinary, God wants to use us. He wants to use us, for His purposes. That means we don’t have to be doing something extraordinary for Him to put us to use.
I co-host this podcast called, Faith Driven Entrepreneur. We spend a bunch of time talking to entrepreneurs about how God can use them in their work and leadership. How they can be used as an example to others as leaders, and how they can be used in their pursuit of bringing glory to God. When we try telling them, we have to remind all of ourselves, that you don’t have to be someone who writes a book, who has a bunch of degrees, or a bunch of letters behind their name, who hold some special office or some title, or even somebody who gets a chance to come up and speak on a Sunday at church, for God to use us.
He will use us right in our ordinary time, just like John the Baptist. In the even calendar years, I like to read the Bible all the way through. It’s an even year, it’s 2020, so I’m into it. It happened that I was in my ordinary Bible reading time. Up pops a verse. They’re related to this weekend and what was on my mind. We’re going to read it together. It’s in Acts. It’s on the other side of your handout. It says, “The members of the council were amazed when they saw the boldness of Peter and John for they could see that they were?” Ordinary.
Ordinary men, that’s right. With no special training in the scriptures. They also recognized them as men who had been with Jesus. That, to me, is amazing. That, to me, kind of says it all. Because here they were, the disciples. We know their journey. We’ve seen them. We’ve seen where they come from being ordinary in their work. Jesus has found them. Jesus had a purpose for them. He’s gone away. They follow through. They do something extraordinary and yet everybody looks at them and says, “They’re ordinary people.” Which makes it very clear. I think it makes it very clear to all of us that God wants us to be, and He honors, when we stay ordinary even in the extraordinary, even in the extraordinary. When you read through the Bible, it’s a God thing. He takes ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Do you know why He does that? Because He wants to show everybody that it was God. It’s not a man that can do that. It can only be God. Amazing.
Another thought for us is that we can choose to remain ordinary in the most extraordinary of times. It’s a choice. It’s a choice. Because here’s the good news. There will be extraordinarily good things coming. We will have extraordinarily, amazing, great, good times in our life. What are we going to do with that though? Are we going to create a new show on Instagram to show everybody how extraordinary our life is? Are we going to put on airs or begin to act above our means? Or does God want us to remain just who we are? Living and thriving in the ordinary with Him. Those around us see us as sensitive, approachable, humble, happy, and content with where we are at the moment. I think that’s what they saw in the disciples.
We’re also going to have extraordinarily bad times. We have to figure out how we react there too. I’m going to tell you a story and I’m going to try not to get emotional. Those of you who have heard me speak before, you know I cry a lot. In the old McDonald’s commercials, I used to cry at those all the time. It was 11 months ago today, that Patti and I got one of those phone calls. Those of us who live on the West Coast who have friends or family on the East Coast, or in the Midwest, there’s a certain hour of the day when the phone rings that you know it’s not good news. We got this call. Patti answered the phone. Her middle brother who is a year younger than her had been in a very serious ski accident. They weren’t sure he was going to live. He had broken his back in multiple places. He had pretty much all of his ribs broken. He had torn his aorta, ruptured his aorta. One of the broken ribs had clipped an artery and he’d almost bled out, which led to paralysis and lots of bad things. What do you do? You do what any of us would have done. You drop what you’re doing. You start to make reservations. You get on a plane and you go.
For the next ten days, we sat in a neuro ICU, waiting to see if Bob was going to live or die. He lived by the grace of God and a lot of prayers. He doesn’t walk very well now, still got a lot of problems, 11 months later, but he lived. At that moment, we have family there. Patti is the only daughter, the only one away from home, and her 89-year-old mother. We prayed about it. What we heard God saying to us is to ‘pick up your ordinary life and go there.’ We’re fortunate that what we do, our work, and our activities, we can do it on a Zoom call.
We just picked up our ordinary life and we went to the East Coast. We stayed until December 31. To us, it was just our ordinary lives being put someplace else. To my family, to Patti’s family, it was extraordinary. They couldn’t believe we did that. We had to do that. That’s what God was telling us to do. He said, “Just take your ordinary life, move it there. I’ll make it all work out.” I think there’s a lesson in there for us. As believers, as people who are following Jesus, who people need in moments of grief, sadness, pain, and loss. They need others around them to support them. Do you know what we can do? We can take our faith and we can be ordinary for them. We can give of ourselves and we can sit with them. We can write them a note. We can do a telephone call. What we don’t want to do and God doesn’t want us to do, is avoid being ordinary with others. He wants us to spend that time.
Sometimes you know what you do? You don’t even talk. You just sit there for hours at a time, but that person knows you’re in the room. That God wants us to be ordinary. I think He’s telling us, that even in the extraordinarily bad times, that He wants us to remain ordinary through Him and with Him.
Since it’s 2020 and I’m trying to think about these decades left, which is kind of morbid. But actually, you start to think about things when you’ve gone through what we went through last year. It’s a new decade. I’ve been trying to think about 2020, which I’ve seen. I’ve seen it. I’m going to be bold enough to say that I’m going to see 2030. Here we go. I feel good enough about that. 2040, I think I’m going to make that. 2050, yeah I think I’ll do it. I think I’ll be all right. 2060, I may need a little help. 2070, whoa. There is no 2080. Those of you who work in biotech, keep working. Just keep that coming. We’d love to see that 2080. I think that would be kind of cool. But chances are, no.
I’ve started to narrow down my activities, letting go of some of the interest in the activities that I had been working hard at more of the ordinary time I’m given. Actually, it means learning a word that I’m not good at, the word no. I’m just having to start to say no. That word, to me, has become less and less of a FOMO moment. When you say no, you’re thinking, “Oh, but what am I missing out on?” It’s more about now, thinking about this ordinary time that God has given me and what I have left, to accept the beauty of this ordinary time. The grace, the calm, the peace, the completeness of living positively, it might once have felt too ordinary, but it doesn’t feel that way anymore.
This brings me to my last thought. If you were here on Vision Sunday, how many of you were here on Vision Sunday? Here or over in Reardon. Okay. You’ve seen these things? Pastor Terry has talked about these. Who has them? Anybody got them on? Yeah, good for you. Pastor Terry says he wears his on Sundays. I wear mine every day. Just saying. Let me tell you why this is really cool. When you wear it every day, people ask you about it. They’re saying, “Hey, what’s the bling? What are you doing here?” I say, “It’s sow, water, reap.” They say, “What’s that mean?” I go, “It’s my church, sow, water, and reap.” I said, “You know that what you sow is what you reap.” They go, “Oh yeah, I don’t want to talk about it.” Right there in the ordinary time, I’ve got a chance. We’ve got this chance. But I love this, where we’re going. I love the vision for the next decade of our church to sow, water, and reap. I think sowing is really cool. It’s planting those seeds, making sure we’re doing our thing. It feels very motivational. It feels very productive to plant seeds. I like sowing. Reaping, that’s pretty cool too. The harvest, that feels like it’s going to be rewarding, that it’s going to feel inspiring. We’re not going to know what the seeds are. This is really cool. I can’t wait.
Watering, now watering to me feels like work. Wait a minute, I told you I was a Sunday School teacher. Everybody needs an object lesson. This is what we do with the kids. They’re child-like. We’re supposed to be child-like in our faith so just go with me on this. Watering, there are seeds in here. Nothing is growing. We don’t know what those seeds are. Could be there’s a mustard seed in there that’s going to grow up to be a huge tree. Seeds that we’ve sown, seeds that other people have sown for us, that we don’t even know. We have grandparents. We have parents. We have friends who have prayed for us. They’ve prayed things into our lives. If God answers prayer, those seeds can be reaped. It’s got to be watered. It’s got to be watered.
When do things have to be watered? They’ve got to be watered all the time. Water, water, water, water, water. Sometimes we water a little more in the dry periods. Sometimes we water a little less in the wet periods. We have to water. Now, I’m from the Midwest. I’m from Indiana. There’s a big argument, that if you’re a farmer when do you water? It’s an argument. What time of the day is the best time to water? Some people water in the morning. Some people water in the afternoon before the sun goes down. I’m going to make a suggestion to us. I’m going to go out on the limb and say that there is one part of our day that is the best time for us to water ourselves and that’s in the time of day that we want it to be the most ordinary of any time of the day and we are happy when it’s ordinary. When is that? Morning, of course. We don’t want anything extraordinary in the morning. That’s the time when we want everything to go just like we want it to go. As ordinary as could be, no distractions, no problem with the car. The dog does what the dog is supposed to do exactly when the dog does it. Traffic is just like Waze said it was going to be.
You get the point. In this very desired, ordinary time is a great time to do our personal watering that we daily need. Jesus taught us in the Lord’s prayer, “Give us this Day, our daily needs.” He did not say, “Give us our annual needs.” There’s a great book, Jesus as a CEO, but he did not say, “Give us our quarterly needs.” He said, “Do this daily.” He took us back to the daily watering. Let’s consider that through our times in God’s word and prayer, that we ordinarily do. That we are watering, watering what God wants to do with us next. That’s a cool thing. That’s not work. That’s a good thing. That’s the kind of watering we all should do. Pastor Terry put up this slide two weeks ago and I wanted to bring it back up. Remember this? He said, “Here’s a cadence. Here’s a rhythm.” It starts with what? Daily.
Daily, then it goes to weekly, and then it goes to seasonal. Then there’s this life arc thing that we’ve got to think about. Right smack in the middle of all of that is ordinary time. It’s just a lot of ordinary time in that. We’re going to close up in a second with a song that I heard while I was ordinarily listening to Spotify. It’s called, Spend a Life. I’m listening to it and I think, “Wow, that’s the song that we should have for the message that I’m going to talk about next month. That’s pretty amazing.” Spotify was spot on. I love this. We’re going to listen to this. I want you to listen to the words. We don’t actually have the words up there. You can spend some time on that.
Then we’ll receive our offering. I want to close up with and ask you some questions. Ask all of us these questions. Is God preparing us, you, right now, on this ordinary Sunday in this ordinary time, what is it that he’s preparing us for? We may not know what it is, but let’s know that He is. It’s going to be something. We’ve also got to ask ourselves, and I want to say this because I know we’re all at a different place in our faith journey. There are maybe some here that are the first at church and this is a lot to take in. There are some that are, “I’m committed to being a follower of Jesus and I’m just learning. I’m just planning to start that seed. It’s a little tiny seed. I’m just starting to water it.” Some of us have been at this for a long time. We need to get back to watering. There are those that, you’re helping encourage all of us.
Everybody is on a different faith journey, but we also have to ask ourselves, “Can we be okay in the ordinary time we’ve been given to allow God to find us?” Either to find us for the first time or to find us again. He’s looking and He’s calling. When we are asked by God to be used by Him, will we be open to answering what we hear He wants us to do? Will we do it? Will we follow through on His desires for us? Can we, when the extraordinary times come, the good and the bad, stay consistently ordinary for God with Him right there with us? It all comes down, really, to this. Will we commit ourselves, through this season, to doing our necessary watering, to what we’re sowing, coming back daily to what God provides us in His word, through our times here in worship, through our prayer time, through our shape groups, through our service time, in fellowship with others to strengthen us. Will we come back and allow ourselves to be watered every day? Can we find ourselves here, right now, at this moment, getting excited? Getting enthused? Knowing that God wants to bring to us something amazing, out of the ordinary?
Let’s pray. Lord, we just thank you for this time. We thank you for the ordinary time you’ve given us. What a blessing that we can even be here today. Lord, we just ask you to let this message germinate like the seed. Let it sit down inside of us. Every one of us will respond in our own unique and individual way. Lord, we just ask you as we water ourselves this week, to reveal that to us, show, whether or not we are allowing ourselves to be found. Convict us, Lord, if we’re not. Give us the courage to hear what you’ve got to say to us and allow us to go do it. Lord, allow us, also, to remain ordinary with you. Lord, you have given us so much and you will give us good and we will have bad in our lives. We know we depend upon you to come back to, to make this ordinary life that we have, as purposeful and special as you want it to be. Lord, take us safely home. Bring us back here next week. In your name, we pray. Amen.
Have a wonderful ordinary Sunday.