The church calendar calls this long stretch of the year Ordinary Time, which sounds like an insult and isn’t. No great festival, no build-up, no aftermath. Just week following week.
Most of life is Ordinary Time. The school run, the shift, the shopping, the same walk up Church Walk you have done a thousand times. It is tempting to treat it as the waiting room — the bit before something real happens.
But the gospels are mostly ordinary time too. Bread. Boats. Fish. Dust on the road. Jesus spent thirty years in a workshop before he spent three on the road, and the Church has never quite known what to do with that long silence. Perhaps the point is simply that it wasn’t wasted.
Whatever this week holds for you — and September has a way of filling up — you don’t have to wait for it to become significant. It already is.
A prayer for the week
God of ordinary days,
you are not only in the mountaintop and the crisis,
but in the kettle, the queue, the quiet afternoon.
Teach us to stop looking past today
for something better worth your attention.
Meet us here, in the middle of the week,
in the middle of our lives,
and let that be enough.
Amen.
Sunday services at St Mary’s: 9.30am, with coffee afterwards, and Encounter at 11.15am. Whoever you are, you’re welcome here.
