Ordinary?

Huw Williams | 18:16, Monday 03 December 2012 | Turin, Italy

Development is a fascinating thing. Suddenly Kitty’s mind is alive and inquisitive, hungry for experience and learning. Pushing her buggy slowly down our familiar street, where a month ago she looked blankly at the passing colours, while the various sounds didn’t even seem to register, now she leans forward in her pram like a bobsleigh speed-demon, trying to squeeze that extra mph out of her machine, yelping with delight she grips the sides with white knuckles as if on a roller-coaster and her bobble-hatted head darts side to side for fear of missing something. Every second of a routine walk to the shop is extraordinary, because for an eight-month old of course, there is no such thing as ordinary.

It is a delight to watch but as so often happens, she turns the spotlight quite unconsciously on her old man. Because now I ask myself when the walk down the street became so unremarkable? When did the various colours become so dull, the trees so bland, the passing people such nameless, faceless objects? Sometimes I even take this route with earphones stuffed into my ears to block out the noise, to remove myself one step further from these surroundings.

There is something about the human heart that is so determined to harden itself, it seems. The infinite variety of creation shouts of an infinitely wonderful and vibrant God. Yet familiarity certainly breeds contempt and our natural inclination is airbrush out its details, varnish over its edges and settle for generic groups like trees, people. And we do the same with how we imagine the Creator Himself, as we reduce Him to a power, a force, or even a disinterested, stern deity. But there is no such thing as ordinary sunlight, ordinary smells or an ordinary tree, so how much less (as C.S.Lewis famously observed) is there such a thing as an ordinary person.

And how much less again, an ordinary God.