How to Make Your Ordinary Life, Extraordinary

When I met her for the first time, she looked ordinary to me, unassuming, like any grandmother, anywhere, with salt and pepper hair and a soft, generous smile.  How could I have known that I had met a hero?

 

On that very first mission trip, into the high Mexican desert, up the winding dirt roads to land of cactus and cattle and smiling children living in structures made of sticks tied together with twine, how could I have known that there was a gem buried in those desert mountains?  That there was a gem of a woman tucked away in the sparsely dotted folds of those mountains, a hero of a woman with a name like a gemstone.  Her name was Garnet.

And this gem of a grandmother, she led our team up these winding mountain roads and we bounced and jarred over rocks and packed dirt in a white twelve-passenger van, she told us her stories.

The stories of a life lived full out for Jesus.

She told us that she had come to this desert land when she was just a girl, becoming woman, newly married to her pastor husband.  She had heard God’s call to be a missionary in Mexico in a dream.  She told her husband and he prayed and he too had a dream about a place in the desert where there were people who have never heard the Good News, the God-news.  She told us that they, just barely twenty, had packed up their whole life in a travel trailer and drove from the cold Midwest to somewhere in central Mexico where they would take the gospel to people who have never heard it.  And she would learn what it meant to suffer for the gospel.

As they went into village after village, up into the high mountains to bring the good news of God’s grace, they were often shot at.  They endured constant opposition from communists, from religious leaders who didn’t understand grace or the gospel, from witches and people involved in voodoo, from just about everyone.  She was poisoned on purpose by an enemy of God and lay paralyzed for months on the verge of death until one day God miraculously healed her. And when the woman who poisoned her saw that Garnet had recovered, she was terrified, because she had seen the power of God at work and knew that He was greater than anything she had ever worshipped.  As for Garnet, she forgave her, she reached out to her, she loved the very woman who had tried to kill her.   She took her ordinary love and God made it extraordinary.

For ten of the fifty years that Garnet has been there she lived in a tent in the desert.

They used their trailer to become a medical clinic where Garnet, who had no previous medical experience, began treating people’s sicknesses, delivering babies and sharing the gospel.  She has delivered over three thousand babies in that desert, in the darkest nights, in the worst conditions, in tiny shacks with dirt floors by candlelight that were overrun with lice, bringing forth life because of the One who had given His life for her.  Because it really is just gratitude for grace that makes us give our lives. 

Often she delivered three babies a day, went days without sleep, without food, without help.  When she gave birth to her own three boys she did it alone, in the desert, with no one to help her and almost hemorrhaged to death every time.  But the stress of this kind of life can drive some people to  break, like so much glass and her husband she said, just up and shattered one day.  He became violent and abusive and eventually he abandoned them there in the desert.  But she stayed.  

Over the years she adopted two daughters along with her three biological children and took in over twenty street children that would call her mother and this gem just kept shining like a diamond in the dark. 

If you were to meet her you might think she was just another ordinary grandmother, gentle and sweet.  Or if you knew her story, you might call her a saint.

But you would be missing the point.

We are all just ordinary people who serve an extraordinary God.  Ordinary people, who have been changed by extraordinary grace that makes us want to give it all for the One who first gave grace to us.

Ordinary people, who do not have extraordinary gifts or talents but just use what they have.  Ordinary people who give their time, their love, their lives to serve sacrificially, love without boundaries, and forgive radically.

The gemstone of a woman was no doctor or nurse, yet she gave her life to heal people and serve them and just give what she could, her very life. 

This very ordinary Midwesterner, from an ordinary middle-class life, just said yes to the call of God and gave what she had.  She gave what she had, and didn’t stop giving even in the midst of suffering for a lifetime.  And she gave because of grace.  She gave because she understood the truth of the gospel, that God gave his best to us, His only Son, to buy us out of slavery to death and sin and so we give our best, like our Daddy because we have been adopted into the family of God.

This precious gem, she challenges me.  It has been almost eight years since I met her for the first time and I think of her almost every day. This is the and the question that I ask myself:

 How I can take my ordinary life and just give what I have for Jesus?

And when we love the broken kid down the street, take time to pray for the hurting neighbor,  reach out to those who don’t yet know the grace God offers them, then I and you can take our ordinary and let God make our everyday extraordinary.  We may not be missionaries in a foreign land but we can love right where we are.  We can give right where we are.  We can let our ordinary loving become extraordinary living, by God's grace.