Sharing the extraordinary ordinary

Be happy with those who are happy, weep with those who weep.  Romans 12:15

There are many emotions that fall between happy and crying.  Most of our days are spent somewhere between the two, in the ordinary routine of life. That is where most of life is lived.  And that is where I have found myself in the last year with a group of young moms in my community.  Certainly crying together over the sad times and celebrating together the happy times, but it seems we have formed great friendships in sharing the routine everyday life of a mother that many times is neither happy nor is it sad.  It just is.

This week I find myself an ocean away from my home spending time with friends in Ghana, West Africa.  This week is different and yet it is the same.  I sat next to my friend Olivia a beautiful young woman from Ghana whom I first met when she was engaged to be married. Now 4 years later she is a wife, school teacher and mother of a 2-year-old.  It is where many of my new friends at home live, in the beginning stage of understanding what life as a mother can be.

As we talked for hours about nursing, naps, toilet training woes, sleepless nights, the demands of home and work, personal time and the dreams we had of ourselves that we now find buried amidst all the demands of motherhood the world seemed like a very small place.  More similar than different.  She is living many of her days in the routine, the day that just is, wondering how to still see those dreams for herself fulfilled.  My visit was an encouragement to her.  Maybe it brings hope that there is life to be lived when our children are older.  Perhaps it is in the camaraderie of hearing stories that are familiar the world over.  And it might just be that I was not weeping with her nor was I happy with her, but I was sharing the mundane routine “just is” with her as well.

I find these young woman at home and here so very far away.  I don’t think it’s that I am some great mom expert.  It’s that they are just starting and I am years on down the road, willing to sit down with them in the ordinary days and remind them how normal it is, how they will survive and just how extraordinary being a mom is.

Customer Service Done Right

She returns home each evening and relays the day’s customer service interactions.  She wears a uniform and a name tag to work and “That”, she says, “has made me a non-person in the eyes of the customers.  It’s like I’m a robot, a machine or just a thing.  They don’t look me in the eye, talk to me or acknowledge that I am a person.  I want to wear a sign that says talk to me, I’m real!” She accompanies me to the grocery store now and I lose track of her on every aisle.  When I backtrack I find she is having a conversation with the store clerk who is wearing gloves, stocking the freezer section. Not just “hey, how you doing” but a real conversation, listening and interacting. I find she looks everyone in the eyes these days.  Really looking at them.  Her pace is slower and she notices the people, all the people, around her.  She sees them.  She treats them like real people that she cares about.  She’s walked in their shoes, she’s one of them.  And they look back.  They smile.  And you see them respond, converse with her and become real people. I saw this picture while the two of us were visiting NYC last weekend.  ”Christ on a Train” by an unknown artist.  And I thought of her.  She has been demonstrating for me simple ways of being “Christ On A Train”.  Slowing down long enough to notice.  To sit with people.  To look them in the eye.  To see beyond their uniform, name tag or stereotype.  To see them as people created by the same one who created me.  Loved by the same one who loves me. And the very ones I am asked to love as well. She’s teaching me a lot these days.