Holiness in the humdrum
Suzy Wilson, CMS mission partner in Ethiopia, reflects on her current season of mission and mothering
Photo: At home in Ethiopia (Chris and Suzy Wilson)
I wish someone had told me that obedience can also look like this – or maybe they did but I was unwilling or unable to really understand what that meant; right now my life is mostly in the quiet.
by Suzy Wilson
Obedience is making soup, washing up yet another round of plates and teaching my children. The footprints I leave behind me are barely visible, and it is a daily trust exercise that this calling is just as valid as others.
There are moments when fear wraps me up, and I am burdened by a feeling that I will reach the end of my life and regret these long days, and I will fade from this world quickly.
But mostly our days are sunny. I watch my children encourage each other, laugh together, build a den and spend hours listening to Narnia – already soaking in its mystery and beauty. I see my son as we step outside our gate for lunch, and he turns and asks for some of his pocket money to give to the people with almost nothing who sit on the street.
Squeezed into a local cafe, they greedily eat shiro, happily handling the spice that burns my lips and confidently asking for the bill in Amharic, completely comfortable in these strange surroundings.
Perhaps my days aren’t so mundane after all, perhaps they are, in fact, glorious. Sweet days that linger – they stretch out with wonder when I see clearly to dust off the treasures; and such glory, a rhythm interrupted by these monastic moments.
Jesus bids me to come and sit with him in a season centred around seclusion; sometimes it feels like a furnace, and perhaps it is, for surely a transformation is taking place.
I am slow to learn, yet he graciously keeps on taking me by the hand to reveal the glorious truth that layer upon layer of richness surround us in our everyday, if we’d only dare to believe it.
If this is what he has called me to then I have permission to dwell here, to rest in the beauty that our quiet life offers, and to stand in awe of the one who has helped make these blind eyes see. I can bathe in the glorious revelation that what we might call dull is in fact an issue of eyesight rather than of reality.
I sit on the sofa while my kids play on the floor, or we drink hot cups of sweet tea and share poetry together and I bask in this extraordinary unveiling, that holiness exists in the humdrum, and in our every moment we are standing on holy ground.
In this journey of obedience that has led me into home-living, I behold seclusion holding hands with sanctification, and in his cocoon he is ever so gently clothing me with a sacred and most beautiful of garments.
Suzy also recently discussed parenting and mission on the Parenting for Faith podcast (S5 Ep5 WHAT IF… we don’t have church community?)
