The Great Ordinary

The family dinner, the reading of a book, the walk through the neighborhood, the singing of songs around the fire, the laughter of children, the love between a husband and a wife. All of these things seem rather ordinary. Yet it is within these moments that the extraordinary is grown.

Family life, which can seem so ordinary, is the context in which great saints, (and great sinners) are formed. It was into this very environment that Christ chose to enter human history. It was within the life of an ordinary family that He chose to dwell for thirty years. It was in the quietness of Nazareth that He advanced in wisdom, and age, and grace with God and men. The Son of God spent the greater part of His earthly life in the hiddenness of an ordinary home.

So why do we so often criticize this environment? Why do we turn our noses up at the ordinary? Why do we long to be somewhere else, imagining that the quiet duties of daily life are keeping us from doing something greater?

Perhaps it is our arrogance. Perhaps it is our impatience. Perhaps we fear the demands of a life in which greatness is rarely recognized and virtue must be practiced without applause.

A man can act with nobility, courage, wisdom, and strength when the great moment arrives only if he has spent years cultivating those virtues in moments that seemed insignificant. Nobility requires practice. Courage requires practice. Wisdom requires practice. Strength requires practice. It is not every day that a man faces a dragon, but when the dragon comes, his strength will reveal the habits he formed long before he ever saw its shadow.

The ordinary is where character is formed.

The ordinary family was good enough for Christ. The ordinary family is therefore no small thing. It is a place of formation, sacrifice, sanctification, and redemption. The dinner table, the kitchen, the backyard, the bedroom at the end of a long day, these places can become the workshop of saints.

How, then, will we receive the ordinary life given to us?

Will we choose nobility in the small moments? Will we practice patience when no one will praise us for it? Will we give our attention to those nearest to us when there are a thousand other things competing for it? Will we recognize that the life we are tempted to dismiss may be the very life through which God intends to form us?

It takes great ordinary families to change the world.

The world will be changed in our homes long before it is changed in the streets or in the halls of government. The future is being formed around dinner tables, in quiet conversations, through bedtime prayers, in the patient love of husbands and wives, and in the daily example given to children.

Great things are often born in places that seem very small. The Kingdom of God itself grew quietly in Nazareth. Let us build it within our own homes as well.


There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. (Tolkien, The Hobbit)

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