by Steve Van Winkle
Pastor of Fellowship Baptist Church, Bozeman, MT
We had just arrived home from the former Gallatin Field. It’s now called Bozeman-Yellowstone International Airport, an apparent concession to the trust-funders and celebrities who frequent Big Sky like royalty slumming among the local serfs.
So, the name changed to reflect a more sophisticated clientele. At least, that’s my explanation for the change since Bozeman-Yellowstone International Airport is neither in Bozeman nor near Yellowstone, and has no International flights. But, it is a very nice airport and its cleanliness and simplicity and beauty cushions the blow for parents sending their daughter back to college at the end of summer.
It was a more or less quiet ride home and after a quarter-hour trying to find something to do in the quiet, we decided to lie down together. I suppose it seemed mildly scandalous any other day, but lying on our bed would accomplish the same as sitting mindlessly at a desk.
We lay there. Cheryl’s head was resting on my shoulder, and we talked about things. And life. We sighed some, confessed sadness we both knew we had, and laughed enough to keep us safely removed from depression. It all came down to this: Here we were, Steve and Cheryl, and our oldest was flying off to her second year in college, our middle daughter was days away from her last year of high school, and Spartacus was about to begin his first. The ripples of life we both knew were flattening out behind us.
“We all turn out pretty ordinary.” The sentence came from nowhere, and it was half said before I realized it was out loud.
“What?” Cheryl whispered.
I was looking at a picture on the wall next to my side of the bed that had been suspended there since we moved in over ten years ago. Only God knows how many times I had looked over at it. There they are in the picture, my kids frozen in time. They are the kids I once knew, dressed for Easter. Madison and Baylee are sporting corsages I bought them for the morning and Spart is wearing clothes that have no Nebraska “N” on them anywhere. They are there together, close knit and beautiful; I imagine them anxious to get home and sift through Easter baskets with grandma.
“Ordinary,” I said again. “We all turn out pretty ordinary.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just remember when I was 20, I felt pretty extraordinary. I walked past people knee-deep in painfully ordinary routines, and I just knew my life would be more than the ordinary.”
She understood what I meant. We knew it when we were dating and in the initial years of marriage. I don’t know if we would have phrased it as such, but we had never intended to be ordinary. God’s purpose was magnificent; the ministry needed our fresh faces, and our collective idealism would carry us up and over the rip tide of ordinary imprisoning the masses.
“And here we are,” I continued. “Middle-aged and the kids we never dreamed we’d have are about to leave for lives of their own. No one ever tells you that when you have children you have surrendered the next 20 years of your life making sure they are fed, sheltered, and capable of becoming better people than you were and all God wants them to be. Twenty years. Twenty years of the most ordinary stuff life ever served up: oil changes, parent meetings, crusty noses, Sunday school, hand-me-downs, yard work, Christmas trees, tickle monsters, owies, back-to-school, and all the other mundane things I never realized I was enjoying when I was hoping they would end soon so I could focus on being extraordinary.”
“Yeah.” Cheryl agreed. “Nothing wrong with ordinary.”
No. There isn’t. There are three souls on this planet who never needed me to be extraordinary. They never needed me to pastor thousands, to write books, to be known by scores of people, or to pursue my extraordinariness.
They needed me to count their breaths as they lay wheezing with a respiratory infection, making sure they were doing okay. They needed me to be home at night and slip into their rooms and stare at them sleeping and silently pray for them. They needed me to sneak out with them in the middle of the night to get some pop for no reason at all, and to carry them like a “sack ‘o taters” to bed. They needed me to worry about gas mileage, and to work out the fights I had with their mom, and ask to see their report cards, and take family pictures, and give them hugs for no reason, and a myriad of other daily routines I swore would never mark my life.
They needed me to be ordinary.
As I lay there next to my wife, I understood for the first time the beauty of it — of ordinary.
“I guess not.” I said.
I could feel her eyelids blink against my shoulder and I wondered what she was thinking. Outside, we heard a familiar sound of straining engines as a plane was bursting into the sky after taking off from Bozeman-Yellowstone International Airport.
“There she goes.” I said.
And we stayed there just a few minutes longer, listening to the engines in the sky fade into the east, and we squeezed one another a little tighter as a small reward for being so ordinary for so long.