Ordinary Living

I wrote this post at l’Abri Fellowship last summer. If you don’t know about l’Abri, you can read about it here. It’s a wonderful place.

At l’Abri, we specialize in responding to difficult questions. But sometimes it is the simple ones that prove the hardest to answer. “What did you do today?” someone asked me recently, and I replied, “I actually really didn’t do anything,” which meant that I did not do anything impressive enough to mention on the phone.

Life at l’Abri is, well, ordinary: we study, work in the garden, scrape paint off walls, cook, eat, talk, eat some more. It is tempting to regard all of this activity as insignificant or insubstantial because it is the long, slow work of expanding our minds, enriching our friendships, and caring for a community. Not much of it translates easily into interesting stories that we can recount to our friends. A photo of me sitting on the couch reading “The Reason for God” is not going to generate many “likes” on Facebook. (more…)

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