Gus

Last weekend Matt and I visited our dear friend Leah on her family farm outside of Houston. There were bluebonnets. And humidity so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Leah has a dog named Gus. Gus is a sturdy, friendly fellow, who lumbers through the house grunting and puffing loudly. He has big feelings, that Gus, and plenty to say about everything. For some weeks now, Leah has begun each day by telling Gus that “today is going to be a weird day,” referring to the fact that their schedules have been upside down and inside out for a while. Gus definitely thought our visit was “weird.”

Returning home and settling back into our routines and practices after those few days away, I found myself longing for a normal, not weird, day. Like Leah and Gus, our days have been weird, abnormal, off-kilter for months now. It’s been this and that: a few too many concert weekends, a month of extra musical guests, a general feeling that the world has tilted sideways. Ordinary has never seemed so good.

But almost immediately I caught myself. If I were to be totally honest, “ordinary” is a fantasy. It doesn’t exist. It certainly doesn’t exist in a household with two working musicians. It doesn’t exist in 2025 while living in this country. Or probably any other country for that matter.

On the other hand, “ordinary” might be another word for “practice.” For showing up. For staying disciplined to the habits and routines and rituals that make us happy and healthy and help our lives run smoothly. It means eating daily salads and putting in my laps in the pool. That would be all my laps, not just some of my laps. It means getting up when the alarm goes off and rolling out my yoga mat instead of hitting the snooze button 37 times. It means sweeping the floors and watering the garden despite the spring winds that immediately dry out the potted plants and blow inches of dust (or “enchantment” as they say around here) into the house. I might prefer whining and moaning and telling Gus how weird things are, but much of ordinary I have some control over. Lately, I have forgotten this.

We spent hours sitting on Leah’s front porch in deep conversation about nothing and everything. I took walks through the pastures, frightening the cows who thought a woman tramping across the fields was very weird. We ate great meals, wandered through a farmer’s market, slept hard and long in beds covered with old quilts. I never unpacked my laptop, or my needlepoint project. I didn’t write; I hardly read. Just floated blissfully from moment to moment. When we got back home, we felt like we had been gone forever. Or for only a minute.

In The Pastor as Minor Poet M. Craig Barnes writes:  

"After wasting far too many years trying to do the spectacular, it has finally occurred to me that God loves routine. All of creation holds together by the same things happening again and again, whether those are great things, like planets revolving around stars, or very small things, like electrons going around and around their nucleus. And with each rotation, year after year, through winter, spring, summer, and fall, if you are paying attention, you can almost hear the doxology: 'Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.'  Similarly, we are not asked to be other than a part of this created order who get up, go to work, care for children, make meals, do laundry, pay bills, and go to bed, only to rise the next morning to do it all again. 'Keep on doing . . .,' the apostle commends. But along the way, those whose pastors have taught them to pay attention do it all as doxology."

There are sacred places in this world, and holy people in our lives. There are front porches and dinner tables where meaningful connections take place. There are trails through pastures and up mountains where our souls find rest. There are pastors and teachers and friends and enemies who remind us that our ordinary lives matter, that there is beauty and grace and weirdness in equal measure all around us, that there is a song, a doxology, embedded in all our practices. Praise God, I say, from whom all bluebonnets grow.

All photos courtesy of Leah.