How to Make Something of Your Everyday Life

I recently pulled a book off the bookshelf, one I had read before by Jessica Fechtor—Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals that Brought Me Home.

It’s a young woman’s story of a brain bleed and multiple head surgeries on her way to a doctoral degree and her longing to be back in her kitchen creating good food for the people she loved:

“During those long months [of recuperation], food had called something up in me that needed calling, demanded things of me that my academic work had not. It had inspired me to make something of the everyday life around me … to make something of myself.

“My kitchen wasn’t the route back to the person I had been. It was the route to whom I would become.”

I’ve written about this concept before, but it resonates with me and is worth repeating—the concept of how something you never wanted to happen can redirect you to whom you will become.

So, how does a brain injury, or a spouse walking out, or being asked to leave a place of ministry that we loved—how can hard circumstances motivate us toward recognizing how fragile life is, toward wanting to make something of our everyday lives?

Here are 3 simple thoughts along those lines:

1.  I think we begin with wanting to, which is a hard one—because mostly we don’t want to keep on putting one foot in front of the other after a serious diagnosis or losing a child. We don’t want to continue submitting our writing or our scholarship applications after repeated rejections. But once we cultivate the desire to make something of our every-day-ness, then we’re on our way.

2.  After we’ve determined to live forward, then maybe we could open our hearts. Because opening our wounded, disappointed, discouraged hearts means we’re tentatively taking steps toward living fully again.

Is there someone in your community you can open your heart to? Someone who can’t get out much. Your neighbor down the street who just lost her husband. Cancer patients. Caregivers who are suffering right along with their loved ones. Single moms who could use a break … or adoptive or foster moms who could use a break … or hey, any mom who might need a break.

Share as much of you as you possibly can.

3.  This thought has to do with opening our homes as we open our hearts. It’s about the magic of hospitality, which prompts us to be genuine and vulnerable for the sake of other people. Even in our ordinariness. Even while healing from setbacks. Even if our place is small, if we don’t have a full kitchen, or we can’t afford a prime cut of meat. We create space because hospitality is part of opening our hearts and letting other people in. It’s part of taking the focus off ourselves for a while.

I love to bake for my guests. In her book, Jessica Fechtor writes about baking in a way I’d never thought of before:

I don’t care how big your sweet tooth is, you can’t eat all those cookies alone. You bake to share. Baking is an act of generosity, and thereby an act of freedom, since to be generous is to be free from the smallness of thinking only of yourself.

I like the notion of being free from the smallness of thinking only of myself.

Christ spoke these words recorded in the book of Matthew:

 “If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.” – Matthew 10:39

I keep coming back to the truth that we get to choose so much in spite of all that we didn’t choose—those things that happened that made life harder.

We get to choose to notice and be grateful for this day of lungs circulating air in and out, this beauty that surrounds us even in an ugly world of war and abuse and the selling of humans, this life with people to love and people who love us.

We pay attention to these everyday things that are priceless. We acknowledge our ordinary every-day-ness as a valuable gift. We choose to set our agendas, our hopes and dreams, our lives aside. We choose to live fully for the sake of others, for the sake of Jesus Christ.

Choose life. Choose to live forward.

Pay attention to the doors that may be opening on this journey, parts of which you didn’t want to take. But you’re there nevertheless, and so why not make something beautiful and purposeful out of the unexpected and the sorrowful and the ordinary—that journey.