Just Another Day (Friday Devotional)

 

Let love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.

- Proverbs 3:3

Yesterday was one of the biggest days of the baseball season, Opening Day. Never do the skies seem bluer, the grass greener, and the hope realer than on Opening Day. Stadiums are decorated with bunting, former players return for pregame festivities, and fighter jets fly over at the end of the national anthem. The whole day is a celebration of all the game means to so many people.

But then today and tomorrow and the next day, for 162 games throughout the spring and summer, something will happen: there will be more games, day after day after day. Admittedly, a 3 PM game in June doesn’t carry the kind of pageantry that Opening Day does. Teams won’t sell out their tickets on a July weeknight the way they did yesterday. Baseball will feel more workaday and routine, less romantic and transcendent, by the time the dog days of August roll around. But even without the spectacle, the games will go on.

Sunday marks the beginning of a week full of a different—and more important—kind of celebration than Opening Day. On Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and, of course, Easter Sunday, Christians from around the world will tell the story of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection with special worship services, big meals, egg hunts for kids, and more. Pastors and staff members and volunteers will give their all to make this a Holy Week to remember.

But then on April 10, life will go on. We’ll put the lilies and the plastic eggs away, we’ll toss our Easter outfits in the hamper, and we’ll return to normal life. With all the spectacle of Holy Week behind us, we’ll move into the quiet but crucial work of daily discipleship.

So often, we get so fixated on the big days and significant moments that we discount what Eugene Peterson called “a long obedience in the same direction”—the uneventful, unrecognized, but nevertheless important opportunities for faithfulness in day-to-day life. Humble acts like feeding the hungry or praying for the suffering may not draw a crowd the way an Easter pageant will, but they’re just as pleasing to God—maybe more!

For the next 10 days, faith will be at the front of people’s minds—but when Holy Week ends, the next week will still offer countless opportunities for faithful living. After all, when it’s all said and done, Opening Day is just one game—there’s a long season still to come.