The Mundane Stuff

I became a Christian in high school but didn't really understand the
faith until college. And college is an important formative time for
many who became Christians at earlier ages. The great but tricky
thing about college is that you can be extremely focused as a
Christian. Sure, college has its unique distractions and pitfalls.
But it is also a time that you don't have a whole lot of other
responsibilities to worry about. If you live in a dorm, the school
usually pays to clean the bathroom you use and the cafeteria takes
care of cooking your meals and washing your dishes. You're kind of
cut off from your family, especially if you go to school far from
home, and even if you weren't, you wouldn't have many responsibilities
anyway: you don't have kids, and your parents aren't quite old enough
for you to be worrying about things like Alzheimer's and nursing
homes. All you have left is the books, and even those can be tackled
in the context of ministry, to the extent that you take classes with
others and build relationships with them as you study together.

Fast forward about a decade. You've got kids, so you're mind is
occupied with things like day care and college savings and good
nutrition. You've got a house to clean, laundry to do, groceries to
buy. You don't breeze through your routine physicals anymore, because
you're entering an age where you start to have to get things regularly
tested and such. In other words, there's just a lot of mundane stuff
that takes up your time, stuff you didn't have to worry so much about
in college so you could focus on being a Christian and doing ministry.

You might think from the previous paragraph that I'm speaking somewhat
autobiographically, and I most certainly am. You might also think
from the previous paragraph that I'm pining for my college days, but I
most certainly am not. I would not for a second trade my current life
and its responsibilities for my previous days in college. But I have
had to adjust my sense of time allocation. I was in college and still
am today a very driven person. The freedoms of college gave me lots
of time to do ministry, and by and large I used the time in that way.
Now I have less of that time, taken as it is by the mundane stuff. I
don't regret it, though I know people who, like the apostle Paul, have
chosen a lifestyle that frees them from the mundane stuff and frees
them for full-time ministry. Sometimes I even kind of like the
mundane stuff. So I'm not writing to complain about the mundane
stuff, just to acknowledge that there's a lot of it, and that it's an
adjustment from college days. Whether our lives are completely
allocated for formal ministry or we are responsible for mundane
things, may we understand that ultimately all of life is ministry and
accept our daily challenges accordingly.