Life moves pretty fast.
If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Ferris Buller
In 2008, the graphic designer Aaron James Draplin received an email. After a decade of hard work and successfully working with everyone from Nike to the Grateful Dead to President Obama, having founded Field Notes (the cool little memo books made to “write things down to remember now), Draplin received an email from a potential client named Farmer John.
The project was to help rebrand Farmer John rebrand Redwing Farms, a family company specializing in farming equipment. After a few months of back and forth, Draplin realized Farmer John’s last name was Hughes. As in the legendary director, John Hughes (not the used car salesman for my Perth readers).
The man who made some of the 1980s’s most classic films: Uncle Buck, The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, and Home Alone, just to name a few.
Over email exchanges and phone calls, Draplin and Hughes developed a great friendship and planned on working on another project before Hughes's untimely passing. “John was a sweet man who spoke so highly of his wife and his sons and their families…” writes Draplin.1
John Hughes’ films captived Draplin, and thousands of others myself included. And of all of Hughes’ films Ferris Buller’s Day Off is my absolute favorite.
Buller, Buller
Ferris Buller’s Day Off tells the story of three friends skipping class and bouncing around Chicago on an anything-but-ordinary day. It’s every high school kid’s dream.
In the film’s opening scene Ferris, the protagonist, says these lines:
Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
This line from this cult classic came to mind as I read the words of a scraggly pastor from the first century writing to a group of Jesus’ followers in the metropolis of Rome.
In chapter 12 of the book of Romans, the apostle Paul writes:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. (THE MESSAGE)
Paul urges his readers that in light of God’s scandalous grace, they are to offer their everyday and ordinary lives - their “sleeping, eating, going to work, and walking around life,” as gifts. How?
Romans 12:1
As Buller tells us, life does move pretty fast. We blink and we’re 27 or 67. Births, deaths, new jobs and maybe even new cities. If we don’t stop, look, and listen to our lives well, we could miss it. Miss this beautiful, finite, fleeting and wonderful life.
Now your life may not look like a day full of fun but these words from Pastor Paul are an invitation to cultivate the kind of life that sees each moment as pregnant with possibility. To see each moment as a gift of grace.
In Romans, Paul is helping shape the imagination of this newly formed group of Jesus’ followers in the heart of a city where spectacle, wild escapades, and persecution are rampant.
Paul is trying to help them understand that God is not so much concerned with getting them out of Rome to some disembodied heaven but God is after getting heaven into them. Paul is trying to teach these Jesus people to become aware and alive to God’s work unfolding in the right here and right now.
As Frederick Buechner elquontly puts it:
It seems to me almost before the Bible says anything else, it is saying that - how important it is to be alive and to pay attention to being alive, pay attention to each other, pay attention to God as he moves and as he speaks. Pay attention to where life or God has tried to take you.2
Paul is inviting his readers, and now you and I, to a life shaped by the resurrection life. For the resurrection helps us see wonder everywhere all the time. A resurrection imagination sees with “x-ray eyes…. eyes that see beneath” the ordinary moments of our lives to grace and wonder.3
Again, how do we cultivate such a life?
We stop. We look. We listen.
We stop fretting, we stop busying, and we stop numbing ourselves to death with entertainment.
We look up and beyond our screens. We look and listen to the giggles of the wild and whimsical faces of strangers in parking lots and grocery stores.
We stop and we look and we listen to the names and stories of our neighbors.
The single mother or father that we’ve lived next door to for years - who may be a full-time nurse who longs for a smile, a hello.
Today, we can choose to stop, to look, and to listen…long enough to notice the aches and pains of our own story, for it is in these places that Jesus seeks to bring life and hope forth. Each seemingly mundane moment of our lives can become holy.
And holiness is about experiencing the pulsing beauty found in the “remarkable ordinary” of our everyday existence.
For first-century believers and now you and I, to live in light of God’s grace is to lead a life of noticing.
Draplin noticed an email from a farmer. A farmer who happened to make the classic 1980s film Ferris Buller’s Day Off. A movie about making an ordinary day extraordinary.
Which is what I think Paul is getting at. That growing in Christ-likeness is seeing the world as “a manger, the whole bloody mess of it, where God is being born again and again and again and again and again.”4
Today, you my friend can choose to stop, to look, and to listen to the parts of your life and world that Jesus is seeking to bring life to. I hope you do.
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RECENTLY
BOOKS
Completed
The Remarkable Ordinary by Fredrich Beucnher
A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene Peterson
In Progress
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Renovation of the Heart by Dallas Willard
PODCAST
Introduction to the Spiritual Disciples by Bill Dogterom
Aaron James Draplin, Pretty Much Everything, New York, NY: Abrams Books 2016, 220.
Fredrich Beucnher, The Remarkable Ordinary, 34.
Beucnher, The Remarkable Ordinary, 37.
Beuchner, The Remarkable Ordinary, 38.