Dear Maggie,
One night last fall, our bathroom toilet flooded. It burst its banks and flowed out into our hallway and down the seams of our wood floors. It might have run clear to the Arkansas River had we not thrown down towels to stop it, creating a wet sort of dam. The toilet water also saturated our bath rug and seeped beneath our hallways floors, making them buckle.
We thought our new floors were ruined, and the towels too. And right there on the floor, down on our hands and wet knees close to midnight, my husband and I kissed each other over the mess, and we laughed.
I once read an author who said that when things like this happen in life (and they will happen: the toilet will flood, the garbage disposal will break, the kid will throw up during the flight), you really only have two choices: You can laugh, or you can “curse God and die,” as Job’s wife counseled him to do.
It’s a little dramatic, but the idea is that every ordinary thing in our lives comes from the hand of God. To spit and stamp your foot in frustration simply doesn’t help. It’s better to take it from His hand and say, “You are good and do good; teach me your statutes” (Ps. 119:68).
It’s a mistake to believe that God doesn’t work through ordinary means. Open your Bible, Maggie, and you’ll find that the biggest, most miraculous events were really made up of very small things. God spoke to Moses through a bush. He spoke to another man through a mule. He raised up his servant Moses through a foster mother. His own Son came not to be served, but to serve, and spent the first few decades of his life in ordinary labor (Matt. 20:28). Read the Scriptures and you’ll find rain, wind, bread, blood, bones, songs, swords, and shepherds. It’s the story of real people and things, and so the “wisdom from above” we find in Scripture is a wisdom that meets us right down here on earth (Jms. 3:17).
It’s not too much to say that God’s Word helps us make sense of leaky toilets and ordinary days. Remembering this will do you well when you’re ready to get married someday, Maggie—because a marriage is really just a lifetime’s culmination of a million ordinary moments.
It’s not too much to say that God’s Word helps us make sense of leaky toilets and ordinary days.
When I look back at our months of courtship and engagement, my favorite memories are the ones when Jared and I worked together—when we moved his beehives to the bottomlands in the thick, July heat, weeded the garden, visited the hospital, and cleared out what was his grandparents’ home, soon to be ours.
One night, as I scrubbed the bathtub, I looked down the hallway and through the kitchen to where Jared was repairing a leak behind the toilet in the laundry room (a different toilet this time, funnily enough). I’d seen him in a sportcoat behind the pulpit, but right then, I thought he had never looked so handsome to me. There is a dignity and attractiveness all their own in ordinary work. I’m afraid couples who only date at 5-star restaurants and focus on the fun don’t get the clearest picture into who their lover really is. What does he look like cleaning a toilet, cutting a garden plot, visiting the elderly? He can take all the online tests and spiritual gift surveys you want him to, Maggie, but these are the things that tell a man’s whole story.
Marriage is a beautiful landscape. There are foothills and mountains, but what make those moments leap from the frame are the quiet valleys between—the long faithfulness so often commended in the Scriptures. You don’t really know what the valley looks like till you’re down in it, and the toilet floods, and you’re on your hands and knees together. That’s when you can really look at each other and say, As long as we both shall live, I do.
Until then, dear Maggie, do not despise the day of small work and ordinary chores. Look for a man who will join you in them, for it’s long faithfulness in the quiet labors that our Lord will reward on the last, great day (Matt 25:21).
“Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus.” ~ Revelation 14:12
*Maggie is an entirely fictional character. You might say she was me just a few years ago.
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