The Miracle of Mundane Moments

We look to stories in the Bible as incredible tales of amazing people doing utterly remarkable things. The truth, though, is that most of them lived most of their lives in moments that were utterly mundane. That wasn’t just the case for characters in the Scriptures. It’s the case with our lives today too. And yet, as ordinary as most of our lives are, we long to experience the extraordinary. We want to be special, to know that we are more than we seem. This is where the wonder of the Christmas story comes racing to center stage. As extraordinary as we imagine that story to be, most of it was very, very ordinary. What made the difference in these ordinary moments was the movement of God in their midst. Today, as we wrap up our series, When Heaven Met Earth, we are talking about the ordinary moments in the lives of ordinary people, and how things can become entirely more extraordinary than that. Let’s get started.

The Miracle of Mundane Moments

Sometimes the most extraordinary things can happen out of the most ordinary circumstances. Consider something that every single person in the room has in their kitchen, and which most of us have used at least once in the last 24 hours. In 1945, Percy Spencer was working as a radar researcher at Raytheon Labs. Raised as an orphan who never finished elementary school, Spencer taught himself physics and advanced mathematics, joined the Navy, and through that discovered his penchant for science. One day, Spencer was working in the lab with a radar magnetron. That’s basically a tube that converts electrical signals into electromagnetic radiation. It had been invented a few years before and was essential to the invention of modern radar. As Spencer worked with this magnetron, he noticed that a bar of chocolate in his pocket had melted. 

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Christmas Eve 2025

Today’s the day! For weeks we have been waiting and preparing for this day to arrive. It’s Christmas Eve! In just a few more hours we will all close our eyes and open them on the day of our Savior’s birth. Each year at my church we gather together on this special evening in order to celebrate the reason for the season as a body. We don’t make it long or terribly fancy. But it is memorable and meaningful. This year I’m involving the kids in the message in a way I haven’t before. They’ll be right up on stage with me, and I’ll share some fun things about the Christmas story with them while the adults get to listen in. Hopefully it’s going to be a good time. With this in mind, for today’s post (the last, with the exception of next Monday, until after the New Year) I thought that I would give you a sneak peek at what I will be sharing with them. May today be a day of joyfulness and rejoicing for you. Merry Christmas!

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Advent Reflections: John 1:14

“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. We observed his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The theological word for Jesus’ coming to earth is incarnation. That’s from the Latin word for flesh which is the direct source of our word carnal. The idea is that God didn’t just put on a costume in Jesus. He became fully human and lived right here on earth as one of us. While Luke and Matthew tell the story of His arrival, John tells us the truth of who He actually was and what His coming meant. Let’s talk about this glorious truth today with John’s help.

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A Cosmic Christmas

This week we continue our Advent series, When Heaven Met Earth. As promised, we are going to be taking in a story of Jesus’ birth that probably doesn’t fall on your radar when you think about your favorites. Yet this story, for as different as it is, may be the most important of all the stories of Jesus’ birth in terms of giving us a bigger, fuller picture of the reality of what was happening in the universe at large when God came to be with us as a baby. Read on (or listen!) as we marvel at the fact that Christmas is bigger than we realize.

A Cosmic Christmas

Paul Harvey was famous for telling “the rest of the story.” He would take a story that many people know a little bit about, and then explore some surprising or encouraging element of it that not nearly as many people knew. The combination of the creativity of his reporting with his absolutely classic voice made his stories a true delight to all those who got to hear them. Sometimes his stories introduced people he thought should be better known. Sometimes they gave details about something or someone that made it even more impressive than it already was to most people. They always left you feeling not just better informed, but encouraged about the state of the world than you were before listening to them. Harvey was doing Gospel good with his reporting. A good story that lets us see things from a different angle or a bigger picture often does that. 

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Songs of the Season

“For God is my witness, how deeply I miss all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. And I pray this: that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, so that you may approve the things that are superior and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

It’s the third Friday of the season of Advent, and that means it’s time for our final Song of the Season for this year. Christmas is a wonderful time for many, many people. There are just so many different things to look forward to. But it can also be hard. It can be hard when those elements weren’t ever present in someone’s life. It can be hard when they once were there but are gone now. For most people, there is at least one memory of a Christmas past when everything was perfect. It probably really wasn’t at the time – no time ever is – but it is frozen in our memories in such a way that all we see is the good. Christmas is often a time when we long for that. Today’s song takes us there. Pull out your tissues because this one might draw up some tears. Let’s listen to Freeze the Frame by Michael W. Smith.

Continue reading “Songs of the Season”