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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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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For Our Good

After a few days off, it’s good to be back. The Advent season is a time for preparing for the arrival of Jesus into our world and into our lives. For the next few weeks, as we take part in the preparation, we are going to spend some time looking at the stories of Jesus’ arrival. When Jesus arrived, heaven met earth in a way that left earth forever changed for the good. These classic stories give us some insight on how that happened. They may be familiar, but there is nonetheless great wisdom here if we will have it. Let’s get started with Matthew’s story of Jesus’ birth and see what the Spirit has to say through it.

For Our Good

Many of you know that I enjoy building metal models. They are all over my office. I think what I enjoy most is following instructions carefully and winding up with a neat-looking finished product in the end. There are enough things in this world that don’t have nice, neat endings where you can see and physically hold in your hand the results of your work. These metal models give you just that. And these days, the more complex they are, the more fun they are. I think my last model had somewhere near 200 pieces and 8 double-sided pages of instructions. That felt good to finish. 

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Digging in Deeper: Matthew 1:20

“But after he had considered these things, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, ‘Joseph, son of David, don’t be afraid to take Mary as your wife, because what has been conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.’”‬‬ (CSB – Read the chapter)

What are you afraid of? That was actually a topic of conversation in my vehicle the other day. The list included a pretty standard set of things: spiders, snakes, mice, insects, and the like. Any of those on your list? Perhaps, but I’ll bet you have some other things on there as well; things that are bigger, harder for you to precisely define, and possess more control over your life than any of the cliched list. The good news is, you don’t have to live with this. Joseph didn’t either.

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