Struggling with Scripture #3: Mark 1:16-20

Sometimes I struggle to simply make it through the day, whether a work day or a day off.   Most of the time it is simply a casual day: free time on my hands, normal chores to cross off a list, simple ideas floating through my mind to be reflected on.  Perhaps it is the normalcy itself that I struggle with - the daily routine, the repetition of  activities, the lack of new or stimulating work - just another day. Thoughts cross my mind about what it would be like to be in a different time or place, doing something different, something "exciting," and I look around and heave a sigh.   Just another day.

It was just another day for the first disciples of Jesus Christ.  Sun shining high in a cloudless sky, slight breeze crossing the sea, smell of salt and fish, the feel of rope in their hands.  Strong backs used to the work still ache while heaving the nets, communication is spoken back and forth, companionable silence filling spare time.  A perfectly normal day.  Then, Jesus walks down the shore, and their lives change in the blink of an eye, never to be the same again as they follow Jesus. 

The most holy, epic,  and strange adventure had just begun for the first disciples on a completely normal day.  No one wrote about the decades coming before this day, nor the weeks before this event, but only this single day when the disciples were called and chose to follow.  It's amazing that the disciples simply got up and left to follow Jesus, that they knew enough to pay attention for his coming, to go about everyday work but ready to leave at a moment's notice.  It is this waiting, this working-until-that-time, that I struggle with.

In much the same way as the disciples, much of our work, family life, chores, and free time goes- unwritten and unspoken about; it simply goes.    Yet each of these routine days are preparatory days, times and places where our character is tested and prepared, where our ears and hearts are opened and attuned to Jesus voice, where we are trained heart, mind, body, and soul to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.  And in the midst of these days, these simple, ordinary, normal days, we wait for Jesus to walk along our shore and shout out to us.  The question that haunts me is this: will I hear the call and know it, will I see it and believe it, or will I be so bored by normalcy that I miss the day Jesus walks along my shore and calls for me to follow?

"Lord, in the midst of each day, help me to know you a little deeper, love you a little more, and become more attentive to your call."