The word, exceptional has always struck me. A mark measured—something to strive for. If we are not careful, an intimidating feeling, when we look at it as though we cannot ever measure to it. In the grand scale of things, it seems the difficulty in, exceptional, is the journey getting there. If we take our eyes off of just the steps in front of us and focus on the work it will require, to achieve our end goal, we become discouraged. Nothing that is exceptional, happened overnight and most likely is never an instant success, but rather a million tiny moments of trying over and over again, getting back up, and learning from the failures, continuing to move forward in the direction to become exceptional.
In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers quotes, “We have to be exceptional in the ordinary things of life.” Ordinary. So often, ordinary gets a negative association tagged along with it. Why is it that we are so afraid of the ordinary? Perhaps, it is because we are not searching for what is exceptional in the ordinary of what is right in front of us, but rather searching for the exceptional in something we do not have or wished we were. It is so hard to stop and smell the roses—if you will—when we are too busy admiring someone else’s extraordinary or buried in a pile of visions of what we wished we were and are not. I always loved the saying, “If the grass looks greener on the other side...stop comparing. Stop complaining. Start watering the grass you’re standing on.” What if we woke up each day to water our grass with a thankful heart for our ordinary, and looked at ways to be exceptional at viewing them as a blessing?
It is in our ordinary moments, real life is happening. Do not miss that. Do not be so bogged down with the misconception that ordinary can only be mediocrity and stand complacent in the motions of it all. The uniqueness of it, is that each of us holds a different ordinary. The challenge is finding the gratefulness in the ordinary and learning to be exceptional in it.
So today, I will strive to be exceptional with my ordinary. I will take the moments to stop and be thankful for the mess, thankful for the dishes, thankful for the laundry and then I will squeeze my children—who make the piles of laundry possible—a little tighter and breathe them in a little longer. To live an exceptional life, I will start today, being thankful for all the ordinary and working to make sure I am exceptional in it. After all, what if the answer to extraordinary is living the ordinary, exceptionally?
