A Quiet Ordinary Life

What she wants is not complicated and she has known it since she was about twenty six.

She wants to live in one place. She wants to know the people in it well enough that she can tell when something is wrong from the way somebody says hello. She wants work she is good at that finishes at a reasonable hour. She wants a garden and a Tuesday that looks a great deal like the Tuesday before it.

That is the whole of it and she has never wanted anything else.

Two people have told her it is a waste. Both of them love her and neither of them was being unkind.

The first was a woman at a conference who said, warmly, that God had put more in her than this, and that she should be careful about small horizons. The second was her own brother, four years ago, over a table, and he used the word settling, and she has not forgotten which word he used.

She is thirty eight. She has half believed them for four years, in the way you half believe a thing you cannot refute, and the half believing shows up on Sunday nights when she cannot say what her life is for.

If somebody has told you that an ordinary life is a waste of you, this article is for you.

It is an instruction

Let me put the verse in front of you, because most people have never noticed it is there.

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you.1 Thessalonians 4:11

Study to be quiet. The word is ambition. Paul is telling a church to be ambitious about living quietly, which is a deliberate joke and an entirely serious instruction.

And then two more: mind your own business, and work with your hands. And then, at the end, as we commanded you, which is Paul putting it beyond the reach of anybody who would like to treat it as a personality option.

That is a commanded life. It is not a lesser option for people who could not manage a larger one.

You have been describing a life the New Testament instructs, and describing it accurately is not a failure of ambition. That is not my encouragement. It is written in 1 Thessalonians 4:11, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

So four years of half believing has not been humility. You have a life He commanded rather than a compromise you settled for, and it is available on an ordinary Tuesday. The word settled that before you were twenty six, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in that garden while you read this.

What was actually being said to you

Here is worth separating out, because you have been carrying both sentences as though they were one.

The woman at the conference said God had put more in you than this. That may be true and neither of us knows, and if it is true it is God's business to say so, at a time of His choosing, in a way that does not leave you unable to name what your life is for on a Sunday night.

Your brother used the word settling. That is a different word entirely, and it is worth noticing what it assumes. Settling means you took a smaller thing because the larger one was not available. He assumed the ordinary life was second choice.

It was not. You have wanted this since you were twenty six and you have never wanted anything else, and a thing you have chosen consistently for twelve years is not what settling is.

And here is what nobody said to you at either moment, which is that a life like the one you describe is unusually expensive. Staying in one place for decades. Knowing people well enough that you cannot avoid the hard bits. Being present for the funerals as well as the weddings. Almost nobody manages it, and most of the people who talk about small horizons have never once tried to hold a street together for thirty years.

You have permission to want what you want, and the wanting has never once been a smaller version of anything. 1 Thessalonians 4 makes a quiet life a matter of ambition and a matter of instruction; His Spirit is the one who lets a person hold their own life without an apology attached.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of why you cannot say what your life is for is that somebody near you makes you pay for taking up space, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.