Ordinary Time

The longest season of our Church Calendar is Ordinary Time—which are the weeks following Pentecost and leading up to Advent. During this time we especially remember the lives and actions of Jesus’ followers. We think about how the first Christians lived their lives, and how we should live ours today.

This season of Ordinary Time takes up half the year and it doesn’t offer big exciting festivals such as Christmas or Easter. As a result, as one Sunday follows another, this season can begin to feel, well, ordinary.

There’s a good reason for this. The believers who developed our Christian calendar knew that following Jesus isn’t always a big party. Sometimes it’s long, hard, and even mundane. But they wanted to remind us that God still works in our lives during the regular times. After all, how ordinary is ordinary when God is in it?

This is the season that helps us figure out how to go about living out our extraordinary faith, with its extraordinary history, in the worship of an extraordinary God, in our normal, everyday, ordinary lives.