The Uncommon Normal: Behind the Name

Underqualified. Far from ready. Maybe someday, but not now.

These are words I felt far too often, whispered silently to negate the call we felt to step into missional living amongst those who live nearest us.

Our house is too small. There are no more spots around our table. There is no separate place for the kids to play aside from—aheh, the bedroom our two girls share, or the little bonus room that became part nursery, part playroom after our son was born. Our backyard is not even completely fenced. The road just beyond the small front yard from the house is busy. We won’t be here for long (though “not long” still stretched out a couple more years like a rubber band being stretched taut, near the breaking point).

Looking back I can see my rationalizations for what they were—and what they were not. They were honest. They were practically, logically sensible. They also gave me an out to not be present right where I was, to not go out of my way to say hi to anyone aside from the neighbors immediately on either side of us. They let me elevate my convenience over being relationally engaged with our neighbors. Anyone else relate? These words were not words filled with hope, imbued with the love so graciously granted me, or saturated in faith that God can take my small and make it more than enough.

In this season, there were other words we dared speak aloud. Words that were tinged in hope. Words redolent of an unrest, a stirring for something more. Dreams of the someday. A vision for one day hosting a missional community out of our home for our neighbors.

It was a battle for which words would be the loudest, which words we would allow to take root, which roots we would nourish and cultivate.

Is this where you are now? Is your hope just faintly alive? Do you feel stuck and useless where you currently live? Does starting a missional community right where you live sound farfetched and impossible?

Here is the truth I wish I had embraced: you don’t have to start a missional community to live missionally in your neighborhood.

Let’s pause here and unpack this a little. Perhaps your house is not currently set up to host a large gathering of people. Perhaps your budget is tight and you don’t know how to find any extra to throw at sharing meals with others. Perhaps you have habits and hurts you are still healing from and you feel like you have nothing left to give. Perhaps you stay home with multiple kids under age ten and your time is a precious commodity. Perhaps your young ones still keep you up at night, transform your house into a war-zone of toys faster than you can pick them up, and leave sticky clumps of granola bars all over your couch. Perhaps you are plain flat weary. Discouraged. Just trying to survive.

Honey, I get it. I’ve been there. Many days I still wrestle with these thoughts. But there is another way.

Perhaps we could turn on the sprinkler in our front yard instead of behind the privacy fence and encourage neighbor kids to join in the fun. Perhaps we could write an anonymous note of encouragement to the also struggling mother down the street. Perhaps we could try some tentative small talk with a neighbor walking their dog past our house. Perhaps we could draw a hopscotch with sidewalk chalk on our driveway. Perhaps we could offer to take out trash cans for a neighbor we know will be on vacation during garbage pick-up day. Perhaps we could ask a neighbor if they have a egg or half a cup of sugar we could have sometime when we are in a pinch. Perhaps we could smile and wave to cars driving past our house. Perhaps we could find something that we would typically do indoors that we could just as easily do in our front yard. Perhaps we could make ourselves visible to our neighbors a little more often.

Perhaps we could take

one.

baby.

step.

towards loving our neighbors.

What does it mean to live missionally in our neighborhoods? While there are many definitions out there, here is what it currently means to me: I posture my heart like an open door, welcoming my neighbors into my heart, my life, and my home, with the intent of demonstrating through my actions how much they are dearly loved by their heavenly Father.

It can be simple.

It can be one baby step, followed by another baby step, and another. Before you know it, it will begin to feel natural to pick up on where the conversation ended the next time you see the same neighbor out walking the dog. It won’t take as much thought to find something you can as easily do out in your front yard as inside your house. The hesitation before you voice your offer to help will diminish. You will find relationship-building with your neighbors keeps rising on your priority list. And your heart will be more fully alive. I promise. Because when we love God and our neighbors, we are living into the identity we were created for, and that is immensely life-giving.

It may be that starting a missional community in your neighborhood is the yearning of your heart. It may be that it is not currently but perhaps someday it will. Regardless, just it is true that you can live missionally without starting a missional community, it is also true that you cannot start a missional community without being willing to live missionally. No matter your end game, it starts with missional living.

Living missionally is not the normal rhythm of most suburban American neighborhoods. Face-to-face connections and engaging relationally with those who live nearby is sadly becoming a thing of the past for many. We hurriedly walk to the mailbox with our heads down, hoping to remain unnoticed. We play in our backyards, hidden away from our neighbors behind privacy fences. We know so few of our neighbors on a first-name-basis. We ask our facebook friends for advice and help before we knock on our neighbor’s door. We close the garage door before getting out of the car when we return from work or running errands. We walk past our neighbors without attempting eye contact or a smile.

Choosing to live on mission in your neighborhood means you are choosing to go against the grain and forge your way into a new rhythm of normal, one that is uncommon. It means you are inviting God’s heartbeat for your neighborhood to shape your own normal, and what is normal for your family, instead of simply living out what is normal for others. That is where the name of this blog comes from.

My tagline for The Uncommon Normal is “neighborhood missional living for the imperfectly ready.” I would love for you to also live missionally outside of your neighborhood, but my goal is to encourage you in your mission inside your neighborhood. Whether or not you start a missional community at some point, you will find plenty here to help you as you journey towards better loving your neighbors, doing life with them, serving them, and getting to know them. I commit to sharing the raw, gritty, and vulnerable as I make visible to you the journey we are on towards living missionally in our neighborhood and cultivating a neighborhood missional community.

You may not feel ready yet, even for your first baby step towards missional living in your neighborhood. Ann Voskamp wrote about pouring yourself out when you feel incapable of doing so in her book The Broken Way, penning that “God believes in me. Christ in me makes me more than enough. I have more and become more, the more I pour out” (93). Friends, you may not think you are ready, but what really matters is what God says about you, and he believes in you.

Let me end with some poignant words from another writer, Alexandra Kuykendall, author of a book I highly recommend if you desire to grow in missional living. She urges in Loving My Actual Neighbor, “Care for our neighbor is woven into the very texture of our humanity. God created us for this. As people made in God’s image, we long to live out the purposes he has scripted for us” (188). Friends, the God who created you and each of your neighbors in his image yearns to be known by each of us. His plan to show your neighbors how deeply he loves them includes you in the story. Will you let him write it?

Father, you are the author of all life, and the author of my story. Would you show me what my #nextrightthing is? Show me how your heart beats for my neighbors. Let me feel a glimpse of the way you feel about them, and help me to be brave enough to take one small step towards living missionally in my neighborhood.

Kuykendall, Alexandra. Loving My Actual Neighbor: 7 Practices to Treasure
    the People Right in Front of You. Baker Books, 2019.
Voskamp, Ann. The Broken Way: a daring path into the abundant life. 
    Zondervan, 2016