The great marvel of the incarnation slips into ordinary childhood. The great marvel of the transfiguration vanishes into the demon-possessed valley. The great glory of the resurrection descends into breakfast on the seashore. The flow of these events is not an anticlimax; it is a great revelation of God.
We have the tendency to look for marvels in our experience. We mistake a sense of the heroic for being heroes. It’s one thing to go boldly through a crisis and another to go through every day glorifying God when there’s no limelight and no one to impress. If we don’t want halos about our heads, we at least want someone to say, “What a wonderful man of prayer he is! What a devoted woman of God she is!” If we were rightly related to Jesus Christ, we’d have reached the sublime height where no one even thinks of noticing us. All they’d notice in our presence is the power of God, coming through us all the time.
It takes the almighty God incarnate in us to enable us to do menial duties to his glory. It takes God’s Spirit inside us to make us so absolutely, humanly his that we are utterly unnoticeable. The test of the life
of a saint is not success; it’s living faithfully in human life as it actually is. We tend to hold up success in Christian work as the goal. The goal is to manifest the glory of God, to live the life hid with Christ in God in human conditions. Our human relationships are the actual conditions in which the ideal life of God is to be exhibited.
