It’s how the Looney Tunes Cartoon hour would conclude on Saturday mornings. Porky Pig would poke his head through a curtain fashioned into the image of a drum and stammer, “Th-th-th-th-that’s all folks.”
It signaled to my 7- or 8-year-old mind that the fun part of Saturday morning was over. It was now an ordinary Saturday.
For many who celebrated Easter as the apex of the religious year, life continues as usual. The Roman Catholic Church even has two periods of its liturgical calendar designated as “Ordinary Time,” one after Christmas Time and the other after Easter Time. We tend to think of “ordinary” as routine, regular, or even dull.
A Sunday School teacher had just finished telling her third-graders about how Jesus was crucified and placed in a tomb with a massive stone sealing the opening. Then, wanting to share the excitement of the resurrection, she asked, “And what do you think were Jesus’ first words when He came bursting out of that tomb alive?”
A little girl’s hand shot up from the back of the classroom. She was leaping out of her chair, stretching her arm, anxious to answer.
When the teacher called on her, she said, “Ta-da!”
What’s left after the grand “Ta Da”?
“Th-th-th-th-that’s all folks.”
Ordinary Time.
But maybe ordinary is not as ordinary as we think.
Sure, I admit: Easter Sunday has passed, a day filled with the joy of Christ’s resurrection, celebrating the reality that all things are new, a day of singing, clapping, and praising God.
And yes, the ordinary can be routine: a tedious Monday staff meeting, waiting in the school pickup line, or preparing a meal from Easter Sunday’s leftovers.
I can appreciate the little girl’s prayer: “Dear God,” she started, “Daddy still hasn’t gotten a raise, sister still doesn’t have a date for the prom, and Momma still makes me eat turnip greens. I’m tired of praying and not getting any results.”
Yet, after Easter, we have the opportunity for Christ’s resurrection power to penetrate the depths of our being. This is the season when growth can occur, when spiritual roots have time to work deeper into the soul’s soil.
It’s not usually the singular moments of euphoria that spur us to growth. Rather, those moments are the result of months or even years of faithfully attending to the mundane disciplines during ordinary times. Strength percolates slowly over time as we do what has to be done in the shadows, away from the limelight. Slowly, in the process, spiritual fruit appears.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the British preacher of the 19th century who struggled with persistent bouts of depression, admitted: “It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.”
Practicing ordinary spiritual disciplines during seemingly mundane times, even when they are accompanied by affliction, may allow us to minister in extraordinary ways, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
We can take courage knowing that, like extraordinary times, ordinary times don’t last. Seasons change. Ordinary time anticipates the extraordinary, eliciting a longing for The Day, or as the Bill Gaither Trio used to sing it, that great “Gittin up Morning,” when “you see the lightnin’ flashin’,/When you hear the thunder crashin’,/When you see the stars a-fallin’,/When you hear the chariot’s callin.'”
It’s the day Christ returns, the day when all our pain, turmoil, boredom, and misery fold into Christ’s permanent presence.
No, the resurrection of Christ isn’t a depressingly sad announcement,
“Th-th-th-th-that’s all folks.”
Instead, it’s a grand proclamation:
“The best part is yet to come.”