Give Meaning to Ordinary Days

daily life, if we have the eyes to see and the heart to voice thanks.

The length to which God goes to capture our attention amazes me.

Everywhere I turn this semester, I find the theme of thankfulness. Thankfulness on the sweet days and the slow days, the sad days and the scattered days.

In her recently popular devotional “1,000 Gifts ,” Ann Voskamp writes essentially about God and thankfulness. For Voskamp, God can be found in anything: the ugly, the chaotic, the mundane. Somewhere around devotional six, she mentions the significance of the Greek word eucharisteo, which is the ancestor of our word eucharist. The original Greek also contains the roots of the words for joy and grace, chara and charis. Her point is that we find the grace and joy of God when we first give him thanks for his gifts, which appear everywhere. They permeate

The second place I happened upon this theme of thankfulness was in a telephone interview I conducted with Al Haley, writer in residence and English professor at Abilene Christian University. Haley was commissioned to write a poem for the College of Arts and Humanities, and I interviewed him to get to know him a little bit. I asked him several questions about his prolific writing, including, “Is there a subject that repeatedly comes to you or appears in your writing often.” Haley’s response stunned me. “I’m looking for the presence of God,” he said, echoing Voskamp’s purpose. “I know that sounds lofty, but I am looking for moments when God breaks through what we think of as mundane ‘reality.’”

Haley’s poem, titled “The Task,” discusses the increasing importance and relevance of Christian higher education. He read his poem at Thursday night’s COAH event, which was a special evening of celebration and commemoration.

That phrase, “Christian higher ed- ucation,” sounds lofty. Through these past weeks — planning for the COAH celebration, interviewing Haley, reading “1,000 Gifts” that phrase has been ruminating in my thoughts. I have come to a fairly simple conclusion.

Yes, a Christian university prepares intellectually to engage any number of professions. Yes, university life prepares us to live on our own, to some extent. However, I believe that the bedrock, the mustard seed, the element of Christian higher education that is essential and defining is this: everyday, ordinary, untidy human life. Our spiritual eyes are defective. Harding does its dead level best to restore our eyes, that we may better see God’s nature in the daily grind.

I’ll end with a bit of my own thanks. Thank you, Harding, for teaching me about literature and language and history, that I may better see God daily and clumsily lead my friends to him, as they in turn do for me.

MALLORY PRATT is a guest writer for the Bison. She may be contacted at mpratt2@harding.edu.

Ferris Foul and Foul is Fair

Iknew things wouldn’t be dull when I saw a kid carrying a giant reggae banana. He must have won it at the balloon-popping booth, and I have never seen a more mellow-looking piece of produce. It even had dreadlocks and a striped Jamaican tam. I half expected the Calypso fruit doll to break into “Come Mr. Tally Man” any minute.

Wouldn’t you know that I’ve lived in Searcy for more than 10 years now, and this was my first time to experience that apex of the social season known as the White County Fair. But the weather was just right, and I had just enough time to kill on a Saturday. So I headed to the fairgrounds, paid my $8 and joined the madness.

As soon as I stepped through the gate, I gazed up at the Ferris wheel with a mixture of dread and longing. I have a terrible fear of heights. Sometimes it’s so bad I have to take a Dramamine just to step up on the curb. I also knew, though, that it was about time I faced my phobia. And I couldn’t resist the 80s joke: “It’s my day off. I should take a ride with Ferris.”

But not quite yet. I still had to work up my nerve, and I thought the petting zoo might be a tranquil place to start. So I invested $2 in a tiny bag of sliced carrots and hung out for a while with an alpaca, a zeedonk and an assortment of goats. You would be surprised how many veggie handfuls a pygmy goat can eat. And considering you can buy a bag of whole carrots at Wal-Mart for $1.48, I may have gotten the short end of the carrot stick.

But did the petting zoo have a soothing effect? You bet your llama, and I can prove it. From there I went straight to the exhibit hall and had my blood pressure checked at the Harding pharmacy school booth. My reading was 115 over

78, which is exactly the same numbers Bobby McFerrin has when he sings “Don’t Worry — Be Happy.”

But despite having my blood pressure cleared for the Ferris wheel, I still wasn’t ready. So I checked out the exhibits. I saw blue-ribbon zucchini, prize-winning needlepoint and the “Best in Show” pumpkin that weighed 87 pounds. The canned preserves were lovely, but the poor flower display — bless its heart — had seen better days.

Next I watched my first tractor pull. It was a new experience to see farmers hauling 5,700 pounds’ worth of weights in the dirt. One guy made it 158 feet before his John Deere popped a wheelie, right there in the arena. I would think that sight would have whipped the crowd into a frenzy, but it didn’t. The calm audience sat motionless. Not a single hoop or holler. I did see a teenager turn and spit on the ground, at which point his stoic father said, “Settle down, son.”

This was a little too much for my blood pressure, so off I went to the livestock show. I surveyed everything from Shetland ponies to spangled chickens, each with either a blue, red or white ribbon. I felt sorry for the poultry that had only gotten a “C” rating. Being a chicken is not much of a life anyway, but how do you live it down when you’ve been officially labeled as mediocre? I would think your “coup cred” would never be the same.

However, seeing those poor middling chickens made me think, “What have I got to lose?” So I marched on over to the Ferris wheel, handed my tickets to the operator, and sat in a bucket headed — as far as I knew — straight for outer space. Two kids who were standing in line behind me were herded into my bucket. Their names were Luke and Lauren. As the wheel lurched upward, I began rethinking the wisdom of having ordered the All-Star Breakfast at the Waffle House that morning. To distract myself from the feeling that my buttered toast was also lurching upward, I struck up a conversation with Luke, who couldn’t have been more than five years old. I asked him if he had ever been on a Ferris wheel before.

“Yeah,” he said, “But it was a lot bigger than this one.” I couldn’t let on that even a step-ladder made me dizzy, so I nodded. In my mind I had already started writing a farewell note to my mother. Then we got stuck at the top. During the longest 18 seconds of my life, I could feel my earlier blood pressure score becoming irrelevant. I really needed to hug a giant banana.

At that exact moment, Luke had the nerve to yawn and say, “This is boring.”

I thought, “here I am — a 41-year-old basket case, and little Luke was already a jaded thrill-seeker at age five. He wasn’t the only one, either. Earlier, I had seen a child sound asleep in a ride called the Spinning Tubs of Fun. I wondered what it took to impress children these days.

When the ride was over, Luke waved goodbye and disappeared into the Monkey Maze. I, on the other hand, wobbled back to the petting zoo to chill with the antelopes. As I nearly passed out in front of an impala, all I could think was, “Daylight come and me wan’ go home.”