As a teenager, my biggest fear was growing up to live an unremarkable life, someone whose biography would be a yawner.

That isn’t unusual. Inside most of us, at some point in our lives, is a yearning to do something great. And that desire isn’t all bad. It stems from our God-given need for significance and meaning.

A verse in Romans 2 is worth pondering: ​“To those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.” Matthew Henry comments, ​“There is a holy ambition which is at the bottom of all practical religion.”

There’s a kind of glory seeking that’s godly and good. Who knew.

There is, of course, a kind which isn’t — an unholy ambition which is at the bottom of much of human suffering. Sure, it may disguise itself as ​“doing great things for God,” but, as some of us have personally discovered, that drivenness may in fact be an attempt to fill through accomplishment those cracked parts of personality that the love of God has not yet mended.

Even those who are truly called to highly visible Kingdom work will spend most of their waking hours in hiddenness. And so it takes great faith to live an ordinary life, or at least our ordinary moments (which are most of them) with God and through God.

Tish Harrison Warren says it well:

I’ve come to the point where I’m not sure anymore just what God counts as radical. And I suspect that for me, getting up and doing the dishes when I’m short on sleep and patience is far more costly and necessitates more of a revolution in my heart than some of the more outwardly risky ways I’ve lived in the past. And so this is what I need now: the courage to face an ordinary day…without despair, the bravery it takes to believe that a small life is still a meaningful life, and the grace to know that even when I’ve done nothing that is powerful or bold or even interesting that the Lord notices me and is fond of me and that that is enough.