Every day, we do commonplace things & interact with ordinary people without giving them much thought. What we need is a theological guide to thinking Christianly about the ordinary nature of everyday life. Leading ethicist Brent Waters shows that the activities & relationships we think of as mundane are actually expressions of love of neighbor that are vitally important to our well-being. We live out the Christian gospel in the contexts that define us & in the routine chores, practices, activities, & social settings that give ordinary life meaning. It is in those contexts that we discover what we were created for, to be, & to become.
Listen in as Dr. Jeff talks with Brent Waters (DPhil, University of Oxford), who is the Jerre & Mary Joy Stead Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, where he also directs the Jerre L. & Mary Joy Stead Center for Ethics & Values. He has written, edited, or contributed to many books.
- Recommended Resources
- Footnotes
Episode 232: Summary & Transcript
Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Episode Summary
Dr. Jeff Myers interviews Brent Waters, an emeritus professor of Christian Social Ethics, about his book Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues. Waters argues that Christian ethics should focus on the mundane, ordinary aspects of daily life, as these are central to spiritual formation. He discusses how his own major health crisis shifted his perspective to value the daily care of others.
The conversation covers the dangers of a culture that fears boredom and uses technology as a constant distraction, the inherent meaning in all forms of work, and the importance of being present. Waters also introduces the concept of “unselfing” as a key moral exercise, particularly in marriage, and uses the ministry of Jesus as an example of an ego-free life focused on serving others in their common needs.
Episode Transcript
Brent Waters (00:00):
And ethics I think is an important concept because we increasingly live in a world that tries to be risk free. And if you achieve that, it means it’s also a loveless world.
Dr. Jeff Myers (00:18):
What if the most important acts of love in your life aren’t the big dramatic moments but the small ordinary ones that you hardly notice? What if folding laundry, cooking dinner, or taking time to listen to a neighbor, what if those things were just as central to the development of your soul as preaching a sermon or leading a mission trip or doing your devotions?
I know it’s a strange thought, but could it be that our greatest moral formation happens in the dull moments, the repetitive moments, the unseen moments of everyday life? Because that would change how we see our jobs, our marriages, our friendships, and even our chores. They aren’t just something that we do in order to get away from them to do what we really want to do. They’re actually part of our calling from God and they transform the way we live and the way we love.
(01:17):
Well, my guest today is Brent Waters. Brent’s the emeritus professor of Christian Social Ethics at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. He served there from 2001 to 2022 and he’s a leading voice in Christian ethics, theology, technology, bioethics. He’s offered many influential books, including The Mortal Flesh, Just Capitalism. But now he’s turning his attention as a retired guy to something that I think we all need to hear.
Because I don’t know about you, but I am afraid of boredom. I don’t want to be bored. And so I’m always trying to come up with things to do so that I don’t have downtime. Well, this new book is called Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues. And it is a fascinating discussion from a very well educated guy, a guy who went to Claremont University, Oxford University, a discussion about how to be bored and how to be bored well.
(02:14):
How do we love our neighbor well in those boring moments? I’m your host, Dr. Jeff Myers. This is the Truth Changes Everything Podcast. Brent Waters, welcome to the Truth Changes Everything podcast.
Brent Waters (02:26):
Thank you for having me.
Dr. Jeff Myers (02:28):
I have been looking forward to this conversation because of a lot of things that have even been taking place this summer. Had two interns who worked as researchers and writers to produce a report on the state of the rising generation. And one of the issues they talked about was the issue of how the rising generation handles boredom. And it turns out none of us are very good at it.
The average American pulls out their phone 200 times a day. That’s every five minutes of waking hours because somehow we’ve just, as John Eldridge puts it, we’ve become disciples of the internet. The idea that we would have to learn patience and to wait to grow in character is gone in the age of the smartphone. So anyway, your book is called Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues. And you argue in the book that the mundane chores and ordinary relationships of everyday life are not only good for us, but they are central to ethical Christianity, to Christian ethics.
(03:38):
I’d love for you to just share how you came to see ordinary moments as essential for how we flourish as human beings.
Brent Waters (03:49):
Okay. Now I’ll wander a bit in the answer, but eventually I’ll arrive where I need to be.
Dr. Jeff Myers (03:54):
You wander as much as you like, Brent, because we’ve got 45 minutes on this show. So it’s the long form. We’re not looking for sound bites.
Brent Waters (04:04):
Okay. Well, then I won’t give you the elevator speech. Well, it was basically years ago, it was just kind of unease on my part that I realized that in ethics, I spent almost all my time thinking about the big questions, genetic engineering, transhumanism, war and peace. And now I want to be clear, those are important questions, important issues that need to be dealt with, but I realized I didn’t have any firsthand experience in almost any of them.
And also what I was missing was a lot of daily life where I spent most of my time, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. And I thought increasingly I became uneasy with saying there’s something wrong about this, especially for Christian ethics, because I think God embraces our lives and our entirety. And for most times we don’t deal with those big questions. It’s the day in and day out of life.
(04:57):
Now what we really cemented that was spending a month in the hospital. I was nine days in intensive care, in the ICU, and they were preparing. I didn’t know at the time, but they were preparing my wife to be a widow, but I pulled through obviously, but in the meantime, I had lost 45 pounds, my muscles atrophied very badly. So I spent three weeks in acute physical rehab and then 12 weeks in outpatient therapy. And I had to learn everything all over again, how to feed myself, how to walk, how to just do the basic things.
(05:37):
So I needed to pay attention to the very simple things of life, taking it step by step. The other thing that cemented that was realizing that although the doctors healed me in a sense, they were a little bit like Melchizedek. They kind of floated in and stayed for a time and then floated out again. But it was the nurses and therapists who were there day in and day out. And so I was both dependent upon the work of strangers and also deeply grateful for their in a sense ministry that they were helping me through to how to be a human being again.
So that’s when I started saying, maybe I need to pay more attention to the ordinary, to the mundane, because this is how also I encounter most people in the world. It’s not in the extraordinary. I mean, there are extraordinary things that happen in life, but it’s in the daily mundane things that we spend most of our time, so why not pay attention to them and see the ethical value in them? And really, I think the theological value of how does God really care for embodied persons and how do those embodied persons care for one another?
Dr. Jeff Myers (06:46):
Brent, one of the guys who’s been speaking at the Summit Ministries program in Georgia for a couple of years is Kelly Kapick, wrote a book called You’re Only Human, which I thought was a beautiful book. And he really helps our students understand the idea of Sabbath or Shabbat, getting that time of rest. But you’re talking about something more. You’re talking about the relationship between those everyday moments and Christian ethics. Help me understand that because I always think about ethics as, well, the study of moral value systems or right or wrong.
Brent Waters (07:22):
Well, it is, but you’re always dealing with real people who have real lives and they’re not abstractions. So what’s fundamental I think for Christian ethics is, for example, I did a lot of my work in bioethics. When I started taking the ordinary more seriously, I started thinking about bioethics differently.
Dr. Jeff Myers (07:43):
Okay. How so?
Brent Waters (07:45):
How do you exhibit that care for people who are in, I mean, what they’re thinking about is not the questions that I was taught to think about is euthanasia or assisted suicide. What they’re thinking about is how do I learn to live a life that now will be somewhat impeded? I may lose mobility and things like that. So ethics, yes, it’s about right and wrong. It’s about good and evil, but it’s also about the obligations that we have to one another to help us exhibit that love.
So it’s the giving and receiving of care. I mean, how do we gracefully give it and how do we gracefully receive it in terms of in the medical arena? So that was one of the things that I started thinking about differently. And it’s also, I mean to me the whole concept of neighbor love became increasingly important because it dawned on me love is risky and if you’re going to love, you’re going to have the risk of being let down, being failed, having your heart broken, whatever.
(08:51):
And that’s again, in ethics, I think it’s an important concept because we increasingly live in a world that tries to be risk free. And if you achieve that, it means it’s also a loveless world. Now I want to be clear, I’m not advocating that people be reckless, but I think people need to take chances on things. I mean, there is that notion that you learn something about yourself when you take a risk and I think that learning to take a risk, it also prepares us to learn how to learn.
Dr. Jeff Myers (09:28):
Brent, when I think of the everyday experiences I have going for a walk and I see my neighbors and we chat, which we do in our neighborhoods still, I’m grateful for that. I guess most people in the world tell me they don’t really have that kind of experience now.
But when you go to the grocery store, let’s say as you’ve talked about common callings, does that affect even that, how you shop for things or what you do or how you interact? Because I’d be curious, we have all these experiences every day where it’s just waiting. We’re waiting in traffic, we’re waiting in line at a store. How are we to see those experiences as something that God’s using to shape us?
Brent Waters (10:11):
Well, we need lessons and learn how to wait because many times we wait for God. It’s not so much that we find God, God finds us. And how do you learn in those moments when you think you need to fill up with something, I think, no, maybe God’s just calling you to be still to simply learn the way. I mean, you’re back to one of your original points. Yeah.
We live in a world, increasingly, where boredom is feared. Actually, boredom is an opportunity to reflect and boredom is there. It teaches you how to receive, to be in that receptive mode, which again, I think is lacking in a lot of our common lives is that we don’t really know how to receive because we want to be in control. We want to set the agenda and not really be open to something that’s unexpected. So how does it affect?
(11:13):
I find, increasingly, what I always try to do is to talk to a stranger because that’s what I find when I travel, people don’t do that anymore. They’re on their phones. They’re talking to someone else. They’re not really present where they are because they don’t really want to be there and yet maybe that’s central to our faith is we are wherever God has called us to be at that moment. So be attentive to it, pay attention to it.
Dr. Jeff Myers (11:42):
Well, this is super convicting to me. And I think of the young adult events that I participate in, there’s a lot of enthusiasm. You get thousands of people together. There’s music, fireworks and the schedule’s very fast. There’s never a moment to stop and reflect. You’re just going from one thing to the next.
And people stand up in front of these kids and say things like, “Yours is the generation that’s going to change the world and you’re going to make a difference for Christ.” It has to be dramatic, it feels like in these situations in order to be effective. But I think what you’re saying is don’t get so focused on changing the world out there that you don’t notice the world that God has actually placed you in.
Brent Waters (12:39):
Yes. Yeah. And I think that is a central aspect of Christian faith because I mean, we are pilgrims after all and we eventually we’re not at home here, which means we are at home wherever we are.
(12:59):
And to wish you were someplace else means I think basically there’s a fundamental disregard of what Christian faith means. It means that you are attentive to where you are, to be there. I think my complaint with technology is that it often serves as a distraction so that we’re not being attentive to where God has called us to be for however short or longer period of time.
I mean, you’re talking about the exciting, the event. I think maybe one of the things we need to do with younger people more and more is to send them off where their cell phones don’t work, have access to screens and they actually have to encounter nature again.
(13:44):
That may be very, very productive. I mean, one of the things that, kind of, I’ve been paying attention to in my own neighborhood is, I know there’s a lot of children in our neighborhood, but I’ve never seen them out playing. Wow. And I’m wondering, what do they do?
And my hunch is maybe we’ve organized children too much and the technology has played into that. I mean, it’s kind of disturbing to me when you go into a supermarket and you see a one or two year old into basketball with a cell phone all over. I mean, you’re right. We’re growing up with screens and are the screens really our friends, I doubt it.
Dr. Jeff Myers (14:26):
Yeah. Well, I think I remember as a kid playing baseball on the street, playing football in the street, which is not very intelligent. Those tackles hurt, man. You wanted to evade a tackle at all costs, but yeah, the idea that, and there seems like there are two problems. One is that kids are living this highly structured life and the second thing is that the structuring is being done for them by someone else, that almost losing a sense of agency. When I was a kid, man, when I was a kid, I hated when adults said when I was a kid. So I understand what I’m doing here, but it felt like we were supposed to figure it out.
(15:17):
Your board will go do something, go figure it out. And I was even told, if you don’t figure it out, then we will come up with something for you to do. The idea that adults would organize our lives was used as a threat to get us to organize our own. Now it seems like that’s completely flipped in our culture.
I want to kind of switch topics a little bit because I work with so many students and they’re all looking for a job that they will find interesting. They would like it to provide a good means of provision for them. They probably aren’t as materialistic as previous generations that I’ve worked with, but they definitely want to have a job that they feel is meaningful. That’s the term they’re always using. I want to do something meaningful. I want to do something meaningful. So there are jobs, however, that you do throughout your life that are more like chores.
(16:17):
And some jobs are working in a sandwich shop or being a trash collector, things like that, that people look at and say, “Well, that’s just stuff that has to be done because we have to eat and we have to have all of our junk picked up, but there’s no real meaning to it.” When people say things like that, how do you help them reframe those statements?
Brent Waters (16:45):
To really think through, saying you have to really look at, what does it mean to be meaningful? I mean, the fact of the matter is those people that you mentioned do more for more for a lot of people than say people like me who are in the academy. I mean, you have to ask the question, “How does the food get on my table?” Who builds the house I live in? Who maintains the cars and things like that?
And I think it’s basically, those people are invisible to us, but they’re absolutely necessary to our own wellbeing. So we really are interconnected. When you think of all the things that have to go right, be able to go down that supermarket, buy those groceries, few little things go wrong and we discovered that in supply lines, people suffer. So you have to really ask the question, what is unmeaningful about helping people eat, about helping them find shelter and things like that.
(17:45):
The other thing to say is, okay, in so-called meaningful work, I used to tell my students, look, in the academy, yeah, it’s meaningful to be a teacher, but there’s a lot of donkey work that goes with it. There’s just no way to get around it. It’s mindfully boring.
(18:03):
But that’s just kind of the price of admission to doing this kind of work and you’ve got to pay attention to that. I mean, the devil is in the details and if you don’t really pay attention to that work that may not strike you as being all that meaningful, there’s consequences to pay. So I think it is the notion that basically they’re, I won’t say that all work is meaningful, but my hunch is most work is because it’s meaningful to someone, even if it remains unacknowledged.
Dr. Jeff Myers (18:35):
My wife, Stephanie, is so much better at this than I am, just noticing people and the things that they do. We went for a hike the other day and the people from the city who pick up trash on trails were there in the parking lot and we went up to talk to them and they were a little suspicious at first. I think they’re used to getting a lot of criticism, but we said, “We just want you to know this trail is so beautiful. You guys do such a great job taking care of it.”
And all of a sudden they wanted to be in a conversation with us, but you are right, to most people they’re invisible. The only time you notice the trash people is when they haven’t done their job and there’s trash and it’s unsightly and you feel, frankly, a little bit unsafe. But when everyday people do their jobs, that is a way of bringing glory to God.
Brent Waters (19:28):
It is because I mean, I think you’re showing regard and respect for creation, you’re showing regard and respect for neighbors. I mean, one of the things I’m concerned about is I think increasingly people take less pride in their work. I mean, there’s not the craftsmanship that used to be there and now it’s more or less, if it’s good enough that’s fine, but where is the notion of the excellence and performance of whether it be woodworking, whether it be lecturing, whether it be preaching, do we take the time to master the skills that are necessary for that?
And I think that’s also a training for ethics because a lot of ethics is character and virtue and to form character and virtue is habituation and creating habits is just routine practice over and over and over again until it just becomes second nature. So that learning these little things I think prepares you to learn the virtues that you need to form your character as a Christian, as a human being.
(20:36):
It’s important for people to get up in the morning, make the bed. It’s important to learn the skills of being in a kitchen if you’re going to cook and to do it right and to try to make a dinner that is pleasing to people and things like that. There’s that dimension of it. I mean, Albert Borgman used to say that we now live in an age of shoddy and people just get accustomed to shoddy workmanship.
And it’s too bad because I think that what happens then is you generally just disregard a life of excellence and I think you’re in trouble once you start saying it doesn’t matter whether you try to live an excellent life. I mean, the little things add up to big things and how we habituate those little things either prepares us for a life of virtue or a life of advice, I think.
Dr. Jeff Myers (21:29):
You’re reframing how Christians should think about the world and there’s so much running through my mind right now. I also like to get up and make my bed in the morning. I feel like it is my chance at the very beginning of every day to perform an act of beauty and order and the rest of the day can go a whole lot better because I know I can create beauty and I know I can bring about order in my world because I just did it with the very first thing I did in the morning.
But I think a lot of people sense that, well, if I have to take a job flipping burgers, that’s the term that we always use. If I have to take a job flipping burgers, it’s because I can’t find anything else. It’s not something that I’m called to. It’s something that I submit to because I lack a calling.
(22:25):
I think a lot of young adults sort of think in that way or they say, “Look, I know this is the price of entry. I’ve got to take this job so that I can work my way up and take better and better jobs.” Talk about that idea of calling for a minute and vocation because a lot of people think vocation is just what you do to make money and you’re tying it into something that is actually spiritual.
Brent Waters (22:51):
Yeah. I mean, I think where we made a fundamental separation, and I think it’s unfortunate, is that calling is somehow higher than vocation. So for example, we have vocational schools and that’s where you learn how to flip burgers and do things like that and somehow that’s second rate or third rate. But I think you can’t really divorce the two.
I mean, every calling is something that you do for God and neighbor and that means flipping burgers is an important service for neighbors. They’ve got to eat. And so there is a notion now, is it interesting to flip burgers? Well, I didn’t find it very interesting, but nonetheless, it was providing a service to others. And there’s a lot of callings that are not going to be related to your job.
(23:43):
I mean, I was called to be married. I mean, I was called to be a husband. I was called to be a father. No one paid me to do that and yet I would say those are the most important things I did in life, far more than my calling to be a professor. But in each of those settings, to be a parent, to be a husband, to be a professor, I also had to learn vocational skills. You do really have to learn how to effectively lecture, how to effectively teach. You have to learn through hard experience and failure at times. What does it mean to be a good husband? What does it mean to be a good parent?
(24:21):
I want to reunite the notion that the calling and vocation really can’t be separated and that I think it’s vitally important for Christians to recover that because in virtue of our baptism, we are all full-time Christians and that means there’s no such thing as part-time ministers. We’re all full-time ministers of Jesus Christ and how do we minister where we actually live?
I think that’s an important thing to learn so that you don’t have the Sunday, Saturday split or one day a week you’re a Christian and that other six days you’re not. I think recovering a sense of vocation and calling is a way to do that.
Dr. Jeff Myers (25:04):
No, I love that. I think there was a moment in church history where what you’re talking about right now, they would have understood the aspect of it of, you need to learn to wait on God because that’s what shapes your soul cultivates you. But at the same time, they didn’t really see the everyday work that we do to earn a living as meaningful. What are the terms? Viva, activa, and viva contemplativa. And you have the life of contemplation, you have a life of activity and the better people are the ones that have the life of contemplation.
I think Martin Luther is at least one of the early sources that I look back at and say, he kind of collapsed those two distinctions and said, “When you’re doing laundry, you’re bringing glory to God. When you’re cooking food, you’re bringing glory to God.” And there was even a Mexican Catholic, I think she was a social philosopher or something and she said, “Look, if Plato had been baking, he would have done a lot better philosophy.”
Brent Waters (26:08):
Well, I think that’s true. And I think he did shatter that distinction for the better. Now, Luther claims that when he changed a dirty diaper, he was giving glory to God. Now, I’m not sure Luther ever really changed the diaper, but nonetheless, he was onto something on doing that. And it’s really to see our lives as a whole and so that the active life and the contemplative life are not necessarily a hierarchy. They’re complimentary.
And you have to remember, I mean, even in the monasteries, they had physical labor. I mean, cappuccino comes from the monastery. They had to roast the beans and grind them and things like that and they had agricultural duties. So even the monastery realized that they couldn’t, the contemplative life was based upon the physical realities. I think that was the great problem in Greek societies. It was a society where you had a very small elite, completely dependent upon slave labor of meeting those physical necessities. And she’s quite right. If Plato really had to bake his own food, probably it would have been a different form of philosophy.
Dr. Jeff Myers (27:29):
Help us understand in the age of the smartphone, if it’s true that people pull out their phones 200 times a day, I actually started noticing when I pull up my phone after I learned that and I find that I do it when I’m not sure what else to do. So if I’m standing in line, I assume that the line, the purpose of the line is to somehow get between me and my goal. And so I don’t like it. I find it frustrating.
And maybe this is just an American deal, right? Maybe this is a first world problem because I’ve been in other countries where people basically stand in line a lot, an hour or two a day is not uncommon for people to stand in line. You have to be patient because you have no sense that the trajectory that you see yourself going on is actually going to materialize.
(28:23):
So I’m in line, say, and I pull out my phone because I’m bored. What should I be doing instead? Help us develop the discipline of changing that habit.
Brent Waters (28:37):
Okay. Well, I mean, as a disclaimer, I will say during baseball season, I do pull out the phone to check the scores, but it’s a really good question because what’s the best way to use that time of boredom to some good cause, really what it is. What I do is I pretend I’m a novelist and I watch people and try to say, “If I were a novelist, is there a short story here? What would you think about the people?”
Or even to strike up a conversation that someone online is very interesting because particularly if you interrupt your time on the screen, it’s a way of really saying, “Okay, how do I find myself in this moment and really not try to escape it by using the technology to get out of it?” So what are the creative things that I’ve tried to do in this?
(29:46):
Well, in retirement, one of the first things I did was I got rid of my old smartphone and I got a new smartphone that wasn’t as smart because I realized I didn’t need all the apps and things like that. So I have a phone that’s pretty app-free. There’s some basic things on there. I do have the Major League Baseball app.
(30:08):
Of course. But what I find then is it’s not tempting for me to use the phone because the phone is actually more boring than standing in line and watching the environment around me. I find just increasingly I just spend less and less time on screens. I think screens I realize a lot of times are distractions and now what gives me a lot of hope.
I’ve run into quite a few young families where they have rules in the household that when everyone comes home, they turn off their mobile phones. They limit the time that the family watches TV and are on the computers and they play board games together. They talk about books. They make sure that they eat as much as possible all their meals together so that the time of dinner is also a time of table fellowship and conversation. I think that there are certain rituals then to go with the preparation of the meal, the actual conversation and the cleanup afterwards.
(31:12):
I think those rituals are important because it brings families together and sitting around playing board games. I think technology tends to divide us rather than unite us because I think a conversation on Zoom is not the same as having a face-to-face conversation.
Dr. Jeff Myers (31:30):
That’s right. Yeah.
Brent Waters (31:32):
It’s a stewardship of time I think is really what I’d like to think more about is I realize nothing is free. So whatever time you spend doing this means you can’t spend the time doing that. And what are your priorities? And how do you want to spend that time? I think again, that’s something as Christians that we should be thinking about because it does form certain habits in us. I think technology gives us an excuse to ignore which is most present to us and I’m not convinced that’s a good thing.
Dr. Jeff Myers (32:07):
Yeah. I completely see that. Where did we get the idea that what’s happening out there is more important than what’s happening here in my environment right now. Yeah, I’m kind of interested in whether we have a piece between Russia and Ukraine, but I can do nothing to affect that.
(32:30):
If I’m thinking about that or reading something about that, I’m not thinking about what are these people like standing around me at the store or in the cars that are next to me as we wait for the light to turn green? What is their life like? I love your idea of being a novelist because you’re becoming so attentive to your environment and actually asking yourself, if I had to write down what is happening here, how would I describe it? And it makes me think, Brent, that’s actually an act of tremendous creativity. Think about how much more creative of a person you become in your world because you’re paying attention to things that most people overlook.
Brent Waters (33:20):
Yeah. I mean, that’s the other thing. It’s interesting to me that what technology promises us something like AI that’s going to make us more creative and my response is really? I mean, if you’re having something else do the work for you, is that really being creative? I mean, it just begs the question, what is creativity?
And I mean, there’s an ancient argument that actually, none of us can be creative. Only God can be creative. Everything else we do is imitation. So it’s mastering that art of divine creativity. And how do you do that? Well, I think you pay attention to the world God’s created. So there’s part of that. There’s also the notion to me that again, I don’t want to come across as being entirely anti-technology. I’m not, but I do want to. People like Rosen have written a marvelous book. I’m paying attention to the ordinary kinds of things.
(34:23):
And she wrote an article recently that I think I want to pay more attention to where she says, “Look, when you’re looking at Silicon Valley, don’t listen to what they say. Pay attention to what they do.”
Dr. Jeff Myers (34:36):
What they do with their own kids, you mean?
Brent Waters (34:37):
Yeah, with their own kids and also what they’re really trying to convince you to buy and things like that and then make your evaluations of, how do you order your life so that technology is a servant and not a master? And I think that’s an important question because I think technology can be an excellent servant, but I think it makes a terrible master. So it forces us to really set priorities. How do I want to spend my time? With whom do I want to spend my time? How is that time best spent to the honor and glory of God?
(35:14):
And I think the more that we pay attention to that, the more we realize, okay, you do get back to the mundane and the ordinary, because that’s how we spend a lot of our time as embodied creatures who were created in the image and likeness of government. So it’s not something to be dismissed. I mean, you’re right.
I guess my complaint more than anything is we live in an age where everything has to be extraordinary. We are extraordinary people who do extraordinary things and therefore I think when you think about the mundane it’s just insulting to our sense of what is our wellbeing. Well, our wellbeing may actually be much more ordinary than we realize.
Dr. Jeff Myers (35:57):
Yeah. You don’t hear very many graduation speakers say, “Now students go out and in every way possible be ordinary.”
Brent Waters (36:06):
Right. And actually they should say something to that effect. It also struck me to the same route of, I mean, this is why I was at seminary and again, did we want to create extraordinary ministers? Well, it seemed like that was the goal, but I’m not sure that’s what we should have been doing because the same root of the word ordinary is the same root with the word ordination. And maybe we are ordained to be common and ordinary with our common and ordinary people.
Dr. Jeff Myers (36:41):
Yeah. Man. Well, we only have a couple minutes left. I’ve loved this conversation and I think it’s going to change. It’s already changing the way I think about a lot of things. Weirdly, I don’t feel guilt or shame. I just feel motivated to be different. So thank you for helping with that.
Talk about this, your idea of the common callings and ordinary virtues in terms of marriage, because a lot of people who are listening or watching this have a marriage relationship or they desire to have that kind of a relationship. What insights, as you were writing, have helped you in that way?
Brent Waters (37:30):
Well, take a step back, what brought me into this was that Iris Murdoch, who was a philosopher and novelist, kind of stole a concept from Simone Vay on selfing. And the reason she came up with the term unselfing was she said, “Look, most moral problems are created by the fat relentless ego and it gets in the way of everything. So you’ve got to unself in order to really see what the situation is.”
So there are certain exercises on unselfing. So she looked a lot of her life at Buddhism and things like that. But it seemed to me that marriage is an exercise in unselfing because I think what I discovered very early in my marriage is, it’s not about me.
(38:15):
It’s about us and us in relationship to God, us in relationship to others. So I’ve been married 50 years now and what I want to tell people, has it had its exciting moments? You bet. Has it been happy? Yes. Has it been hard work? Yes. Is every moment exciting? No. But it’s part of the package deal of being married.
And I think marriage is an exercise and unselfing in the same way that parenthood is an exercise and unselfing. There are those times when basically you have to realize it’s not about me. It’s just not about me. And maybe I think worship at his best is an exercise of unselfing. You’re there to worship God and it’s not about us.
Dr. Jeff Myers (39:08):
And correct me if I’m wrong on this, but when you talk about unselfing, you also bring in the ministry of Jesus. Were there things that you learned from how Jesus walked with his disciples that helped form your thinking?
Brent Waters (39:24):
Yeah, I think it’s remarkable that if you really read those gospel accounts carefully, you realize Jesus doesn’t really try to put himself center stage very often. It’s more or less enabling others to do what is required of them or what they need. The teaching and ministry of Jesus, again, it’s remarkably ego free because, what is important is again, what we learn about God. And so Jesus is instrumental and not necessarily the end of what the gospel stories are about. I mean, Jesus is always pointing to a greater reality. Yeah.
Dr. Jeff Myers (40:12):
That’s right, isn’t it? Yeah. I mean, it’s very, very rare for Jesus to say, “I have authority in this moment. Listen to me.” It’s much more him saying, “I am here to do the will of my Father who sent me. It is my bread to do the will of my Father who sent me. I say nothing of my own, but only what the Father gives me to say that his entire ministry was pointing to God.”
Brent Waters (40:38):
Yeah. And I think that comes through most clearly in the gospel according to John as opposed to synoptics. I’m not saying that one’s necessarily preferable to the other, but I think there is that common thread of Jesus as being iconic really is seeing through Jesus to a different reality, higher reality, higher calling, if you will. And yet that calling is never divorced from the reality of the person being called.
So again, I mean, Jesus takes care of, I mean, he takes care of very mundane things when you think about it. They run out of wine at a wedding, so he makes wine. People are hurting, so he heals them. And it seems like Jesus is never offended by the people who have common complaints. He understands that. So yeah, that came through. That played a role in the thinking about the unselfing.
Dr. Jeff Myers (41:39):
Yeah. Well, I love this. I love this idea. I don’t know why this popped into my head, but the author, George Elliot wrote a book called Middle March. And it’s interesting when you read George Elliot books, you realize everything that happens in these books is very ordinary. It’s just the everyday conversations, everyday situations. But there’s one character, Dorothea passes away. Her life had been frustrating.
(42:12):
It wasn’t the kind of life that we hoped to live. And Elliot, at the very end of the book, Middle Marts, talks about, the great good of the world is largely owing to people who rest in unvisited tombs. And it brings tears to my eyes when I think about it because we do have this addiction that everything has to be extraordinary or at least entertaining, but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the great good of the world is due to people who just pay attention to what’s going on around them and love their neighbor in that moment.
Brent Waters (42:54):
Yeah. I think as you look back, there are so many people in our lives that, were they exciting? No, but they were steadfast. They were reliable. They were there day in and day out and you’re right. I think without those people, the world would not be anywhere near as good a place as it is. Now we’ve got our problems, but overall there are things that our world is full of blessings.
If you want to change the analogy, I don’t know a lot about horses, but the little I know is, okay, thoroughbreds are a lot of work. Maybe you need more Clydesdales and work horses to really make a good stable. And going back to the other thing, I think we need to impress upon people at all stages in their life. Just to be doing what you need to do day in and day out, there’s no such thing as a higher calling than that. It is the calling and this is how you do love your neighbor and this is how you exhibit a love of God.
Dr. Jeff Myers (44:08):
That’s right. Yeah. No one else is coming. You’re there in that situation. And boredom is, I guess what I maybe take away from this is boredom is a choice. I can choose to be interested in what is happening around me rather than bored.
Brent Waters (44:30):
Yes, that’s right. And that boredom affords you an opportunity to really be observant.
Dr. Jeff Myers (44:38):
Yeah. Well, Brent, thank you. Thank you for this conversation. I’m taking a lot away from it. I think it’s going to reshape the way I see a lot of things and I think the people who are watching and listening right now probably are realizing the same thing. We all know that there’s something wrong with the way we engage with our world around us. And man, as a goal-directed guy, I’m really taking that to heart. Yeah, it’s powerful. Thanks for taking time to be on the show today.
Brent Waters (45:06):
Well, thank you again for having me.
Dr. Jeff Myers (45:07):
Thank you to my guest, Brent Waters, for coming on the show. You can go to G-A-R-R-E-T-T, garrett.edu, and you can look up Brent Waters and find more of his resources.
This podcast is a resource of Summit Ministries. At Summit, we come alongside the rising generation, their trainers, their parents, and influencers, so that the young adults of this generation may know God’s truth and become champions of a biblical worldview. To learn more about Summit Ministries or to get more resources to help the young adults in your life embrace and share the truth that changes everything, just visit summit.org. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you next week.