I remember when the kids were babies. Someone once asked me what it was like being a new Dad. I remember saying, “Being a Dad is great. The thing that’s so amazing about it from a personal standpoint, though, is the level of insanity to which one is able to adapt."

I still think that’s true. What I learned to call normal after the kids were born are things I couldn’t even have comprehended before we had children. I rarely got 8 hours of sleep a night. I hardly ever got more than 10 minutes for a meal. After a hard day of work, I may get to read for 30 minutes uninterrupted.

There was crying and slobbering and truckloads of dirty diapers. That was my life. I loved it (and love it still), but I’m astonished that all of it became so unexceptional, so ordinary after just a short time.

We’ve just concluded the time in the Christian year that falls after Pentecost. In liturgical language, that time is known as “ordinary” time. "The word ‘ordinary’ [in this context] comes from the ordinal numerals by which the weeks are identified or counted, from the 1st week of Ordinary Time in January to the 34th week that begins toward the end of November."

But, in this case, even though Ordinary Time refers to numbers and not the usual sense of the word, I still have a difficult time getting past the use of the word ordinary to denote time.

To speak of time as ordinary is to suggest a quality of time. Common. Familiar. Unexceptional. Humdrum. Workaday. Normal.

Ordinary time occupies a large part of the Christian year precisely because ordinary time occupies a large part of our lives. It is common, familiar, and unexceptional.

And yet, look at what we’ve come to call ordinary during our time. We live in a country that feels as if it’s teetering on the edge. Refugees and immigrants looking to save their families and find a life worth living are met first not with welcome but with suspicion and hostility.

The threat of guns, their easy availability, and their proximity to our children plague our nightmares.

Our Black and Brown neighbors and our LGBTQ siblings increasingly live in fear that the world threatening to emerge has painted shockingly clear bullseyes on their backs.

In cultural terms, we’re officially in the Christmas Season, where we push and shove to spend fists-full of money on things people will forget by this time next month.

It used to be that Black Friday came two days before Easter; now it’s the day after Thanksgiving—and it denotes not the tragedy and violence of human power but the tragedy of the potential violence of human greed.

Ordinary can mean a lot of things, but uneventful isn’t necessarily one of them. People living in refugee camps with death and destruction all around them have ordinary days. Those living in poverty and fear experience monotony. It’s just that what’s ordinary to them is harrowing to us.

Apart from the whole numbers thing, I think what makes ordinary time ordinary is the underlying assumption that tomorrow will look pretty much like today. Time is ordinary, less because of what’s contained within it than because the time seems to replicate itself day after day. Ordinariness is relative. One can live an “ordinary,” if horrific, life in a tent with a dirt floor and contaminated water.

The people spoken about in this late addition to Jeremiah’s prophecy understand the idea of ordinary ... horror. This part of Jeremiah addresses the inhabitants of Judah living in the rubble left behind by the Babylonians.

If you’ll recall with me for a moment what’s happened in Judah.

The Babylonians came, destroying everything—the farms, the wells, the walls, Jerusalem, even the temple itself lay in ruins. Then, they carted off the best and the brightest among God’s people to Babylon. So what was left behind was a big mess.

Twice, the people refer to their land as a “waste without human beings or animals." Jeremiah describes Judah as a fallen tree rotting on the ground. That sorry state of affairs lasted for about 50 years.

But things returned to normal, as they always do. The people regained a sense of equilibrium. The horror was gone, but its aftermath remained. Time became ordinary again.

Things were bad, sure. But it’s amazing what you can get used to. After a while, it began to look like things would continue this way. They began to assume that tomorrow would look pretty much the same as today had, that time would continue to move, but that each new day would bring with it the same weariness and despair as the one before, each new day becoming a reminder of their abandonment by God. It’s the ordinariness of the days that are so difficult, so totally depressing. It’s the days.