The Gift of Ordinary Time - New Evangelizers

Ordinary Time a gift? Man, that’s not a gift; it’s just the regular, run-of-the-mill Catholic mass season.

Wait just a minute!

Ordinary Time doesn’t mean mundane or dull in the way we modern Americans think of things as “ordinary.” The name “ordinary” in Ordinary Time is derived from the Latin ordinalis, which means numbered sequentially, and is rooted in the Latin word ordo. Do you know what English word we derived from ordo? It’s order.

So Ordinary Time is actually numbered church weeks that are kept “ordered” because there is no holiday or feast being celebrated. So, you see, Ordinary Time is not merely a mundane part of the Church year.

Ordinary Time is where the faith work is done; it’s where we take our spiritual high from the Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter seasons and launch ourselves in the wide world. Ordinary time is where Jesus did his work. He preached, taught, and performed miracles during His ordered time.

How cool is that? Not so ordinary now, is it?

Ordinary Time reminds me of my Hot Wheels cars. I am a product of the die-cast car generation of kid-dom. We were Hot Wheels and Matchbox car nuts. We’d save and scrape our pennies, and use whatever survived the trip through the candy aisle to the toy section to purchase the mod, metallic purple Camaro off the shelf.

The boys of the Hays house were not the only Hot Wheels fanatics in the neighborhood, either. The die-cast automobile fever ran hot up and down our street. We’d pool our strips of orange, plastic track and build fabulous drag racing venues in driveways, garages, basements, etc. Anywhere we could find some space and a place to set up an inclined track was free game to us.

One of my older brothers received an outstanding present one year, The Hot Wheels Super-Charger Set. The Super-Charger Set was an oval track with the signature Hot Wheel’s orange hard plastic hairpin turns at either end. It was a track made for racing.

Although awesome, these indoor, oval Hot Wheels tracks have a big drawback: they are flat and Hot Wheels/Matchbox cars are gravity driven. Get the picture? We needed a hill or incline for the cars to run on their own. The die-cast cars didn’t have a motor or any fancy radio remote control gadgets.

Without help from an external force, they would just sit there and go nowhere. And I don’t mind telling you it wasn’t very exciting slinging or pushing your favorite cars around a track by hand all afternoon.

The Super-Charger set had an accessory; it was the pit/garage building that contained a marvelous feat of toy engineering and design, the Speed Shot Power Booster. In that pit building, behind the stickers of mechanics working and race fans eating in the cafe, was a battery powered motor which ran two soft rubber wheels. These wheels spun on either side of the track and when the car entered the tunnel, usually with barely enough momentum to coast in, the drive wheels propelled it out the other end in a feat of acceleration which would make even the Penske family jealous. The Speed Shot Power Booster. The great thing about it was that the car, or cars, on the track would repeat this energy cycle in a continuous loop as long as the batteries held and the car stayed on the track.

Ordinary Time is the Catholic’s Hot Wheels oval track. It’s where we shine our light and show the world the power of our Catholic faith. The track is where we do our work.

We fire around of the gate and around the first turn in enthusiastic fashion. But as we head down the back stretch, wear and tear and gravity begin to take its toll and drag us down to a crawl. We lose our energy in the journey, we limp into the second turn tired and worn thin. We are exasperated by the ways of the secular world and the weight of our daily grind.

Never fear, because God has a plan…the Super-Charger. The Advent, Christmas, and Easter Seasons are our Christian Super-Chargers with Speed Shot Power Boosters of Faith. We emerge from these seasons energized and ready to take another lap around the track of faith. We are ready to roll.

Ordinary Time is here. Celebrate! Throw a party and have a blast. Just remember, don’t go overboard because tomorrow it’s time to get back to the faith-driven work we do.

Catholics, start your engines!

Copyright © 2014, Mike Hays

Mike Hays

Mike Hays is a husband, a father of three, a lifelong Kansan and works as a molecular microbiologist. Besides writing, he has been a high school strength and conditioning coach, a football coach and a baseball coach. His debut middle grade historical fiction novel, THE YOUNGER DAYS, is a 2012 recipient of The Catholic Writer's Guild Seal of Approval Award. You can find it at the publisher's website or on Amazon.