The genealogy of Jesus is rife with giants of the faith. There are also many people who you wouldn’t describe as important per se, but important enough that we’ve heard of them.
Also included: people who weren’t important at all, but did something that made for a darn good story.
Lastly, and our subject today, genealogical filler material: the people who weren’t important and didn’t do anything worth mentioning.
All that’s left of their legacy are their names—Azor, Zadok, Achim, Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, and Jacob.
They were, as far as history is concerned, unknown and unremarkable.
Correction: They were unremarkable in everything except for this fact—They survived.
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Unremarkable feels familiar. The last two years of the pandemic have brought a lot of unremarkable days. We’ve been putting one foot in front of the other as we try to keep body and soul together.
Keeping body and soul together has been a formidable task, no?
Over the last six months, our family of seven (including Grandma) has been to the doctor’s office at least 50 times. I kid you not. Everything from catching up on covid-delayed physicals to lab work and follow-ups to a sliced finger needing stitches, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. We’ve needed help with our health and navigating a flooded care system has been no walk in the park.
And it’s not just us needing care. “It’s a tsunami,” our pediatrician keeps saying. “It’s a tsunami.”
The head of the Emergency Department at Kaiser Riverside told me that the halls are often full of overflow patients they don’t have beds for. And those patients, he said, are children suffering from mental health crises. Families hit by pandemic-induced mental illness much like a tornado rampages through town: hitting one house and skipping another.
All in all, I think it’s safe to say—many of us are barely scraping by.
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These times have called us to focus our energy on survival—emotional survival and physical survival.
Survive the next anxiety attack, survive the grief of losing a loved one, survive the dehumanizing effects of long haul covid, survive covid itself, survive the day to day realities of a diagnosis, survive loneliness and isolation.
If survival mode feels familiar to you, remember this:
Survival is a worthy endeavor.
Survival is remarkable.
Survival is story enough for today.
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Maybe now isn’t the time to think about your legacy, if you’ll be a giant of influence, or someone noteworthy, or someone memorable. Maybe now isn’t the time to be searching for fulfillment. Maybe now isn’t the time to make long term plans or strive for your goals.
Maybe now is the time to be here, now, and meet each moment with what it calls for. Enjoy the good moments, and for the hard moments—meet those with whatever effort you are capable of. Practice deep acceptance.
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Survival is nothing to sneeze at.
By virtue of survival, our faceless friends Azor, Zadok, Achim, Eliud, Eleazar, Matthan, and Jacob had their names immortalized. By virtue of survival, they made place for all the rest of us whose existence feels unknown and unremarkable. Their place in the genealogy reminds us that we also have a place in God’s genealogy, that we are connected to a story that is larger than us. That we belong in a story that is larger and stretches farther than this unremarkable moment.
It’s okay for your standards to be low right now. It’s okay for your house to be messy. It’s okay to not be meeting your potential. It’s okay to be doing nothing but working and recovering from work. It’s okay to be utterly and completely unremarkable.
You’re in good company.