An Ordinary Story

An Ordinary Story

By Linnea Slade

12/16/2017

Once upon a time there was a young man named John Johnson.  John was fairly ordinary, in the way that most people are ordinary. The only difference between John and the rest of the ordinaries, was this man knew a secret: that everyone was special in some way.  

When people asked him his name, instead of merely saying “John Johnson”, he would tell them he was named after a river where in 1631 the French made their fur trading post that fed the coal mining industry.  His father was a coal miner, and had found the name significant.  When people asked where John was from, instead of telling them “a small town in the Midwest named Custer”, he would tell them he grew up in a town with an opening to the second largest cave in the world.  John would find something extraordinary in everyone he met and in every place he went (provided he was in the right mood).

Some people thought John was wishy-washy because he had a hard time making decisions, but what they didn’t know was that John saw potential in every choice.  He found something to love in nearly every type of food, every clime, and every season under the sun and found it difficult to rule out a possibility that might turn out to be amazing.  Because of this, John often found himself going along with the crowd, but even so he was rarely disappointed.  Even when absolutely everything was a disaster he found that those make the best stories.

One day John went on a date with a woman he met through mutual friends named Jane.  John recognized that Jane was not as educated as he, not as far advanced in his career, and did not share most of his interests.  If he had been had been a normal person, John would have stopped listening the moment he suspected they were not compatible as partners, but John knew enough to keep listening for what made Jane special .

Jane’s father had been physically abusive to her mother and brothers, she had been married to who she felt was the wrong person, she had moved time and time again to first gain distance from her family and then back after the loneliness became overbearing.  She had made many decisions: some rash and some brave, which had led her to being underemployed with no car in a new city with no money saved. 

 When Jane was living in Texas, states away from her nearest family and working from home, she found herself turning off the radio and the television and just thinking.  Never before had she been removed from the distractions of what she thought of as her life for such a long period of time.  Eventually the thinking turned into ruminations on her painful past and the people she blamed, which (as it often does) turned to prayer.  Through prayer she recognized that although others had indeed hurt her, that pain was old. The only reason she still felt it so strongly was because she refused to turn her pain over to the Lord and let Him handle it for her.  He knew better than she what these people had intended when they caused her pain and what they deserved as punishment.

John found it hard to relate to this history as he had experienced a privileged life of family support, education, and career.  Yet there was a point of poignant similarity in their stories: John too had experienced turning to the Lord and acknowledging Him as the Great Mediator, as each of us must. In this moment, he and Jane were the same: children of God on earth for a unique purpose.  

In Michigan, Jane began sharing her experiences with those sharing similar pain and guiding them toward the healing power of the Savior.  She realized that she was in a unique position of having had both the experiences that helped her recognize others’ pain, and also the skills necessary to teach fellow pain-bearers to lay their burdens at the Savior’s feet.   Although she may not have had monetary security, she had found her purpose, and that made her extraordinary.

Jon recognized that we are all given talents that make us unique and grant us opportunities to touch others’ lives for good, but perhaps the greatest talent of all is recognizing the importance of each individual we meet here on earth and being able to look past the ordinary to see the extraordinary. Jon, like all of God’s children, is anything but ordinary.