Jesus Was Ordinary Too

Have you ever felt ordinary?

So exceptionally ordinary that you felt out of the reach of Jesus Christ?

I have.

My first year as a mom was a really hard one for me. And even though I knew that Christ could help me, amid the feedings and nap times, the diapers and time spent building with blocks, I began to feel like Christ was far away.

"What on earth does a man like Him have anything to do with a person like me?" I would think to myself. His name is "Endless," He has worlds without number, and He's perfect. I'm barely surviving the first year of motherhood. My present reality couldn't feel farther from the man I envisioned as I read the scriptures every morning.

Then, that changed. One night, I was prompted to ponder on Christ's life--His mortal, on the earth time. I started imagining all the stuff that didn't make it into the scriptures. I pictured Him growing up in a family--helping His parents do chores around the house or looking after a crying baby sibling. I pictured Him playing with friends--laughing as He ran around or feeling excited at the thought of a girl. I pictured Him as He got older--perhaps creating a family of His own, maybe evening knowing what it is like to stay up all night with a newborn infant just like I was.

I don't know if any of what I imagined really happened, but through my imaginings a change took place in the way I viewed Jesus Christ. While still holding Him in the place of admiration, majesty, power, and honor as before, I also began to see Him in a different light. I began to see Him as a man. A perfect man--yes; but a man nonetheless. Through this transformation, I realized two important things.

First, I realized that Christ lived on this earth with ordinary people just like you and me. He worked with them, talked with them, interacted with them and loved them. He created genuine relationships with those in His life just like we do. And perhaps amid those genuine relationships which He fostered, He had a genuine relationship with someone like me. Perhaps there was someone in Christ's personal mortal life with some of the same flaws I have or who struggled with the same things I struggle with. And even with these flaws and struggles, Christ still interacted with and loved them. He still cared about them. He still kept company with them. When I realized this, I began to feel that maybe if He did interact with someone as ordinary as myself, that perhaps He still would. With me. Suddenly, my ordinariness didn't seem so aloof from Christ's existence after all.

The second thing I realized that evening was that Christ came to know of the mortal experience on His own accord. The scriptures teach that "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3). I was familiar with this scripture before, but I'd always linked Christ's "sorrows" and "grief" with the Atonement. But actually, I began to realize, He came to know of these things before He Atoned for all of our sins. Jesus Christ did not become acquainted with the mortal experience when He knelt down in the Garden of Gethsemane; He became acquainted with it because He had His very own.

As these thoughts entered my mind, I no longer saw Christ as a far-off, perfect being who has only experienced anything that I experience because He has atoned for the sins of the world. Instead, Christ became someone capable of experiencing the same not-so-awesome things I do--not from sin, but just from being alive. And in that moment, more than "just" Atoning for me, I realized that Christ can empathize with me.

Routine and mundane and ordinary are not out of Christ's reach. We are not out of His reach. 

Christ lived as an "ordinary" person, lived with "ordinary" people, and died for every "ordinary" person who's ever lived on this earth.

To me, that's pretty extraordinary.