Why I Love The Ordinary Seasons

By Crystal Virgin

"I used to think the important things happened at the milestones. I'm learning they happen in between."

Summer in our house is loud.

It's kids playing together and then fighting, then playing again. It's the playground in the morning heat and the pool in the afternoon. It's messes I just cleaned up reappearing within the hour, chaos I didn't plan for, overwhelm I'm managing somewhere underneath all of it, and the constant, beautiful, exhausting work of raising two small people who are learning everything at once.

It is not Pinterest-worthy. It is not quiet. And I love it more than I know how to say.

There is something about the ordinary seasons — the ones with no big events on the calendar, no holidays to prepare for, no milestone moments to document — that I have come to treasure in a way I didn't expect. The slow pace. The unhurried mornings. The days that don't ask anything dramatic of us and, because of that, leave room for the things that actually matter.

What Slowing Down Actually Looks Like

When life is full and scheduled and moving fast, I parent on autopilot more than I'd like to admit. I get things done, I show up, I move us from one thing to the next. But there isn't always room to linger.

The ordinary seasons give me that room back.

This summer I've had time to let my girls help with things I don't normally have space to let them do. Folding laundry, stirring something on the stove, watering the plants. It takes longer. It is messier. But something happens in those moments that doesn't happen when we're rushing — they feel needed, and I feel present, and we are just together in a way that the busy seasons don't always allow.

There is more time to teach. More time to repair things when they go wrong, which they do, daily. More time to sit beside them and ask what they're thinking about. More time to notice who they're becoming.

That is not nothing. That is everything.

Ordinary Means Content

I've been thinking about what ordinary actually means to me, and the word that keeps coming back is content.

Not bored. Not stagnant. Content — in the old, deep sense of the word. Satisfied with what is. Present to the life that is actually happening rather than the one I'm rushing toward.

I think contentment is one of the quieter spiritual gifts, and one of the harder ones to cultivate. We live in a world that is very good at making the ordinary feel like not enough — like you should be doing more, going to more places, creating more memories, optimizing more of your time. And sometimes I believe it.

But then I watch my daughters chase each other around the backyard in the late afternoon light, shrieking and laughing and completely absorbed in being five and three, and I think: this is it. This is life. Not the destination version of it — the actual, right now, unremarkable Tuesday version of it.

God is in this too. Maybe especially in this.

The Things That Get Overlooked

The ordinary seasons have a way of surfacing what the busy ones bury.

The conversation that happens on the drive to the playground that wouldn't have happened if we were in a hurry. The question my daughter asks at bedtime that opens into a twenty-minute talk about heaven. The moment I catch them being genuinely kind to each other — unprompted, unobserved — and I think: something is working. Something is taking root.

These are not the moments I'll put in a frame. But they are the moments I'll carry. The ones that are quietly shaping who my children are becoming and who I am becoming alongside them.

I used to think the important things happened at the milestones. I'm learning they happen in between.

Before the Busy Comes Back

Fall is coming. The schedules will fill back up, the mornings will get rushed again, and the slow pace of summer will feel like a distant memory by October.

But right now, today, we still have a little of it left. And I want to receive it for what it is — not a gap between the important things, but one of the important things itself.

The ordinary seasons are a gift. They are an invitation to be content, to be present, to find God on Tuesday instead of waiting for Sunday.

I'm trying to accept that invitation before the chaos of fall sweeps it away.

Because the ordinary, it turns out, is where most of life actually lives. And it is more beautiful than we give it credit for.