I Am A Millennial

I am a millennial. Straight up. Born in ’85 baby. I fit most of the stereotypes boomers love to complain about when it comes to millennials. Mind you my parents are boomers, and your generation raised us to be this way. Just saying.

Yes, I enjoy drinking expensive coffee that takes way too long to brew. Yes, I bought all the flour during lockdown so I could master the art of bread making. Yes, I was duped into believing I had to go to a college that I couldn’t afford only to graduate during a recession. Awesome.

In case you can’t tell I’m still figuring out how to make sarcasm come across via the written word. So, I apologize if I hurt any boomer feelings. I have nothing but love for ya’ll who are about to sell your 3,000 sq. ft. house, which you keep reminding us you bought when you were our age for only $300k, and are now about to sell for a sweet $1.5 million, which will set you up for a sweet and long retirement.

We’ll just sit over here and keep our side hustle going so we can maybe one day buy a starter home for around $500k by the time our kids graduate college. It’s cool. Really. You do you boo.

All sarcasm and low blows aside. I am a millennial for better or worse.

I’m just happy I’m not a Gen Z’er. Praise the Lord! If you ask Gen Z what they want to do when they grow up, you will most likely hear how they will be famous. Not how they want to be famous, but how they will be famous. They really believe they will be famous. Crazy!

Go back almost 20 years and if you were to ask my generation what we wanted to do when we grow up you probably got something like, “I just want to make a difference in the world!” Many of us spent time before or after college serving some cool and hip obscure non-profit. Or those of us in the Christian tradition probably spent time doing some sort of mission work.

A lot of us really did want to make a difference in the world. A lot of us thought we were going to change the world for the better. We were raised to believe we could do anything we put our mind to. We were convinced that we were each special and uniquely gifted to do something great.

I know I was.

My parents are awesome. They really believed and still do believe in me. I could have said I wanted to be an ax murder and they would have said, “You can do it, honey! You’ll be the best ax murder ever. We support you 100%!”

After my first year of college, I took a year off and traveled around the country with a music ministry team. Six kids between the ages of 18 and 23 driving around America spreading the Good News of Jesus through Christian rock music and puppet shows. What could possibly go wrong? Mind you this was before smartphones and Google maps. I still don’t know how we survived. And yes, I am serious about the puppet shows… I know, let’s not talk about it. I still refuse to buy Soren a puppet.  

At the end of the year of traveling for Jesus, I was walking and talking with my friend Elizabeth about what life could look like after team (that is what we called it). We both had a genuine desire to serve God in radical ways. We wanted to do great things for his kingdom. We wanted to do something extraordinary for God. We didn’t want to go back to a normal life. We were ready to say, “Here I am Lord, send me!”

As we were walking and talking, I asked Elizabeth this question. 

“What if the most extraordinary thing we can do is serve God in our ordinary lives?”

We were coming off a crazy year. We were young and full of passion. Not to mention our student loans were still on deferment. The world was ours for the taking. Looking back, I have no idea why I asked that question. It was pushing against everything we were dreaming about.

Fast forward 16 years.

I finished college. I got married. I got a job. I bought a house in the burbs and started a family. She got married to a great guy and they have a few kids. A lot of the people we traveled with got married and have a normal jobs and are busy raising their families.

It seems like over the course of 16 years a lot of us just settled. What happened? Why did we give up on our God-sized dreams? Did we sell our souls to the American dream? Maybe? Or maybe not.  

I really think my generation is the first generation that was raised to believe that we could and should change the world. Only a millennial could write that sentence and believe it.

But I think that ingrained belief has set us up for failure. So many of us have spent our post-high school lives searching for what that one specific thing we are called to give our lives to. We have been searching for over a decade. We are always looking for the next thing. This searching has made it nearly impossible for us to be in the moment. To be present. To be in the here and now.

We are so obsessed with being extraordinary that we have missed the beauty that is found in the ordinary. For many of us ordinary is associated with failure. And many of us feel like total failures.  

I started this blog because I want to reclaim the ordinary. I want to bring dignity and respect back to the 9 to 5. I want to celebrate the family dinner. I want to take my kids on family vacations to a crappy old lake house. Forget Disney World!

What if we don’t have to be extraordinary?  

What if God doesn’t need us to do extraordinary things for his name?

What if he is calling us to be faithful in the ordinary?

What if that is the most extraordinary thing we can do?

This is what I want to give my life to. I want to help ordinary people follow God in their ordinary lives. I am not arguing for laziness or mediocracy by any means. I just want to give my generation permission to be present to where we are at. To give us all permission to embrace the ordinariness of our daily lives. And to help people believe that God can and is using us in extraordinary ways even if it feels completely ordinary.

So, forget extraordinary. I’m going to embrace the ordinary. Who’s with me?

#Extraordinary.

Grace and peace ‘til we rise in glory.