ordinary time

following the liturgical calendar we are in what's called ordinary time. we just got through advent and christmas and lent and easter are still over a month ahead, and so it is this in between time that i am finding myself recovering from christmas and planning for lent and easter.
it is also in this period of time that i am realizing that i have been leading worship and preaching weekly for about 20 weeks. there was one week when i was out of town and another week when the children did the christmas program at one of the churches... but i still needed to prepare and preach at the other church that week... so 19 weeks in total (16 in a row). Now I realize that that's not a record by any means, but i do recognize that perhaps i am in a lull or a funk right now... it feels as though I've been preaching the same of message for the past 3 weeks now (which, of course, i didn't)... that the routine of prepping for worship and preaching a sermon week by week may become... well, ordinary.
yet the act of worship and the delivery of a message should not by any means be ordinary. when we enter into worship service on Sunday morning, we intentionally come before the living God and offer up our worship to him. when the preacher stands in the pulpit and delivers the sermon, that is the culmination of a week or more of wrestling with the text and dancing with the Spirit to bring about a word for the congregation. All this is wrapped in the mystery of God at work in our lives and in our worship on Sunday mornings. That is anything but ordinary.
so perhaps this week things need to be shaken up... preach from a different text, sing different music...something to wake us up out of our snowy, mid-winter slumber... because if we are in Christ, we are not living in ordinary times...