I’m a history buff. The books I love most tell the stories of great men and women in the past—their histories, fears, dreams, and accomplishments.
One challenge that confronts the historian is how to make sense of so many stories in the world left untold, the millions of people whose lives are summed up by dates on weathered gravestones. What about the ordinary people whose names are now forgotten—the “rabble” as Mr. Potter called them in It’s a Wonderful Life, whom George Bailey described as the ones who do “most of the working and paying and living and dying.”
We don’t know much about common people in the past, because they didn’t leave as much of a record. Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, makes this point as she seeks out information about Laura Ingalls’ family.
“That is always a problem, in writing about poor people. The powerful, the rich and influential, tend to have a healthy sense of their self-importance. They keep things: letters, portraits, and key documents, such as the farm record of Thomas Jefferson, which preserved the number and identity of his slaves. No matter how far they may travel, people of high status and position are likely to be rooted by their very wealth, protecting fragile ephemera in a manse or great home. They have a Mount Vernon, a Monticello, a Montpelier.”
Not so with the Ingalls family and others without power or wealth. Fraser goes on:
“Generation after generation, they traveled light, leaving things behind. Looking for their ancestry is like looking through a glass darkly, images flickering in obscurity. As far as we can tell, from the moment they arrived on this continent they were poor, restless, struggling, constantly moving from one place to another in an attempt to find greater security from hunger and want. And as they moved, the traces of their existence were scattered and lost. Sometimes their lives vanish from view, as if in a puff of smoke. So as we look back across the ages, trying to find what made Laura’s parents who they were, imagine that we’re on a prairie in a storm. The wind is whipping past and everything is obscured.”
What does this mean for the historian? The overwhelming majority of people in the world will never have their stories told. “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” goes the song from the musical Hamilton. For most people, the answer to who will tell their story is no one.
What is life, asks Bill Bryson in At Home: A Short History of Private Life, but “centuries and centuries of people quietly going about their daily business—eating, sleeping, having sex, endeavoring to be amused…. That’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.”
Yes, ordinary people doing ordinary things. People without prestige, power, or position, men and women without titles or wealth or earthly possessions—these are the ones who go unnoticed and overlooked. The world goes on, and they live and die and disappear.
Except that in God’s eyes, no one is too ordinary to go unseen. “Let not the needy be forgotten,” we pray, “nor the hope of the poor be taken away.” Commonness is not invisible to God.
From the Old Testament to the New, from the slave girl Hagar in her moment of desperation who encountered the Lord as El Roi, the “God who sees,” (Genesis 16:13), to the woman who scandalized the Pharisees with an alabaster box at the feet of Jesus—the one about whom Jesus asked Simon the Pharisee, “Do you see this woman?”(Luke 7:44)—the Scriptures testify to the God who takes notice. Page after page in our Bibles list name after name, genealogies and numbers and fathers and sons, and in the genealogy of Jesus, even some of the women whose life circumstances or moral status were in question (Matt 1:1-17)—they are all there, a living testament to the God whose records are meticulous.
God sees what the world overlooks. That’s why the Bible reveals the names of Shiprah and Puah, the spunky midwives who defied the most powerful man in the world, a pharaoh whose name, incidentally, God decides not to record (Exodus 1:15). God sees the ordinary. He looks past the powerful men who commissioned the pyramids and sees the humble service of women who would otherwise go nameless.
This is why Mary, when visiting Elizabeth, praised the Lord for “looking with favor” on the humble condition of His servant (Luke 1:48). God sees. The humble. The meek. The common.
And in every society where Christianity has taken root, the lives of the ordinary have been lifted up. How beautiful that Monticello now tells the stories of slaves, not just the story of Jefferson! The same is true of George Washington’s estate at Mount Vernon. The lifting up of the lowly feels right deep down in our bones, not for superficial and politically correct reasons, but because we know this to be a reflection of common grace in a world rocked and still reeling from the events of Easter morning, when the Savior who was mistaken for the Gardener lifted the head of a woman from Magdala and simply said, “Mary.” (John 20:16)
See the world like Jesus, and you’ll learn what Calvin Miller described as “the art of looking around,” of seeing the regal in the rabble, the reflection of God in the eyes of man. “There are no ordinary people,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.”
And none of these immortals goes unseen by the Father, however overlooked they may be by the world.
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