It is often hardest to be faithful to God in the mediocrity of the day-to-day. My friend Claire recently reminded me the dryness of normalcy is when the purpose of our faith shows itself. This is when we can honestly ask and answer: are we in it for how our faith benefits us, or are we in it to serve the Lord?

Recently, while thinking about being in my twenties and all this encompasses, I realized we don't know anything about Jesus while he was in his twenties. (Perhaps that was a slight oversight by the writers; I'm just saying, it would have been helpful.) Jesus leaves the temple with his parents as a 12-year-old in the Gospels and re-emerges as a fully confident, traveling teacher at age 30. There is nothing of the anguish or delight of trying to understand life and how he fits into it during his teenage years or his twenties.

For 18 years, there are no notable happenings in the life of God that the Gospel writers report. Which leaves me to think that Jesus, during this time, was living the dailiness of life, experiencing the routine of what it sometimes means to be human. Luke 2:51-52 (NAB) says he went back home with his parents after they found him in the temple and was obedient to them, and he "advanced [in] wisdom and age and favor before God and man."

Was Jesus "just" living a normal life during these years? Was he spending his time learning, living in a town with people, being a carpenter like his father? Was he experiencing how to be a son, a cousin, a friend? He must have been studying Scripture and practicing prayer; he emerges from his twenties resolute in purpose, aligned with God's will. He is ready to start his ministry; he is sure this is how God is calling him.

Perhaps this silence, this largest portion of Jesus' life Scripture says nothing about, was a gift. A gift of getting to live normally and experience what it is to be human in the mundane. A gift of rest, reprieve and freedom that was not time wasted, but time spent in preparation for the purpose that was to come. Jesus' confidence at his Baptism, where the Gospel writers pick the story back up again, is testament to faithfulness and the Holy Spirit's power at work through us.

Simone Weil wrote in "Waiting for God," "Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul."

As my friend Claire reminded me, it is often in the dailiness that we are refined.

I think, no matter how old we are, the hidden years of Jesus' life can teach us something: if we persistently seek God and make ourselves available to God, the Holy Spirit will do in us, with us and through us what needs to be done.

Also, God's will often is in the ordinary, in being faithful to God and to love in the day-to-day. This, after all, is more challenging because it's not glamorous.

Maybe this is what makes it miraculous.