The Spanish author and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo coined the term “intrahistoria.” The term does not refer to “the history populated by kings and generals,” which is taught in our schools, but to “the quiet and unrecorded lives of ordinary people who are born, who work, who breed, and who die leaving scarcely a trace of their existence behind.”

The quiet lives of ordinary people move humanity to a degree that the noisy lives of kings and generals cannot compare. They are to history what a southerly current is to the Mississippi. Winds may blow from other directions and roil the waters. Kings and generals may sweep across the world like storms on the surface of history, but the current of all things will continue to move towards its goal.

In the coming age, the lives of many kings and generals, tyrants and heroes, will be forgotten like a December snowfall is by June, while the quiet lives of ordinary people will be a cause for joy and celebration. Names that never appeared on the A-list (or even B- or C-list) of celebrities will be written in the Book of Life.

One such name is Kenneth West. I first met “Brother West” when I was in my early twenties and he was in his seventies. My wife and I were on a trajectory toward overseas service with our denomination. We expected to work among the poor in Latin America, but before we could do so we needed to put in two years of “home service” in the U.S. I was placed as a pastor in a small church in a rustbelt city in northeastern Ohio.

“Brother West” was one of the first people I met. He was hard to miss. He was about 6’5” and weighed over 200 pounds. He smiled often, though he was missing some teeth, following a surgery on his jaw that had severed a nerve. He wore simple, dark clothes, but there was a light in his eyes.

As I got to know him, I learned that he had lived an unusual life. He had owned a farm that bordered a lake in Idaho during the forties, where he lived alone and raised his own food and milled his own wheat. He had previously worked in a mine in the Pacific Northwest and had spent time in rural Alaska. At age thirty-five, he came to faith in Jesus Christ, which changed the direction of his life.

He ended up in northeastern Ohio, where he pastored a small holiness congregation. When I met him, he had retired from pastoral work and had moved to our small church. He taught Sunday School and played the piano when needed. He also played a guitar that he had made himself.

I can’t remember how it happened, but I began to meet with Ken West on Thursday afternoons. He would stop at church on his way home from work. (Though he was well into his seventies and didn’t, I think, need to work, he was employed as a custodian for a local business.) He and I would pray together and spend an hour or so talking. I learned from him that a man with an ardent spirit could also have a sharp mind, wide-ranging interests, and an openness to new opportunities.

For some people, pastoral ministry is not an aid but an obstacle to spiritual formation. Scripture becomes a source for sermonizing rather than a guide to living. Busyness militates against prayer and thoughtfulness. Instead of enhancing friendships, church board meetings often make them more difficult. But in Ken West I found a man who had years of experience as a pastor and still had a fire in his belly to know God and love in his heart for people.

Ordinary people may leave no trace in the writings of academic historians, but in the chronicle that God is recording, people like Ken West figure prominently. They are not a momentary squall sweeping across the surface of history. They are the current on which all things move to their glorious fulfillment when everything has been brought together under the authority of Christ.