Reconciling God’s Promises with Life

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Elizabeth

I am deep into planning for our upcoming school year, so this week and next will be from the archives. Enjoy the memories!

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

God’s Words are often difficult to understand.

I don’t know why this is so, why God wouldn’t want us to easily comprehend Him and His ways, but that is a wondering for another time.

All throughout His Word, God makes promises about what will happen when we approach Him. He makes promises about how He answers when we ask Him for something. He makes promises about what He will give if only we would ask.

Sometimes those promises seem to be contradicted by the reality we can see.

Jesus tells us that if we ask, we will receive.

Jesus tells us that if we ask together with others, we will receive.

Jesus tells us that if we ask in His name, we will receive.

Jesus promises that if we are just persistent enough, just have faith enough, just beg Him hard enough with our faces to the ground and our tears falling like blood in desperation, He will give us what we ask for.

This is not what we live.

This is not what we live when a young mother dies of cancer. This is not what we live when a child lives her life in chronic pain and then dies. This is not what we live when a family is torn apart by depression.

So how do we reconcile this? How do we reconcile the promise with the life lived in this world?

Because Jesus also made other promises.

He promised that we would have trouble in this world, that storms would come against us, that we would be hated by this world in which we live.

Did He lie? Is He crazy?

Or is there something deeper within His words that we have trouble understanding?

Is there something deeper that we cannot see from our place here on earth, tethered as we are to the physical, unable to grasp the spiritual all around us?

From one who is stumbling along in the dark with the rest of you, here is what I believe based on what I read in God’s Word as a whole.

What God does is not always what I want. What God allows is sometimes more than I can comprehend. What God gives is often too hard for me.

What God accomplishes is always best.

Best for me, best for someone else, best for our world. Just…best.

Not painless, not comfortable, not happy.

Best.

I know from my own experience as a parent that best is often painful and unpleasant. My children often are unhappy (to put it ridiculously mildly) with what I decide would be best.

When Jesus tells us to ask in His name, rather than His name being a magical incantation to get what we want, perhaps it is a way of living, of remaining in Him as He is in His Father.

When Jesus tells us to ask alongside of others, rather than it being a way to coerce others into asking for what we want so that we can manipulate God, perhaps it is a way to allow the Holy Spirit to work in our hearts in a way that cannot happen on our own.

I don’t know.

As my Papa would say, “Well, I’ll tell you…

I don’t know.”

Here’s what I do know.

When I look at God’s Word in its entirety, whether that be the whole of Scripture or the whole of Jesus’ life, I see a God who is ultimate power and who is ultimate love.

And I see a God who has a plan that makes absolutely no sense while in the middle of it all. A plan that seems, frankly, insane while you are watching it all unfold.

A plan that, at its ending, is better, is more beautiful, is more glorious than anything I could have imagined or asked for.

A plan that is best.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And He was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”… And He said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

And looking up, they saw that the stone had been rolled back – it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; He is not here. See the place where they laid Him. But go, tell His disciples and Peter that He is going before you to Galilee. There you will see Him, just as He told you.

I think perhaps that is why He gave us Jesus. To show us what the end will be even when the middle seems to be crushing the life out of us.

That end?

Best.

Pay Attention

Posted on June 2, 2017 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Tell us of God.

Look at the lilies of the field. Watch the birds of the air.

Show us what God is like.

Once there were women kneading yeast into their bread.

We want to know about God.

There were these workers, see, who were lining up for their pay at the end of the day, and some had worked all day while others had been there only an hour.

What does God want from us?

Once upon a time, there was a businessman who had been dishonest with his boss and was about to lose his job, so he called in all of his master’s debtors.

We want to see God.

Pay attention to the sparrow that falls to the ground.

When people ask to know more about God, the Son of God answers by telling them to pay attention to the world all around.

There is nothing that is separate from God. Nothing that can be deemed secular. Nothing of which could be said, That has nothing to do with Him.

We can learn as much about God by paying attention to the world around us as we can by reading Scripture.

The Holy Spirit within us whispers that both are created by the Word and speak of the Father.

Pay attention!

Scripture speaks of truth and truth is what happens in our world.

Even when what happens is not right and good, it speaks of God.

People can learn as much about the ways of God from business deals gone bad or sparrows falling to the ground as they can from…knowing the Ten Commandments by heart. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor in An Altar in the World

What happens in our world is truth and Jesus is truth and if we want to know God we only have to look around to see Him.

Pay attention.

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This Beautiful Ordinary

Posted on May 26, 2017 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Ordinary.

Is there such a thing?

I’m tempted to think so.

In the midst of the dishes and laundry and cleaning toilets, snotty noses and bedtime stories, the routine can seem mundane, dull…

Ordinary.

Until I really look. Until I really stop. Until I really see what is around me.

Nothing is ordinary.

Those dishes mean a miracle of earth producing food that can be purchased and eaten at our table.

That laundry means a miracle of cotton growing from the ground and being woven into fabric that keeps our bodies warm in this cold winter.

This filthy toilet means an act of service, a deliberate dying to myself in a beautiful sacrifice for my family.

Those snotty noses mean a miracle of beautiful, sturdy bodies that are growing so very quickly.

These bedtime stories mean a miracle of imagination, of minds that eagerly search for and grasp new meanings and ideas every day.

These very things that seem so ordinary are the very fabric of the miracle that is my life.

The Christian faith does not simply, or even mainly, propose a few additional facts about the world. Rather, belief in the Christian God invites a new way to understand everything. ~ Andrew Davison in Imaginative Apologetics

Because all is created, because all is love, than nothing is ordinary. Everything is sacred.

I cannot separate my life into ordinary parts and miraculous parts, into secular parts and sacred parts.

Without Christ, nothing was made that has been made. In Christ, all things hold together.

No matter what surrounds you, it is not ordinary, it is not solely of this world.

No matter how tempted I am to name something as mundane, as secular, it is not so.

Nothing that God has created is ordinary.

All is miracle. All is sacred.

There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. ~ Madeleine L’Engle in Walking on Water

edited from the archives

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His is a Terrible Love

Posted on July 1, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

There is darkness in all of us.

It is a part of being human to feel the weightiness of the absence of God.

And there is an absence of God in this world. The Bible we profess speaks of it.

The prophets and psalms all speak of Him who is not there when He is most needed. The author of Hebrews strips all of our pretense away when he speaks of Noah, of Abraham, of Gideon and David and the rest who “all died without having received what was promised.”

It is the anguish of glimpsing the briefest glow of the light of presence without being allowed to bask in the sun.

It is a terrible love, this love of God for us. It is a love that means His absence as often as it means His presence. It is a love that Jesus speaks of when He utters in His darkest moment the piercing cry of Where are you, God?

You who are in heaven for us, why are you not down here in hell with us?

It is a terrible love that speaks of carrying our own cross, that utters the truth that all ye labor and are heavy laden.

It is a terrible love that wounds, or allows the wounds, before the healing can come.

It is a terrible love that weeps at the death of a friend, of Lazarus. They are tears that speak of the absence of God. Of the part of God in the very body of Jesus who would not save the life of His own friend.

This is, after all, the Gospel. It is terrible before it is beautiful. It is darkness before it is light.

We all labor and are heavy laden. We work so very hard to pretend that it is not so, but even when we are appalled at the darkness, we cannot help but listen to Jesus because we see in Him not only the darkness of being without God but the glorious light of what it looks like to be with God.

It is out of the absence of God that He becomes most present. It is out of the whirlwind, out of the storm that God first speaks to Job, answering Him not with answers but with Himself.

It is out of darkness that we first begin to perceive the light.

Paul says that “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are”, and he points to “the apparent emptiness of the world where God belongs and to how the emptiness starts to echo like an empty shell after a while until you can hear in it the still, small voice of the sea, hear strength in weakness, victory in defeat, presence in absence.” ~ Frederick Buechner

The cross itself is a symbol of defeat before it is a symbol of victory and it, too, speaks of the absence of God.

When the absence is all that we see, when we are tempted to see in it a well of doubt that could lead us into atheism or at least into becoming agnostic, there is yet something else to see as well.

It was out of the darkness and absence that God first spoke. “In the beginning…the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”

Darkness is upon our faces as well, a void that sinks deep into our hearts. And perhaps it is necessary for the reality of this darkness to fold itself around us for us to be able to glimpse the reality of the word that God spoke into the darkness, “God said let there be light, and there was light.”

It is a terrible love that is offered to us, and perhaps we must face the truth of the terribleness before we are capable of accepting the love.

Art credits: Three Crosses sketch by Rembrandt; Supernova photo by NASA

edited from the archives

Five Years of Writing

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Elizabeth

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Five years.

Five years of writing in this space.

Much has happened in five years.

Our family has moved.

We have doubled our number of children.

We have lost loved ones and gained many more.

My writing has improved; I grow more and more into my own writing-self as I write each week.

My blog has grown, slowly rather than by giant leaps and I find that this is how it should be. I am, after all, a mommy to four very little girls.

I find that I am content with my smallness, content simply to write with no expectations for more. Yet sometimes I wonder if God is calling me to more.

It is a fine balance, this staying content. To not feel greedy for more while also not being fearful of the same possibility. How well I achieve this high wire act depends on my day and how much sleep I had the night before.

In honor of this five year mark, and in preparation for sending out my book to be read and judged, next week I will begin a quest for more subscribers, a quest in which I hope you will join me. (It will involve giveaways…a few of my favorite things!)

Perhaps God has more public spaces prepared for these words I write; perhaps He desires for me to continue writing for just a few. While I suspect that I will feel a bit of relief if smallness is His choice, I only want to remain faithful to Him.

In the meantime, and regardless of the result, I will continue to practice my art, being faithful to cultivate whatever talent has been given. I will continue to learn how to craft my words, enjoying the beauty of weaving words and visual art together and enjoying the search for wisdom and understanding that I pray lies beneath my weavings. I will continue to explore this small life around me as well as the larger culture of the world in an attempt to love God better.

I will write, as I have written every week for five years, of the way that God makes all things sacred. I hope that you will continue with me and I pray that you will be helped by these words.

As I end every blogging year, I finish with this prayer:

Whatever the reason for my writing, here I am in this space. I will continue to obey, even though it is hard and often causes my heart to feel fear. I will write. God will listen. I pray He will continue to be pleased.

This Waiting Made Sacred

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Elizabeth

We all go through times of waiting.

Perhaps all of our lives are spent waiting.

My waiting usually looks impatient and discontent.

My waiting usually is spent trying to arrive.

If all of our lives are supposed to be made sacred, how can this waiting become sacred? How can this waiting become beautiful?

If all of our lives are meant for God’s glory, how can we lean into this waiting instead of resisting and pulling back?

Henri Nouwen, a Dutch theologian, writes about waiting as an active kind of waiting.

He speaks of those at the beginning of the Gospels (Mary, Elizabeth, Zechariah, Simeon, Anna) as waiting with a sense of promise. A promise that allows them to wait. Nouwen says that the secret of waiting is the faith that something has already begun.

Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening where you are and that you want to be present to it. ~ Waiting for God

It is a waiting that knows the waited-for thing has already begun.

Like planting a seed and waiting for it to emerge. Like seeing the plus sign on the pregnancy test and waiting to hold the baby in your arms.

It is a knowing that there are beautiful things happening in the darkness. It is a knowing that even though you cannot see, it is growing.

It is a giving up of control because none of us quite know what we are waiting for when God is involved.

Rather than waiting for a job or a baby or a spouse, we are waiting for whatever God chooses to give. We hold our expectations and dreams lightly, with cupped open hands, knowing that whatever comes is ultimately the best thing of all.

It is a giving up of control but it is a gift of surprise and adventure, of something even better than what you had imagined.

It is a waiting with eyes open and breath held in expectation. Expectation of beauty and excitement.

This is a waiting I can lean in to. A beautiful, sacred waiting that glorifies God.

Art credit: Final photograph of crab apple blossoms by Kirk Sewell

Small is Sacred

Posted on December 11, 2015 by Elizabeth

These feel like frightening times. The world at large keeps crashing into my small frame of reference.

It doesn’t feel as though I can do anything against the hatred, fear, and violence that keeps cropping up all around us.

Part of my helpless feeling comes from my own world currently being very small.

My days revolve around nursing babies, napping toddlers, and newly-become elementary students.

What I have to give, what I have to offer to stem this dark tide is small.

Our season in life leaves little room for discretionary income and time.

I wonder if anything I do makes much difference.

In this season of Advent, this season of preparing ourselves for the biggest Gift of all, the gifts that I bring to our God, to our world, seem insignificant, tiny.

Leaving my own book to read one more story aloud? Trifling.

Baking cookies to give to our neighbors? Inconsequential.

Giving up a meal out to purchase toys for a toy drive? Insufficient.

Yet as I read still another version of the Christmas Story to my girls I am reminded that an act does not have to be big to be sacred.

Small acts of kindness to those I know, small smiles and gentle words in passing to those who seem different from us, small gifts to strangers are all as sacred and beautiful as the act of preaching to thousands.

You don’t have to have endless resources to be able to change the world. You don’t have to accomplish something enormous to let a glimpse of light in to the darkness.

After all, what is Advent but the remembrance that it was the smallest, most fragile gift of all that was sacred enough to change our world forever.

The Brilliant Colors of Jesus

Posted on November 13, 2015 by Elizabeth

Autumn is my favorite time of year.

The cool, crisp air striking your skin, the blazing bonfire scent filling you up with every breath, the crunch of leaves underfoot. Most of all, the leaves. The dazzling display of fiery colors that fill your sight in every direction.

Those radiant colors that inspire poetry and art are, I recently discovered (or perhaps rediscovered as I feel sure I probably learned this at one time during my elementary school career), actually the true colors of the leaves. The green that we see for most of the year, the green that fills up our springtime and summer, is just the tree-feeding chlorophyll covering up the brightness. It is not until the tree is no longer making food, not until the leaves are beginning to die, that their true colors blaze out.

I want that.

Oh, how I desperately want that.

As I age, as my body moves closer to death, I want for the colors of this life to begin to fade away and the colors of Jesus in me to blaze out.

From the moment we choose life in Jesus, we are changing.

Little by little, day by day, the green of this world starts to fade.

Little by little, choice by choice, the light of the life to come begins to shine.

The older I become, the more I want people to look at me and see Jesus. I want the colors of me, the colors of my natural self, to fade away. I want the brilliance of Jesus to take over.

At the end of my life, my body will be bent and wrinkled, dry and withered. My prayer is that by then my own self will be so one with Christ that when people look into my eyes, they are taken aback with the dazzling display of Jesus that fills their sight.

What are some of the lessons that Mother Nature is teaching you about our common Creator? She speaks loudly if we will only listen.

For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. ~ Romans 1.20

Whatever Is Necessary

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Elizabeth

What do we do with the truly awful things of this life? With a loss of love, with a deep constant pain, with a fear that pervades our depths?

It is dangerous to attribute it all to our not loving God enough, although perhaps we could say that is often the case.

Our faith is, as CS Lewis once said, often only a house of cards.

He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down. ~ CS Lewis A Grief Observed

We walk around, believing that our foundation is solid, but in truth we are playing at faith. Our house needs a good breath of wind, for if it is never allowed to fall, it can never be rebuilt to last for eternity.

If my faith is only steady enough to endure this life, wouldn’t I want God to blow it down with whatever wind is necessary so that I can endure to the end?

I’m not sure.

I think I want this, but fear holds me back. Fear of what God, in His infinite love and wisdom, might deal out.

He never promised to be gentle.

Is any pain at all worthwhile if it brings us closer to Him, closer to the sort of life with God that Jesus lived?

The given answer should be yes, but I hesitate and pull back at the brink of giving it.

Which means that I do not yet desire God above all else.

Not truly.

Do many of us?

We give our hearts over to so many things other than God. . .As long as our happiness is tied to the things we can lose, we are vulnerable. ~ John Eldredge Walking With God

If God is truly enough, if He is what we need for happiness, for contentment, then we should be able to let go of those we love, endure that deep pain, rise above the pervasive fear, because we still have Him.

It is God who remains when all else is gone. It is God who fills us up with Himself so that we do not need anything or anyone else.

In truth, when we lose, when we hurt, we have more of Him than we have in the comfort and in the ease. That in itself should make us turn from the easy way.

For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him…that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. ~ Philippians 3. 7-12

If only I could believe that. Truly know it and live it.

But without the pain of learning it.

The Weight of Holy

Posted on September 18, 2015 by Elizabeth

I am evangelical all the way down to my toes.

In many ways I am proud of my faith tradition. I will be the first to admit that we have our troubles, things with which I don’t agree, but there are many things I think we get right.

I am grateful for our emphasis on the Bible, our insistence on a personal relationship with God, our reliance on Jesus’ sacrifice to make us clean.

There are a few pieces of Christianity I think we miss out on, though.

One of those pieces is our loss of depth when we focus on individual relationship with God over communal relationships with God. This is a subject I’ll have to explore in a different post.

For this week?

We also lose a sense of the sacredness and holiness of God when we focus solely on a personal, intimate relationship with God.

In our casual services, in our emphasis on God as friend, we forget sometimes how other God is. He is holy, which means separate. Apart.

He is not like us. He is so far above us that we cannot begin to comprehend Him. We are not worthy to stand in His presence. We cannot meet His gaze. To see His face is to die.

We attended a Lutheran church service a few Sundays ago.

I was struck by the ceremony, the honor and respect with which they treat all things belonging to God: in particular, the Word and the Lord’s Supper.

Every move was accompanied by a genuflect before the table holding the Bible and the Communion. There was a reverence to that portion of the service that was weighty.

There was a hush of holiness over the proceedings that I do not see in my own tradition. As each person came up to receive the bread, they were looked in the eye and told “This is His body which was broken for you”. As each person came up to receive the cup, they were looked in the eye and told, “This is His blood which was shed for you”. As each child came past with their parents, a hand was laid on their head and a blessing given on them.

It was holy and it was personal.

As each server of the bread and wine came to their turn to be the receiver, they bowed before the Word and the Communion. Not in worship of those items, but in reverence for the One they represent. In a recognition that God is holy and has declared these things to be sacred.

Our whole lives are to be sacred. I recognize that there is no separation between sacred and secular in our everyday lives. That is the premise behind this very blog. Yet it serves us well to be reminded every now and then of the absolute holiness of the One who makes everything sacred.

Nothing is sacred without God.

Sometimes we forget how much more sacred is the Giver than the gifts.

Sometimes we lose the weightiness of holy and in that shallowness can float upward until we believe that we are closer to God than we truly are.

…and behold, a throne stood in heaven, with one seated on the throne. And he who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian, and around the throne was a rainbow that had the appearance of an emerald…From the throne came flashes of lightening, and rumblings and peals of thunder…Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!

All photographs this week are by Kirk Sewell. You can purchase canvas prints of many of his gorgeous photograph artwork on his website: photographybysewell.webs.com

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

God’s Words are often difficult to understand.

I don’t know why this is so, why God wouldn’t want us to easily comprehend Him and His ways, but that is a wondering for another time.

All throughout His Word, God makes promises about what will happen when we approach Him. He makes promises about how He answers when we ask Him for something. He makes promises about what He will give if only we would ask.

Sometimes those promises seem to be contradicted by the reality we can see.

Jesus tells us that if we ask, we will receive.

Jesus tells us that if we ask together with others, we will receive.

Jesus tells us that if we ask in His name, we will receive.

Jesus promises that if we are just persistent enough, just have faith enough, just beg Him hard enough with our faces to the ground and our tears falling like blood in desperation, He will give us what we ask for.

This is not what we live.

This is not what we live when a young mother dies of cancer. This is not what we live when a child lives her life in chronic pain and then dies. This is not what we live when a family is torn apart by depression.

So how do we reconcile this? How do we reconcile the promise with the life lived in this world?

Because Jesus also made other promises.

He promised that we would have trouble in this world, that storms would come against us, that we would be hated by this world in which we live.

Did He lie? Is He crazy?

Or is there something deeper within His words that we have trouble understanding?

Is there something deeper that we cannot see from our place here on earth, tethered as we are to the physical, unable to grasp the spiritual all around us?

From one who is stumbling along in the dark with the rest of you, here is what I believe based on what I read in God’s Word as a whole.

What God does is not always what I want. What God allows is sometimes more than I can comprehend. What God gives is often too hard for me.

What God accomplishes is always best.

Best for me, best for someone else, best for our world. Just…best.

Not painless, not comfortable, not happy.

Best.

I know from my own experience as a parent that best is often painful and unpleasant. My children often are unhappy (to put it ridiculously mildly) with what I decide would be best.

When Jesus tells us to ask in His name, rather than His name being a magical incantation to get what we want, perhaps it is a way of living, of remaining in Him as He is in His Father.

When Jesus tells us to ask alongside of others, rather than it being a way to coerce others into asking for what we want so that we can manipulate God, perhaps it is a way to allow the Holy Spirit to work in our hearts in a way that cannot happen on our own.

I don’t know.

As my Papa would say, “Well, I’ll tell you…

I don’t know.”

Here’s what I do know.

When I look at God’s Word in its entirety, whether that be the whole of Scripture or the whole of Jesus’ life, I see a God who is ultimate power and who is ultimate love.

And I see a God who has a plan that makes absolutely no sense while in the middle of it all. A plan that seems, frankly, insane while you are watching it all unfold.

A plan that, at its ending, is better, is more beautiful, is more glorious than anything I could have imagined or asked for.

A plan that is best.

I think perhaps that is why He gave us Jesus. To show us what the end will be even when the middle seems to be crushing the life out of us.

That end?

Best.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Tell us of God.

Look at the lilies of the field. Watch the birds of the air.

Show us what God is like.

Once there were women kneading yeast into their bread.

We want to know about God.

There were these workers, see, who were lining up for their pay at the end of the day, and some had worked all day while others had been there only an hour.

What does God want from us?

Once upon a time, there was a businessman who had been dishonest with his boss and was about to lose his job, so he called in all of his master’s debtors.

We want to see God.

Pay attention to the sparrow that falls to the ground.

When people ask to know more about God, the Son of God answers by telling them to pay attention to the world all around.

There is nothing that is separate from God. Nothing that can be deemed secular. Nothing of which could be said, That has nothing to do with Him.

We can learn as much about God by paying attention to the world around us as we can by reading Scripture.

The Holy Spirit within us whispers that both are created by the Word and speak of the Father.

Pay attention!

Scripture speaks of truth and truth is what happens in our world.

Even when what happens is not right and good, it speaks of God.

People can learn as much about the ways of God from business deals gone bad or sparrows falling to the ground as they can from…knowing the Ten Commandments by heart. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor in An Altar in the World

What happens in our world is truth and Jesus is truth and if we want to know God we only have to look around to see Him.

Pay attention.

To hear my blog post read aloud, just click the play button. If you’re reading this in an email, you may have to click here to hear the post on my site.

Ordinary.

Is there such a thing?

I’m tempted to think so.

In the midst of the dishes and laundry and cleaning toilets, snotty noses and bedtime stories, the routine can seem mundane, dull…

Ordinary.

Until I really look. Until I really stop. Until I really see what is around me.

Nothing is ordinary.

Those dishes mean a miracle of earth producing food that can be purchased and eaten at our table.

That laundry means a miracle of cotton growing from the ground and being woven into fabric that keeps our bodies warm in this cold winter.

This filthy toilet means an act of service, a deliberate dying to myself in a beautiful sacrifice for my family.

Those snotty noses mean a miracle of beautiful, sturdy bodies that are growing so very quickly.

These bedtime stories mean a miracle of imagination, of minds that eagerly search for and grasp new meanings and ideas every day.

These very things that seem so ordinary are the very fabric of the miracle that is my life.

The Christian faith does not simply, or even mainly, propose a few additional facts about the world. Rather, belief in the Christian God invites a new way to understand everything. ~ Andrew Davison in Imaginative Apologetics

Because all is created, because all is love, than nothing is ordinary. Everything is sacred.

I cannot separate my life into ordinary parts and miraculous parts, into secular parts and sacred parts.

Without Christ, nothing was made that has been made. In Christ, all things hold together.

No matter what surrounds you, it is not ordinary, it is not solely of this world.

No matter how tempted I am to name something as mundane, as secular, it is not so.

Nothing that God has created is ordinary.

All is miracle. All is sacred.