Photo by Jordan Hill

I am currently in a class titled “Christian Spirituality in Everyday Life” and we are currently discussing the topic of discovering the sacred in what may seem like the mundane – experiencing God’s presence in ordinary life. A basic foundation is the truth that God is “omni-present”, everywhere at all times. Consider Psalm 139:7-12. But, how do we learn to “practice the Presence” in ordinary times? It can be “easy” to experience God when we are at worship or participating in communion, but what about when we are at home doing chores or at the office keeping up with work?

I think the Message translation of Romans 12:1-2 offers us some guidance here.

So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.

Perhaps one way we learn to be attentive to God’s presence in everything is to very practically take our normal activities and offer them to God. Sometimes, I know from experience, that we can feel overwhelmed at this proposal as we try to jump in feet first and attempt to transform the way we see everything all at once. While God can surely open our eyes in dramatic ways, most of the time this is probably akin to quickly taking off your sunglasses on a bright day. Our eyes take time to adjust.

Perhaps a more practical approach would be to look at our daily, ordinary life and prayerfully choose just one activity in which we will practice God’s presence on a daily basis – “fixing our attention on God”. What would it look like to begin to practice God’s presence on our daily commute? The daily task of cleaning dishes? The evening dog walk? The morning cup of coffee?

Can we take these “everyday, ordinary life” activities and begin to invite God into them (really he is already there) and “embrace what God is doing” in these simple times? I think it is this type of practical approach that will enable us to awaken to the presence of God and become sensitive to God’s activity in and around us.

What do you think? What is one daily activity that you could begin to see as sacred time? How might you go about experiencing God in it?