Last week, I mentioned the nonverbal sacredness of time spent working in the kitchen. Many kinds of prayer overlap with each other, so I don’t think it’s an accident that the delight of nonverbally experiencing kitchen time with God happens to overlap with the joy of praying through and about the ordinary stuff of life. The stories we tell children tend to highlight exciting, out-of-the-ordinary adventures. However, unless you live in a profession as melodramatic as mine (I once went straight from a deathbed to a party), the vast majority of your life will revolve around fairly routine, mundane tasks. Even with my melodramatic profession, I have quite a few ordinary tasks, too. Actually, the melodrama has caused me to treasure these less exciting activities. We’re not designed to live with intense melodrama 24/7. So how do we relate prayer to the ordinary? There are two ways: to do the ordinary as prayer and to bring the ordinary to God in prayer. God gave work to human beings in the garden of Eden, before sin. This implies that we are designed to have occupations and ordinary tasks. Work is how we participate in God’s creation. Think about it: every kind of human work involves rearranging, appreciating, or caring for what God made. While it’s easy to see how the creative, teaching, and healthcare professions pour their lives into acts of prayer incarnated, it’s also important to see this in manual, unskilled, or unpaid labor. If you work in a factory making boxes all week to feed your family, each box you assemble is an act of prayer you do for that family. The medieval craftsman who built the European cathedrals understood this well. They would put loving detail into parts of their work that the people visiting the church would never see. Why? Because they built it for the God they worshiped, not just for the people who would worship in the church they were building. One of my favorite rooms in every church is its kitchen. Church kitchens have a pleasant feeling baked into them that gives the impression of the women and men who have put hours of near-anonymous labor into feeding the people they care about. Even in an empty church kitchen, I can feel the echoes of the bustling before potlucks and half-hear the cheerful chatter from clean-up after large events. This may be no substitute for the formal worship that happens in the sanctuary, but it is an act of worship all the same. A church’s sanctuary is its head, but its kitchen is its heart. Its countertops, drying racks, knives and stoves are saturated with almost as much prayer as the pews and Bibles in the sanctuary. When it comes to praying about the ordinary, nothing is too ordinary to bring to God’s attention. If you think about it, the custom of praying briefly before our meals is designed to encourage that. We eat three times a day--the only thing more ordinary is breathing or drinking water. A meal warrants a prayer because it is so ordinary, and so often the most ordinary things are also the most essential. Until I got married, it was my habit to do my devotionals at the end of the day to put the day to rest. This is a good schedule for people who either do not have the luxury of quiet early morning hours or who sleep alone and want to enjoy God’s companionship before nodding off. I switched this order after I got married, and it led to the interesting dynamic where I find myself praying through my schedule and tasks for the day before they happen. Some of these prayers would look a little silly to someone outside looking in, but I’ve found them incredibly helpful. On days where I pray for patience to deal with a specific challenge, I can feel the difference. On days where I pray for God to help me focus and use my time well, I’m usually more productive. On days where I pray for God to make me wise about how to take care of my body, I make measurably better choices about it. No portion of your day is too small or too mundane to bring to God in prayer. No act of ordinary labor is too trivial to be used as an act of prayer. God may be capable of great and dramatic miracles, but He is also the God of the mundane, the quiet, and the everyday. May you meet Him as you go about your day.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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