Reading
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.
Romans 12:1-2 (The Message)
Reflection
If I’m not careful, I have a tendency to think of my spiritual life as mostly consisting of time spent alone. As an introvert, I recognize that this tendency is quite self-interested. I think of my relationship with God as requiring me to step away from everyday life in order to really grow. I need to step away from my family in order to have quiet time alone with God, to read the Bible, and to pray. I need to step away for retreat periodically to get away and reconnect with God.
These are true statements—we do need time alone with God. They become misleading, though, when I think that quiet time with God is the whole of my spiritual life—that my relationship with God is only the time spent alone with God.
Father Ronald Rolheiser describes how one man who lived as a hermit discovered this:
Carlo Carretto, one of the leading spiritual writers of the past half-century, lived for more than a dozen years as a hermit in the Sahara desert. Alone, with only the Blessed Sacrament for company, milking a goat for his food, and translating the bible into the local Bedouin language, he prayed for long hours by himself. Returning to Italy one day to visit his mother, he came to a startling realization: His mother, who for more than thirty years of her life had been so busy raising a family that she scarcely ever had a private minute for herself, was more contemplative than he was.
Despite—or perhaps because of—spending most of her time caring for children, Carretto’s mother developed a deep, contemplative relationship with God without long hours of uninterrupted prayer. This is great news to all of us who are not monks, which I assume is pretty much everyone who will read this.
Christian teachers throughout the millennia and even Jesus himself attest to the necessity of time alone with God, but this is only a part of our Christian life, and not even the greater part. It’s a bit like having a weekly date night and thinking those two hours are your entire marriage. Even a great date matters little if the spouses ignore each other the remainder of the week.
Following Jesus encompasses the entirety of our lives, from our quiet devotional time to our commute to our finances to the way we treat our children. Daily life is the place where God meets us and where we live out our faith, and every moment is an opportunity to increase our trust and reliance on God.
Thomas Merton wrote, “The spiritual life is not a life of quiet withdrawal, a hothouse growth of artificial ascetic practices beyond the reach of people living ordinary lives. It is in the ordinary duties and labors of life that the Christian can and should develop his spiritual union with God.”
As you spend time in prayer today, let it be an opportunity to connect more deeply with God. When you finish and move on to make breakfast or get children dressed or go for a walk, let it be an opportunity to connect more deeply with God. This is how we live out Paul’s instruction: “Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.”
Prayer
God of every moment,
From the holiest
To the most ordinary,
And even the most profane,
You meet us in each of our moments,
Inviting us into deeper relationship with you.
Help us to seek you
In worship and in prayer,
But also in the grocery store
And in the car
And at work
And with our friends,
So that your goodness
Might saturate our lives
And we might live every moment
With you.
Amen.
