We were just eating and enjoying family breakfast as we always do. Everyone mostly quiet. And the firstborn opens his wise little mouth and tells me this, “This toast reminds me of Jesus’ body,” examining it further he continued, “and this jam reminds me of His blood.” And I sat there marveling. Really? I was not presently thinking about Jesus, just food (warm smile). So I thought….

What if the everyday common reminded us of the everyday sacred like that?

What if we never felt quite so far from God and realized that He is near and His sacrifice is what we are living on? His Word, our bread. His body, our blessing. What if all the common things led us to Christ? If the everyday doesn’t lead us to the praise of God, what’s the alternative? If we aren’t blessing Him at all times, then we aren’t blessing Him much of the time, because we all live life in the routine, the mundane, in the absolute ordinary.

We prepare meals, fold piles of laundry, scrub floors, knock down cobwebs. We dust, we greet our neighbors, check the mail, trim the bushes, mow the lawn…. We do ordinary things in rapid succession everyday, so if we do not easily think of Jesus in the midst of it all, we are missing our joy.

If we miss Jesus in the everyday mundane, we are missing our joy.

That firstborn just looking at a piece of toast and connecting his thoughts and the activity of eating with God, and this is simple and profound and it’s the Christian life. To continually come back to God in all things, to stop hiding and wandering away from Him, that’s what it means to be a Jesus seeker, to take up your cross and follow. And how many times have we missed it? In an absolute hurry to get to the next thing, how often do we miss Him?

Maybe me and you can just cease all this striving and be still and know our God. Maybe we can turn our eyes upward and let the visible lead us closer to our invisible God. Maybe then we come to see that what is seen is temporal and what is unseen is eternal.