When Your Life Is Mostly Full of Ordinary Things

The sun gleams and warms my face as March breezes blow. Daffodils nod.

Hope, slides down her little, orange slide and plops to the ground. Eyes squinting, hair blowing, she braves the wind and goes at it again.

Gideon sits barefoot on cool sand in his turtle sandbox and digs, little lips rumbling the noise of toy trucks pushing heaps of dirt, mounding up, piling high, and flattening again.

Samuel lies on a pallet in the grass and reaches for his toes. Then turns and stretches out as far as his little hand can reach to grab hold of that one gossamer dandelion tuft.

Birds sing. Bees drone. The earth turns in this steady pace on its course around the sun.

While I sit and read.

I wonder if we should build a fence around the backyard and where exactly to put a garden and how to scare off those pesky woodpeckers beating holes into the siding of our house.

Hope gets stuck and cries, Gideon yells for me to watch his trucks work, and a plastic bucket blows onto the road.

God exists. And I sit a spell to breathe in spring.

I fold laundry, pick up scattered toys, wonder how to organize this place. I call my husband, Brent, at work to ask him when he’s coming home for lunch.

God exists.

I feed the goldfish.

And sometimes it hits me as strange. Not that God exists, but that God exists and my day is full of these ordinary things. Since God exists—the God who spoke and there was light, who formed all us earth children from the dust of the ground, a God who always is and always was, who bent down to breathe life into our very lungs—shouldn’t we be doing something else?

I rinse out a sippy cup.

But there is this:

“So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31, NIV)

And this:

“Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10, NIV)

And when God made me, didn’t he know most of my life would be eating and drinking and sleeping and cleaning? And since he exists, shouldn’t that change the way I go about all my eating and drinking and everyday doing? My in and out, just living?

And since the angels in heaven always worship him, those brilliant otherworldly creatures who never doubt he just is, shouldn’t I be worshiping him too? When I’m at the sink and in the middle of laundry, when I’m doing the holding and when I’m being held?

And shouldn’t I be still and quiet in my heart with a reverent sort of awe of him, even in the rush of things, simply because he exists?

God exists.

Is there any such thing as ordinary?

This awareness of him in the humdrum of life—it changes everything.

“And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6, NIV)

This article was excerpted from Finding God at the Kitchen Sink. © 2014 by Maggie Paulus. Used by permission of Moody Publishers.

Maggie Paulus lives in Michigan with her bearded husband, three rambunctious kids, and one cat. You can connect with her at MaggiePaulus.com or find her on Twitter at @MaggiePaulus.

Photo courtesy Wendy Copley / Flickr

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