The Sacrament of Every Day Life

There is a myth that has permeated church culture. This myth originated from an artificial break in the natural and the supernatural. German theologians and philosophers sought to remove the mystical from the normal so as to distance God from one’s every day life and happenings.

They got it wrong. The natural and the supper natural co-mingle every time your heart, a muscle roughly the size of your fist, pumps oxygenated blood through the body. When we allow life to slow down and consider the gravity of every second, the beauty of complexity in what seems to us as minutia, we see God.

The sacraments are actions or occurrences that open up  deeper meaning to point to Christ. These things are typically considered baptism, confirmation, marriage, last rites and so on. I do not desire to be disrespectful to those who practice sacraments as devotion to Christ. I believe each one is beautiful, a moment in time that means something. But what I wish to say is, what if we can see God’s provision in the rain dripping from a tree, what if we can see his character in how a mother holds her child, what if we can see his familiarity with us, in the comfort of curling up with a good book.

Ok now I am feeling a little too Thoreau! I’m learning to slow down. To experience. To gaze. To enjoy. To relax. To love. To live. To play. To be in awe of creation. To be in awe of minutia, which leads me to be in awe of Christ.

The other day I had the most pleasant moment. A man was outside mowing his lawn and I got hit with that pungent smell of fresh cut grass as soon as I opened my door. Then I remembered my dad. He would spend a warm Saturday morning cutting grass. Usually we would have the windows open and could hear and smell what he was doing. My mom in our little yellow kitchen and gospel music blaring in the family room that usually meant to us kids that we needed to wake up and they planned to force a productive day on us. I would peep out the window and see my dad. He wore his hat tipped up so high on his head. lol I am not sure why he did that. He had these beat up old grass cutting shoes. They were so dirty he would leave them on the porch. When I was younger we actually had a barn door on our kitchen that let out to the back porch. We would open the top latch and let the air and light peek in that little yellow kitchen. All was right with the world.

My moment of grass smelling was a way to thank God, for the beauty of family, for my childhood and the security my dad and his dirty shoes brought to my family. For me those grass cutting days was a reminder that my dad took care of us. What a sweet moment found in the minutia.