Here’s the good news of an incarnated God. He is with you in the midst of all of it. In school runs, board meetings, meet the teacher nights, football schedules, takeout drive throughs, morning coffee runs, stressful budget meetings, mounting laundry, stacking homework, complex schedules … all of it. There isn’t an element of your life that is somehow too earthy, too human, too flesh and bone for the God who showed the world who He is by manifesting in the midst of very real lives.

Even when it seems like the people of God are dormant and we start to wonder if we are all alone, God is still loving. He even speaks in Babylon. He even moves amongst the darkest nights. The world might not be going all that well, but God is still God, and as we get a glimpse of Him, He is still revealed as glorious and majestic and wise and holy and sovereign. 

When I was a kid in school (which was a very long time ago) I used to worry about a lot of things. I worried about the work that I knew I should do, I worried about what I would be when I grew up and how I should go about that, I worried about my relationships and whether I was like by the people I wanted to be liked by, and I worried about my relationship with God and whether He was pleased with me.

Then I discovered that there were verses in the bible that tell us to not worry. This made me worry more.

Katie is a helper, but she is also really little, and so her helping is sometimes, um, not all that helpful. In fact, when she helps with things, it usually means that those things will need to be done twice, and so my temptation is to not include her at all. One of the places she loves to help is with the cooking. She slides a chair into the kitchen to stand on, she throws her favorite kid’s apron on, and she insists on doing things that she really isn’t capable of doing. It usually leads to a bigger mess than is necessary and more stress expenditure than was budgeted for in my emotional checking account, but it is worth it for the sense of purpose, joy, adventure and participation that it brings her. I love it when she helps, even though it isn’t all that helpful.

The bible is full of instructions around thanksgiving. We are commanded to be thankful, and I think it is in part because thankfulness is very good for us. It right sizes current obstacles, and it reminds us of the faithfulness of God through our past, which provokes us to trust Him with our unknown futures.

All the while, I am all too aware, that the reality of the world and my experience of it is now, in front of me, making up the substance of my life through a series of present tense happenings, or as Annie Dillard famously and rightly said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”  Said another way, our life is the net result of billions of “nows” where we have the opportunity to be present to reality, and we also have temptation to escape it by looking longingly, or loathingly, either forward or back.

It isn’t lost on me that the most discouraging Sunday in church ministry is often the Sunday after Easter, as auditoriums and parking lots return to normal and as people’s sense of the reality of Christ’s resurrection seems like a distant memory.

Part of this discouragement is because we do measure the wrong things and I know that. We usually measure number of attenders, which is an interesting metric, but not a real guage on the impact that the gospel is having on a group of people. But, part of this discouragement is the nagging sense that we know that if we were all really paying attention to the reality of the resurrection, then every Sunday would feel like Easter Sunday. The fact that it doesn’t just shows what a distracted group of people we are.

I love the thought of a God who is prepared to get His hands dirty, to work in the soil of the world, at a task that others don’t really want to do, in order to preserve and promote beauty and flourishing in the world. What a humble King we have in Jesus, one who could be mistaken for a gardener.

As you prepare for Holy Week, it is helpful to remember how Christ Himself prepared for Gethsemane. I can tend to believe that Jesus went to the cross with curses on His lips and frustration in His heart, but nothing could be further from the truth. Though His anguish was indescribable, and His agony unlike any before or since, what came from His mouth was praise for His Father in the form of a song of faith. A song about what is true of God in the midst of deep suffering. A song still true for us today.

Every single day is an opportunity from God to revel in the love of the son of David. Don’t miss out through pretense.

Every single day is an opportunity from God to marvel at the extraordinarily ordinary means of grace that God gives us in the presence of fellow image bearers. Don’t miss out through judgment.