When one of us is away, she begs to know where we are and what we are doing. She loves routine, this two-year old of mine, needs to know that her Daddy and I are constant and will keep her world whole, will keep it from falling into pieces.I, on the other hand, seem to delight in fragmenting my world. I want to divide my life into pieces.
A place for household chores and yard work and a place for reading my books.
A place for my husband and a place for my children.
A place for friends and a place for family.
Neat and separated.
For surface organization, perhaps, this brings contentment. Yet daily I willfully ignore my own Sun and Moon Who could knit my life back together into a beautiful whole. I continually forget about inviting Him into certain places of my day.
There is no joy in places of my day that do not include Christ, only weary tasking and resentment over un-acknowledged work.
How can this change? It has become such habit to separate out my day between sacred and secular.
"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them upon your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up." (Deut. 6.5-7)How can I allow God to knit the secular places of my life back into the sacred?
How can the whole of my daily life be made sacred?
I am inspired by Brother Lawrence, the dishwasher:
"The time of business does not differ with me from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great a tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament."Yet unlike my Eldest Child, I don't allow God be constant, keeping my world whole. I speak as though this were my desire. I sing "in my life be lifted high" yet don't act in physical ways to keep Him present during my chores, while reading my books, in my daily interactions with my family.
I have places. Some are sacred and some are secular.
I long for my world to be whole. For all to be made sacred.
I pray for wisdom. I seek answers and ideas. I have found a few.
The rest of the passage from Deuteronomy:
"Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates." (Deut 6.8-9)God desires for our lives to be made wholly sacred.
He knows how forgetful we are. He knows that He created us as physical beings. He knows that we need physical and constant reminders.
Ann Voskamp shares her family's practice of reading the Word at every meal. They eat the Bread of Life while they break bread together. Perhaps this is another layer of meaning to "do this in remembrance of Me" (Luke 22.19)
After all, Jesus was sharing a meal at the time.
We are just beginning to join in this sharing of Bread at mealtimes.
We try. We fail. We begin again.
We forget. We are ashamed. We begin again.
Liturgy is a foreign and almost forbidden word to us. The idea, however, intrigues me. Set times in your day for going to God. A discipline of regular prayer that keeps us rooted in the sacred at all times, in all of our places. I discovered this version of a book of Common Prayer. We have not tried this yet. Perhaps the little ones are a bit too little still.
Small changes. Little steps. Will you help? Share how God is teaching you to weave your days into a sacred whole?
We yearn and pray for all that we are and all that we do to be made sacred.
