“Every day the sun comes up, and then goes down again. And every day, God says, ‘do it again!’”
You know the feeling. You wake up, make the coffee, wake the kids, get them ready, out the door, late to school, a thousand errands or long grind at work, get home, force homework, rush dinner, hose down the kids, books, bedtime, glass of wine, pass out. Repeat tomorrow.
Where is God in the mundane and the routine? Where is God in the rush of our lives? What does God think about the ordinary stuff that we do every day?
The lie of our culture is that God is only delighted in the extraordinary; the God who is only really happy when we do "great things", so much so that we orient our lives around the desire for greatness, if we don't achieve it, we are unhappy. In fact, we serve a God who loves the routine, the ordinary, the normal, and the everyday. A God who delights in seeing the world that he has made just work.
This morning I heard Dr. Richard Mouw preach on Psalm 104, and the quote above was one of his many observations. Every day, the sun comes up. Every day, it goes down. And the God who made it has the same delight, every day. With child-like joy, God says, "Do it again!"
I wonder how much more joy we would have if we viewed our daily work, whatever it might be, not as something holding us back from a sense of God's favor or his presence, but in fact the very thing in which we were supposed to be experiencing his presence. Our lives would take on new meaning; our routine a new sense of purpose. No longer are we just getting through. Now, even the mundane things I do are an opportunity to experience the wonder of God's ordering of the universe. Every piece of buttered toast or completed homework or brushed tooth brings delight to the God who loves the ordinary. Every day is a day we wake up with God and hear him excitedly say to us, "let's do it again!"