The Sacred Ordinary

The Sacred Ordinary

"And Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, 'Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.'" - Genesis 28:16 (NASB)

I was washing dishes when it happened—one of those mundane Tuesday evening moments that should have been forgettable. Hands in warm, soapy water, mind wandering, the sound of my neighbor's dog barking in the distance. And then, without warning or invitation, the kitchen filled with presence so thick I could barely breathe.

Nothing changed externally. The dishes still needed washing. The dog kept barking. Tuesday remained Tuesday. But something had shifted in the quality of attention, in the weight of the moment, in my awareness of being utterly, mysteriously held.

Jacob had his encounter with the divine in the middle of nowhere, using a rock for a pillow, running from a mess of his own making. Not in a temple or during a religious ceremony, but in an ordinary place during an ordinary sleep, dreaming an extraordinary dream. When he woke up, his first response was surprise: "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it."

We've been trained to look for God in spectacular places—mountain tops and cathedrals, miracles and mystical experiences. But what if the divine specializes in disguising itself as the ordinary? What if sacred is less about location and more about attention?

Annie Dillard wrote, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." What if how we experience the sacred is, of course, how we experience our days? What if holiness isn't hiding in the extraordinary but revealed in the ordinary moments we usually rush past?

The dishes still needed washing after my kitchen encounter with mystery. But I washed them differently—not as a chore to be completed but as a prayer to be prayed, not as time to be killed but as life to be lived. The transformation wasn't in the task but in the attention I brought to it.

Maybe you're looking for God in all the obvious places and missing the divine presence in the dishwater and dog barking of your own Tuesday evening. Maybe sacred is closer than you think, more ordinary than you expected, more present in your actual life than in your imagined spiritual life.

Look around. Where you are right now—in your kitchen or cubicle or car, in your confusion or clarity or simple existence—is holy ground. Not because it feels holy, but because you are there, and wherever you are, love is there also, usually disguised as something so ordinary you might miss it entirely.

"Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it." Now you know.