But there is also the more subtle quest for a suitably “radical” life, a life of conspicuous sacrifice and service—a life that seems obviously set apart for something more than the mundane and (so we start to think) unimportant life. In this version of the ancient error, nonprofit work is more spiritual than for-profit work; urban neighborhoods are more spiritual than suburban ones; bicycles are more spiritual than minivans.
“Just a few more minutes!” But it’s not just sleep I’m greedy for—it’s that in-between place, liminal consciousness, where I’m cozy, not quite alert to the demands that await me. I don’t want to face the warring, big and small, that lies ahead of me today. I don’t want to don an identity yet. I want to stay in the womb of my covers a little longer.
Jesus is sent first to the desert and then into his public ministry. But he is sent out with a declaration of the Father’s love.
We are marked from our first waking moment by an identity that is given to us by grace: an identity that is deeper and more real than any other identity we will don that day.
And before we begin the liturgies of our day—the cooking, sitting in traffic, emailing, accomplishing, working, resting—we begin beloved. My works and worship don’t earn a thing. Instead, they flow from God’s love, gift, and work on my behalf. I am not primarily defined by my abilities or marital status or how I vote or my successes or failures or fame or obscurity,
work to build my own blessedness, to strive for a self-made belovedness.
But I was imprinted. My day was imprinted by technology. And like a mountain lion cub attached to her humans, I’d look for all good things to come from glowing screens. Without realizing it, I had slowly built a habit: a steady resistance to and dread of boredom.
The first activity of my day, the first move I made, was not that of a consumer, but that of a colaborer with God.
the creation story, God entered chaos and made order and beauty. In making my bed I reflected that creative act in the tiniest, most ordinary way. In my small chaos, I made small order.
But I sat expectantly. God made this day. He wrote it and named it and has a purpose in it. Today, he is the maker and giver of all good things. I’d
we often feel like the way we spend our days looks very similar to our unbelieving neighbors—with perhaps a bit of extra spirituality thrown
getting the right ideas in our heads or having a biblical worldview. While doctrinal orthodoxy is crucial in the Christian life, for the most part we are not primarily motivated by our conscious thoughts. Most of what we do is precognitive.4 We do not usually think about our beliefs or worldview as we brush our teeth, go grocery shopping, and drive our cars. Most of what shapes our life and culture works “below the mind”—in our gut, in our loves.
alternatively, by a kind of Christian radicalism—living in alternative communities, forsaking average careers, going overseas, or intentionally living among the poor—then we will be formed as an alternative people. Though each of these approaches has valuable insight to offer about how to follow Christ in our contemporary culture, they are not enough to form an alternative people in themselves.
These “formative practices” have no value outside of the gospel and God’s own initiative and power.6 But God has loved us and sought us—not only as individuals, but corporately as a people over millennia.
Examining my daily liturgy as a liturgy—as something that both revealed and shaped what I love and worship—allowed me to realize that my daily practices were malforming me, making me less alive, less human, less able to give and receive love throughout my day.
“Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.” I was, and remain, a Christian who longs for revolution, for things to be made new and whole in beautiful and big ways. But what I am slowly seeing is that you can’t get to the revolution without learning to do the dishes. The kind of spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary. I often want to skip the boring, daily stuff to get to the thrill of an edgy faith. But it’s in the dailiness of the Christian faith—the making the bed, the doing the dishes, the praying for our enemies, the reading the Bible, the quiet, the small—that God’s transformation takes root and grows.
by such great minds was a gift, but I began to feel like the sort of Christianity that I gravitated toward only required my brain.
She didn’t understand—or at least, she couldn’t articulate an understanding of—what we were saying or who Jesus is or why we were singing at all. Nevertheless her body knew and was training her in a habit—a habit of pausing before she eats and singing with others in gratitude. I hope that one day she’ll be able to engage her mind in rich theological study and be able to offer an articulate doctrine of prayer. Yet even now, as who she is, she can offer up a prayer with her body and join with her family in song. She is being trained in worship.
sexually driven advertising trains us to understand bodies (ours and other people’s) primarily as a means of conquest or pleasure. We are told that our bodies are meant to be used and abused or, on the other hand, that our bodies are meant to be worshiped. If
Similarly, when we denigrate our bodies—whether through neglect or staring at our faces and counting up our flaws—we are belittling a sacred site, a worship space more wondrous than the most glorious, ancient cathedral. We are standing before the Grand Canyon or the Sistine Chapel and rolling our eyes.
In my tradition, when a chalice is broken or an altar cloth is torn, we don’t throw it in the trash; it must be buried or burned. Leftover consecrated wine is either drunk or poured into the ground, never down the drain. We do this because these objects are sacred, set apart, and worthy of care. In the same way, care for the body—even these small, daily tasks of maintenance—is a way we honor our bodies as sacred parts of worship.
He anoints the bathroom mirror with oil and prays that when people look into it, they would see themselves as beloved images of God. He prays that they would not relate to their bodies with the categories the world gives them, but instead according to the truth of who they are in Christ.
Underneath these overreactions and aggravations lie true fears. My lost keys reveal my anxiety that I won’t be able to do what I need to do to take care of myself and those around me. They hit on my fear of failure and incompetency. My broken dishwasher uncovers my worries about money—will we have enough to fix it? And it exposes my idolatry of ease, my false hope in comfort and convenience—I just want things to run smoothly.
But little things gone wrong and interrupted plans reveal who I really am; my cracks show and I see that I am profoundly in need of grace.
When suffering is sharp and profound, I expect and believe that God will meet me in its midst. But in the struggles of my average day I somehow feel I have a right to be annoyed. The indignations and irritations of the modern world feel authentic and understandable. I’m no Pollyanna. In a shipwreck, yes of course, “Be content.” But the third day in a row of poor sleep and a backed-up sink? That’s too much to ask.
I had a theology of suffering that allowed me to pay attention in crisis, to seek small flickers of mercy in profound darkness.
Otherwise, I’ll spend my life imagining and hoping (and preaching and teaching about how) to share in the sufferings of Christ in persecution, momentous suffering, and death, while I spend my actual days in grumbling, discontentment, and low-grade despair.
And yet, in my brokenness and lostness, I also need to form the habit of letting God love me, trusting again in his mercy, and receiving again his words of forgiveness and absolution over me.
God’s eager love for us ventures into the undignified and outsized, like a woman who is a little over the top about a lost coin, sweeping out rooms and looking under the furniture until she finds it. God searches more earnestly for me than I do for my keys. He is zealous to find his people and to make them whole.
Food has so much to teach us about nourishment, and as a culture we struggle with what it means to be not simply fed, but profoundly and holistically nourished. It is a joy to sit at the table with nourishing food and be able to tell stories—nourishing stories—about where each dish came from:
It is adequate and a little boring. Now, it is warmed over again on my stove for lunch. Like most of what I’ll eat in this life, it’s necessary and forgettable.
In his temptation in the wilderness Christ says that we are not only nourished by bread but by “every word that comes from the mouth of God”
I briefly bow my head and thank God for my taco soup, a daily ritual so ingrained in me that I pause in gratitude before this meal without much thought. But this habit of prayer reminds me to receive the day and all it contains as a gift. In his book Food and Faith, Norman Wirzba tells us that “to say grace before a meal is among the highest and most honest expressions of our humanity… . Here, around the table and before witnesses, we testify to the experience of life as a precious gift to be received and given again. We acknowledge that we do not and cannot live alone but are the beneficiaries of the kindness and mysteries of grace upon grace.”
We are endlessly in need of nourishment, and nourishment comes, usually, like taco soup. Abundant and overlooked. My subculture of evangelicalism tends to focus on excitement, passion, and risk, the kind of worship that gives a rush. Eugene Peterson calls this quest for spiritual intensity a consumer-driven “market for religious experience in our world.” He says that “there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. Religion in our time has been captured by a tourist mindset… . We go to see a new personality, to hear a new truth, to get a new experience and so somehow to expand our otherwise humdrum life.”
Instead of the focus of worship being that which nourishes us, namely Word and sacrament, the focus became that which sells: excitement, adventure, a sizzling or shocking spiritual experience. An individual’s own experience of worship, a subjective notion of his or her encounter with God, became the centerpiece of the Christian life.
There are times when we approach Scripture, whether in private study or gathered worship, and find it powerful and memorable—sermons we quote and carry around with us, stories we tell of being impacted and changed. There are other times when the Scriptures seem as unappetizing as stale bread. I’m bored or confused or skeptical or repulsed. There are times when I walk away from Scripture with more questions than answers. We can be like the dwarves in C. S. Lewis’s Narnian tales who have a delectable feast set before them but, because of a curse, mistake it for food that is revolting, unappetizing, perhaps even poisonous.8 How should we respond when we find the Word perplexing or dry or boring or unappealing? We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread.
The contemporary church can, at times, market a kind of “ramen noodle” spirituality. Faith becomes a consumer product—it asks little of us, affirms our values, and promises to meet our needs, but in the end it’s just a quick fix that leaves us glutted and malnourished.
If I were eating this soup a century ago, it would likely have come to me through land I had tilled or through a farmer I knew and could talk to and live life with. This kind of embedded community and commerce links us to those who we owe gratitude—our neighbors, our land, and ultimately, God. But now this taco soup is an anonymous commodity. It arrives on my table seemingly by magic. With this anonymity comes ingratitude—I do not recall those farmers and harvesters to whom I owe a debt of thanks. I do not think of God’s mercy in providing a harvest. And with anonymity and ingratitude comes injustice. Like so much of what we consume in our complicated world of global capitalism and multinational corporations, purchasing this corn and these beans involves me, however unwittingly, in webs of systemic injustice, exploitation, and environmental degradation that I am ignorant about and would likely not consent to. I do not know where the onions in my soup came from or how the workers who harvested them were treated. My leftovers may have been provided by a man whose kids can’t afford lunch today.
Our primary concern is that our meal is convenient, cheap, plentiful, and requires very little from us. The habits that led me to make this soup were not borne of my formation as a steward and a worshiper but of my formation as a consumer. The free-market economy can produce a kind of abundance. I have more than enough soup. And yet this appearance of abundance is false when it comes at the cost of subjecting others to slave labor or poisoning the soil.
Spirituality packaged as a path to personal self-fulfillment and happiness fits neatly into Western consumerism. But the Scriptures and the sacraments reorient us to be people who feed on the bread of life together and are sent out as stewards of redemption. We recall and reenact Christ’s life poured out for us, and we are transformed into people who pour out our lives for others.
The truth is I get along with most people pretty well. When I do have conflict, it is usually with those I love most. The struggle to “love thy neighbor” is most often tested in my home, with my husband and my kids, when I’m tired, fearful, discouraged, off my game, or just want to be left alone.
For most of my twenties, I was part of a movement in evangelicalism that valued a radical, edgy kind of faith—I wanted to change the world, at least a little part of it. I wanted to be part of a community that sought justice and that served “the least of these.” What drew me to that kind of work, besides the clear call of Scripture, was a longing for and vision of God’s shalom—a very pregnant word that means God’s all-consuming, all-redeeming peace. The hope of a kingdom where God is worshiped wholly, where humanity extends love and mercy with generosity, where systemic injustice is broken and “the oppressed are set free” was (and is) inconceivably beautiful and intoxicating.
“You talk of hating war. But where’s your own peacetime?”1 I can get caught up in big ideas of justice and truth and neglect the small opportunities around me to extend kindness, forgiveness, and grace.
“Keep his mind off the most elementary of duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones. Aggravate that most useful of human characteristics, the horror and neglect of the obvious.”
We both seek to pass the peace in our daily life and work. And, more and more, I’m seeing that Steven’s work and my work are inseparable. He needs me to seek peace with my husband. He needs us, as his friends, to pursue God and to love each other and our children well. He needs me to apologize to Jonathan for raising my voice in the argument we had today. He needs me to forgive. And we need Steven. We need him to be the prophet he is, to never let us forget that the poor are among us. We need him to constantly expand our horizons beyond our front door. We need him to keep inviting us to volunteer with him and to tell us how to pray for him.
Steven said to me once, “You and Jonathan stabilize me. And I hope to destabilize you.” What he meant is that he won’t let us get too comfortable.
And he needs us: young parents who are ordinary and worn out. Even though he spoke of destabilizing us, I’m steadied by the call to remain missional and to seek peace in the small ways in front of me. Steven reminds me of reality—the world is no tea party. When I get caught up in pettiness and exhaustion, I need to be reminded that my family and community are part of a larger mission.
And yet we are also called to stability, to the daily grind of responsibility for those nearest us, to the challenge of a mundane, well-lived Christian life. “Passing the peace” in every way we can, in the place and sphere to which God has called us, is neither a “radical” practice nor an “ordinary” practice; it is merely a Christian practice,
We’ll have to keep forgiving all day, every time we think back to our argument, every time we’re tempted to pick up the sword again. Peace takes a whole lot of work. Conflict and resentment seem to be the easier route. Shorter, anyway. Less humiliating.
We cannot seek peace out of our own strength. We all blow it—we fail those around us, we pass judgment instead, we retreat into selfishness as often as we extend a hand. If we are ever peacemakers, it is not without a good deal of war within our hearts. But God has reconciled us to himself, and he brings reconciliation and peace to every sphere of life.
know people who empty their inbox every day. Those people have superpowers and exist on cheerfulness and productivity as food. They’ve given me books on how to be more efficient and organized with email, and I’ve read parts of them.
“And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord …” At the conclusion of our time together, we receive benediction and are told to go: “Let us go forth in the name of Christ,” or “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”1 We are blessed and sent. There is no competition between the work we do as a people in gathered worship—liturgy means “the work of the people”—and our vocations in the world. For believers, the two are intrinsically part of one another. In recent years evangelical leaders and churches have increasingly focused on integrating faith and work. This effort is both needed and immensely helpful.2 But many of us still struggle with the temptation to divide our “secular” work from our “spiritual” lives and wonder whether we can fully participate in Jesus’ mission with our particular training, gifts, and vocations.
All of these may be important ways to serve God through our work but, since it is not possible to live out of every one of these messages simultaneously, Christians either tend to be confused about exactly how their work matters to God and to the church or they pick one or two main emphases and judge those who aren’t living up to their particular take on meaningful work.
“the rest of us just had jobs to fund that important work.” He wondered aloud, “How could anyone leave that conference with a sense of calling outside of a few sanctified careers?”
It’s easy for me to assume that the parts of my vocation that God cares about are the parts that I like. The rest is the dross and doldrums and groaning and necessary evils. Luther said, “God himself will milk the cows through him whose vocation it is.”7 But could God himself check email through me? Could he balance the family budget and fold the laundry through me? Could he fill out bureaucratic work forms through me? Does he care about any of this?
We are not great shots across the bow of history; rather, by simple grace, we are hints of hope.9
It is much harder for me to see the holiness, dignity, and artistry inherent in financial planning or office administration or retail sales or bus driving or burger flipping.
A Puritan carpenter could made a chair, stand back, gaze at a job well done, and sell it to his neighbor who he’d known for decades, knowing that his neighbor would be blessed by many hours in his good chair.
There are global, systemic forces that can make work in the modern world dehumanizing and vicious (vicious means “prone to vice”). The song “Sprawl II” by Arcade Fire is a screed against these forces in modernity, where “dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains.” The song continues, “They heard me singing and they told me to stop / Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock / These days my life, I feel it has no purpose.”
We live in a world where I can sit at my desk and email people I’ve never met in order to discuss work that I will do by staring at a screen.
Whether it comes from my youth group drilling into me the importance of a daily quiet time, or my deep respect for monasticism and contemplative spirituality, I still imagine “meeting God” in a silent place, preferably outdoors by the ocean or a still pond, or in a cathedral with stained glass, with my Bible and journal and hours of stillness. That’s how I prefer God to meet me, not through a “ministry of competence” in checking my email. This longing for a contemplative ideal can be a particular burden for me as a young mom, in a home that is typically loud, active, sleepless, and filled with unending requests and needs.
B. B. Warfield, a professor of theology at Princeton in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was concerned about what he saw as a “tendency … to restless activity” at the expense of spiritual depth.13 Warfield reminds us that “activity, of course, is good… . But not when it is substituted for inner religious strength. We cannot get along without our Marthas. But what shall we do when, through all the length and breadth of the land, we shall search in vain for a Mary?”14 Yet, in the same address, Warfield integrates the value of prayer and stillness with
Long before the Puritans or B. B. Warfield, the Latin phrase ora et labora, or “pray and work,” marked monastic spirituality, particularly in Benedictine communities. The idea is perhaps most famously embodied by Brother Lawrence, who wrote, “The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen … I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.”16
But I want to remember that we were made for a day when God’s chosen people will “long enjoy the work of their hands” (Is 65:22). We are blessed and sent to work in this world, where we will face fallenness and toil. But even still our labor is not in vain. And one day all of it, even our smallest daily tasks—even email—will be sifted and sorted and redeemed.
Christians are people who wait. We live in liminal time, in the already and not yet. Christ has come, and he will come again. We dwell in the meantime. We wait. But in my daily life I’ve developed habits of impatience—of speeding ahead, of trying to squeeze more into my cluttered day. How can I live as one who watches and waits for the coming kingdom when I can barely wait for water to boil?
Patience [is] the basic constituent of Christianity … the power to wait, to persevere, to hold out, to endure to the end, not to transcend one’s own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice
We live this story every year, week by week, living out what we confess in the creed in the way we name our days. And in liturgical time, we make space—lots of space—for waiting.
Our problem with time is social, cultural, and economic, to be sure. But it is also a spiritual problem, one that runs right to the core of who we are as human beings… . Indeed, these distortions drive us into the arms of a false theology: we come to believe that we, not God, are the masters of time. We come to believe that our worth must be proved by the way we spend our hours and that our ultimate safety depends on our own good management.
Time is a gift from God, a means of worship. I need the church to remind me of reality: time is not a commodity that I control, manage, or consume. The practice of liturgical time teaches me, day by day, that time is not mine. It does not revolve around me. Time revolves around God—what he has done, what he is doing, and what he will do.
When one of the kids they worked with reached a milestone—a month of sobriety or new growth in healing—they pulled out all the stops. They lived so close to profound pain and yet, in the midst of mourning, they learned to practice celebration. They lived in waiting and celebrated each mile marker. It was a laughter born of their long labor.
stretching sense of waiting, of not being able to glimpse what was on the other side, suspended in a posture of expectation and uncertainty. She looked at me and said, “I always felt like I was waiting for the gift. But I’ve come to see that the waiting is the gift.”
And yet Jan, who had practiced waiting far longer and better than I, knew what it was like to wait patiently, believing that God’s timing is perfect and that, mysteriously, there is more happening while we wait than just waiting.
We have a telos as we wait, an ultimate purpose and aim. Because we have a telos—a kingdom where peace will reign and where God is worshiped—we can never wrap our lives in little luxuries and petty comforts and so numb ourselves to God’s prophetic call for justice and wholeness in this world.
As Rev. Canon Mary Maggard Hays explains, “We aren’t just conversing with each other when we recite the Psalms antiphonally or responsively. We are talking to God, too. Reminding one another and God of his promises and our complaints. We are witnessing one another’s cries for help and reminding God that we are in this together.”2
Christian friendships are call-and-response friendships. We tell each other over and over, back and forth, the truth of who we are and who God is. Over dinner and on walks, dropping off soup when someone is sick, and in prayer over the phone, we speak the good news to each other. And we become good news to every other.
These friends’ lives become a sermon to me. I don’t mean that we give each other pat answers or cheap pep talks—few things are worse than receiving a neat little packaged sermon after we’ve poured out our fears or embarrassments to someone.
They run the gamut from triumphant praise to deepest depression. They let us be as complex as we actually are.
Many feel that the church (if it’s necessary at all) is primarily intended to serve our individual spiritual needs or to group us together with like-minded people—a kind of holy fraternity. If we believe that church is merely a voluntary society of people with shared values, then it is entirely optional. If the church helps you with your personal relationship with God, great; if not, I know a great brunch place that’s open on Sunday.
But if Christianity is not only about my individual connection with God, but is instead about God calling, forming, saving, and redeeming a people, then the church can never be relegated to “elective” status. Christ did not send his Holy Spirit only to individuals. He did not merely seek personal relationships with his followers. The good news is not simply that I can believe and thus make it to heaven, or even that I can believe and live out my life among a band of Christian friends.
And here’s a further complication: the church is not an entity outside of me. I do not stand on the outside looking in. I am as much part of the church as (in the words of Paul) a hand is a part of a body. That means that when I see sin in the church, I am implicated in it. I contribute to the brokenness of the church. I have dealt wounds to others; I have been unfaithful to the bridegroom. Every church leader and church member is, in no insignificant way, a failure. But here too we see God’s power because, in this body of Christ, we find a place where we can be gloriously and devastatingly human. We find a place where we can fail and repent and grow and receive grace and be made new. Like a family—but even closer than a family—we can learn to live together, weak and human, in the goodness and transformation of God.
In the Christian faith it’s almost a philosophical principle that the universal is known through the particular and the abstract through the concrete. We love people universally by loving the particular people we know and can name. We love the world by loving a particular place in it—a specific creek or hill or city or block. The incarnation of Jesus is the ultimate example of this principle, when the one who “fills all in all” became a singular baby in a tangible body in a particular place in time.
Because people like Rebekka sit near me in church—people who know me, who get me, who I trust and laugh with as we gather in small group over the study of Scripture and a plate of spaghetti. But there are other people around me in the pews, people I find irritating or awkward, people who vehemently hold political opinions I find suspect, people with whom I have nothing in common outside of our shared membership in this community of the saints. Some of those I practice call and response with each week would not be people I’d ever want to go with on a long road trip.
The meal would be incomplete if even one of these was not at the table. It would not be good news if even one of these members were missing. As Lesslie Newbigin put it, “None of us can be made whole till we are made whole together.”9 If we are saved at all, we are saved together.
Mysteriously and wondrously, God revels even more than we do in the slight bitterness of tea, the feel of sunshine on skin, a ripe avocado, a perfect guitar lick, or a good plot twist.
“because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his friends.”
“personal taste … even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for country cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa.” Though small practices of enjoyment may seem trivial, the demon sees in them “a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness.”
Our culture’s relationship with pleasure is complex. On one hand, we seem obsessed with pleasure. We overindulge and overeat. We are addicted to amusement and are overwhelmed by pornography, sexual gratuity, and violence, both on screens and off. Ironically, greed and consumerism dull our delight. The more we indulge, the less pleasure we find. We are hedonistic cynics and gluttonous stoics. In our consumerist society we spend endless energy and money seeking pleasure, but we are never sated. Pragmatism, another powerful cultural force, can denigrate our desire for beauty and enjoyment—we don’t build parking decks for their aesthetic appeal, we just need somewhere to put our cars. Workaholism and constant connectivity fight against our ability to be present to the pleasure of the moment.
It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.
We have sinned and grown old, and become dulled to the wonders around us. Though it may seem counterintuitive, enjoyment takes practice. Throughout our life we must relearn the abandon of revelry and merriment.
worshipers thoughtfully sought to make their space beautiful, knowing that God is worthy to be worshiped in and through beauty. Peek into a worship space and you’ll find incense, flowers, bright whites of vestments, dancing, candles, banners, or works of art and music. Glory. We taste, we smell, we hear, we see, we feel. Our senses come alive in worship.
Christian worship trains us to recognize and respond to beauty. We learn to embrace the pleasures of being human and of human culture. Our God-given, innate thirst for enjoyment and sensuousness is directed toward the one who alone can quench it, the God who we were made to enjoy forever.
As busy, practical, hurried, and distracted people, we develop habits of inattention and miss these tiny theophanies in our day.
But it takes strength to enjoy the world, and we must exercise a kind of muscle to revel and delight. If we neglect exercising that muscle—if we never savor a lazy afternoon, if we must always be cleaning out the fridge or volunteering at church or clocking in more hours—we’ll forget how to notice beauty and we’ll miss the unmistakable reality of goodness that pleasure trains us to see. We must take up the practice—the privilege and responsibility—of noticing, savoring, reveling, so that, to use Annie Dillard’s phrase, “creation need not play to an empty house.”
complained to him that I didn’t know what to give up for Lent. I felt overwhelmed. He said to me, “You don’t need to give anything up. Your whole life is Lent right now.” He told me to take up the practice of pleasure: to intentionally embrace enjoyment as a discipline.
The cry of “Encore!”—the demand for more and more and ever more—can turn a healthy pleasure into an addiction.
There is nothing magic about these chimes; nothing superstitious. They are just bells. We ring them in the Eucharistic liturgy, as a way of saying, “Pay attention.” They are an alarm to rouse the congregation, to jostle us to attention, telling us to take note, sit up, lean forward, and notice Christ in our midst.
These moments of loveliness—good tea, bare trees, and soft shadows—are church bells. In my dimness, they jolt me to attention, and remind me that Christ is in our midst. His song of truth, sung by his people all over the world, echoes down my ordinary street, spilling even into my living room.
Or I stay up trying to squeeze more activity into the day, to pack it with as much productivity as possible. My disordered sleep reveals a disordered love, idols of entertainment or productivity.
My willingness to sacrifice much-needed rest and my prioritizing amusement or work over the basic needs of my body and the people around
don’t consciously think, “I value this episode of Parks and Rec more than my family, prayer, and my own body.” But my habits reveal and shape what I love and what I value, whether I care to admit it or not.
Each Ash Wednesday we remember together that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.10 This practice isn’t meant to be morbid. Most of us spend much time and energy trying to avoid the reality that we and those we love will die. But in facing the reality of death, we learn how to live rightly. We learn how to live in light of our limits and the brevity of our lives. And we learn to live in the hope of the resurrection. Sleep serves as a daily memento mori, a reminder of our death.
Mark Galli has said, “The strength of the evangelical movement is its activism; the weakness of the evangelical movement is its activism.”11 Evangelicalism’s energetic history has produced genuine and needed changes in society: the progress of women’s rights, the protection of children, and antislavery legislation, among many others. But it can also foster attitudes that depreciate sustainability and rest. When our zealous activism is coupled with a culture of frenzy and grandiosity, the aim of our Christian life can become a list of goals, initiatives, meetings, conferences, and activities that leave us exhausted.
Note that the rash of worn-out ministers did not cause the movement to rethink its tactics. It did not generate a theological discussion around the ideas of rest and the sustainable Christian life. Instead, they started a fund—another activist cause to rally around.
We are worn-out ministers, worn-out parents, worn-out business people, worn-out believers. This affects our worship together. We are prone to embrace a faith that is full of adrenaline, excitement, and activity. But we have to learn together to approach a Savior who invites the weary to come to him for rest.
The Jewish day begins in seemingly accomplishing nothing at all. We begin by resting, drooling on our pillow, dropping off into helplessness. Eugene Peterson says, “The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace. We go to sleep and God begins his work.”
What if Christians were known as a countercultural community of the well-rested—people who embrace our limits with zest and even joy? As believers we can relish sleep as not only necessary but as an embodied response to the truth of Scripture: we are finite, weak creatures who are abundantly cared for by our strong and loving Creator.
