by Zach Roll

God’s work in everyday life.

You can listen to today’s devotion by clicking on this SoundCloud link

“Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
Genesis 2:7 English Standard Version

I got the idea for this devotion from a chapter of a book I am reading, entitled “Being Lutheran”, by Trevor Sutton. The chapter talks about ordinary everyday life, ordinary objects, and ordinary people. It explains how God works in the ordinary.

We do not like the ordinary today. We are bored by the ordinary. We are constantly searching for something louder, brighter, and crazier. “Same old” just doesn’t cut it. Searching, and seeking, for the extraordinary, and bizarre, all the time is like a drug, and we constantly need more and more of the extraordinary to satisfy our cravings.

When we think of the God of the universe, he is anything but ordinary, he is in a category all by himself. We can’t ever fully understand him, only the things he chooses to reveal to us. “Surely God is a fan of the extraordinary and has a flare for the dramatic,” we say. “He doesn’t have any use for plain old boring stuff.”

Wrong. Dead wrong.

God uses the ordinary all the time, and what he does with the ordinary is beyond our imagination. As Sutton explains, Jesus uses ordinary things like saliva and mud to restore sight to a blind man. He uses bread and wine to deliver his body, his blood, and the forgiveness of sins to his Church. He uses the ordinary water of baptism, attached to His Word, to wash away our sin and adopt us as His own.

Instead of shrugging off the ordinary, and chasing after the extraordinary, take a moment to recognize what God has accomplished through the ordinary. As you go about routine, everyday, life, instead of being bored by it, embrace it.

God works through the ordinary of your life, too.

Copyright Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Colorado Springs, Colorado