This is an excerpt I jotted down last month while reading “Jesus Freak” by Sara Miles.  I pulled it today from the stack of 3 by 5 cards on my writing desk and I shook my head.  This theme just keeps chasing me around.

I spent the last two days listening to heavy “be aware of the times” teaching at a large Women’s Conference.  What did I come away with?  “God Is Here” by Steve Case, a modern look at Brother Lawrence’s “The Practice of the Presence of God” (a book I read almost exactly 10 years ago).  I skipped the books about God in the midst of your pain and how to study the book of Daniel and the truth about sex, and my eyes and my heart went straight to a plain covered, humble book about God at Starbucks.  I guess that’s where I’m at…still.

God is in the every day, the here, the now, the computer time, the morning, the evening, the snacks, the walks, the runs, the cries, the laughs, the pie-making, the dish-washing.  But that is not the inconvenient part–that I might run right into God as I turn the corner into my kitchen.  No, the inconvenient part is that my physical mindedness gets in the way of accepting and judging according to the Spirit.  The inconvenient part is that I see the coffee cup and I think about the coffee cup.

Today, when I consider the times, the business of life and hurts therein, when I analyze them and judge them (Luke 12:56-57), I will consider them in terms of how much I engage with God in the common.

*As an aside, I notice the misspelling on the note card.  Sometimes I get anxious to write things down before I forget them, resulting in misspelling.