finding God in the mundane

"Let the seeking man reach a place where life and lips join to say continually, 'Be thou exalted,' and a thousand minor problems will be solved at once. His Christian life ceases to be the complicated thing it had been before and becomes the very essence of simplicity." A.W. Tozer -- The Pursuit of God

In the fall of 2003, I had no idea what I was doing. After finishing my undergrad, I had served as a youth ministry intern at a local church, only to be turned off by the office politics. The purity of my heart for ministry was gone, and I wasn't sure that it could be fixed. The "profession" was irreparably tainted, my dream job had since been removed from the table, and I was working on a master's degree that seemingly had no further purpose. All of my friends were getting married, and even if I did want to work for a church again, every head pastor was looking for a married couple. Stuck managing the coffeehouse outside my once beloved campus, I felt completely void of purpose at a very young age.

I was scheduled to attend a 3-day seminar on spiritual formation for my graduate work, and received the appropriate time off of work to accommodate. I woke to a gloomy November downpour, packed up my laptop and textbooks, and headed towards Bethel.

Running about ten minutes ahead of schedule, I decided to stop at the coffeehouse to make myself a fruit smoothie. I would stay out of everyone's way -- I planned to enter through the backdoor, use the blender, stick some money on the counter, and head to class. It didn't work out that way.

Immediately upon arrival, I was hammered with a laundry list of meaningless responsibilities. My co-worker wasn't used to working mornings, so the line was backed up when elderly customers had to express what they wanted from the menu. The cash register had came up short from the night before, and we were running low on products before the order arrived. The order arrived while I was present, and I was roped into making sure that everything was kosher. When I was done attending to consumer needs and employee insufficiencies, I made my mango smoothie and headed to class fifteen minutes late.

There are few things I hate more than being late to a structured event; my dad was embarrassingly early to everything I ever did as a child, and I caught his anxiety. I walked into class expecting the stares of every other student and the disdain of our visiting professor.

The teacher was on faculty at Asbury, and was finishing prayer as I entered. I took a seat and he informed us that much of our seminar would be in practice of spiritual formation. We immediately began an exercise of sharing how God ministered to us in the little things.

Still angry and flustered, I paid half-attention to the first couple testimonies: something about what God was doing in marriage or finance or employment. I clearly had nothing to share.

One of the women in our class -- Lisa was her name -- worked successfully as an assistant at a law firm and took the ministry classes purely to learn. She began describing the stress of the office environment, and how the only way she could relieve the stress was to get away for a while. She explained that she had found refuge in attending our humble coffeehouse for lunch, and that she was always blessed by the kindness and servant attitude of its employees. She looked at me personally and said, "Thank you."

Tears began welling up in my eyes. For all the seeming lack of appreciation I received at my church for "doing my job," God allowed me the grace to unknowingly minister to a grateful lay person who found her only refuge in my mundane tasks. Choked up, I shared with the class how little I wanted to be there that morning, how nothing was going how I had planned. The teacher prompted a few men to lay hands on me in prayer, and we "practiced" our first lesson in spiritual formation.

The class ended up being amazing, but more importantly, God gave me fresh perspective on what I deemed as ministry. The service industry provided me an opportunity to live as light to those in perpetual darkness; in the big picture, it was essential for me to understand that God is present and active at all times. Our plans regularly fail us and the little things pile up, but God desires our entirety to demonstrate His Glory. When we become aware of His presence in our everyday tasks, we can respond to the Spirit's promptings in exciting and unexpected ways.