The Barefoot Evangelist

There is a kind of holiness that only reveals itself in ordinary time.

Not the mountaintop moments. Not the grand revelations. Not the stories that end up printed in books or preached from pulpits years later once we have polished them into testimonies with tidy endings. I mean the quiet stuff. The reheated cup of coffee. The laundry folded while thinking about people you love. The standing in line at the grocery store trying to mentally calculate whether the money in your account and the food in your cart are still speaking to one another. The tired feet at the end of a workday. The frozen leftovers pulled out because you were wise enough to care for your future self three weeks ago.

We spend so much time waiting for life to become meaningful that we miss how much meaning is already sitting right in front of us.

Jesus, for all the grandeur later generations wrapped around him, spent an astonishing amount of time noticing ordinary people doing ordinary things. Baking bread. Catching fish. Sweeping floors. Feeding guests. Planting seeds. Looking for coins. Carrying water. Mending nets. Preparing meals. The kingdom of God, according to Christ, was somehow hidden inside all the things respectable religion often dismisses as “just life.”

Maybe that is part of our problem. We have confused holiness with spectacle. We keep waiting for lightning while God quietly keeps showing up in casseroles, conversations, gardens, text messages, shared laughter, rides to appointments, and the brave decision to get up one more morning and participate in life again despite everything.

So today, if your life feels small, repetitive, messy, exhausting, unfinished, or painfully ordinary, perhaps do not rush past that too quickly. There is sacred ground under your feet more often than you think. Sometimes the holiest thing we will do all week is simply continue caring for one another with tenderness in a tired world.