Connecting Our Faith and Daily Life

Tammy Lee

“If you seek me you will find me if you search for me with all your heart,” wrote the Psalmist describing in his words God's desire to be found. Some say that “God is nearer to us than the air we breathe.” Yet, our experience suggests otherwise. We hear 'seek' and that means exerting a strenuous effort for something lost. If we have 'found' we wonder how long the discovery will carry meaning in a world of transient and exponential suffering of which our own is only a fragment, or at best we return to a baseline of what Freud called “ordinary unhappiness” or Kierkegaard “the sickness that lays waste at mid-day.” That is the bad news as it were.

After 25 years of both intentional seeking and random being found, it appears to me that God is much more about the infiltration of the ordinary…absorbing that mundane unhappiness and the anxiety at midday and transforming it into something workable and life-giving. The kingdom is not something we seek only…it is something that has already been found in the person of Jesus Christ come among us as one of us. The ever present continuing mystery of the incarnation suggests that our work in the spiritual country is to find God where we least expect God…”among,” as Brother Lawrence suggested hundreds of years ago, “the pots and pans.”

What follows are some suggestions of how you might do that.

#1 What was your primary emotion yesterday? Where did this feeling come from? Where did it take you? Where did you take it? Can you see the prompting of God, the calling of God in that emotion, passion, or feeling?

#2 Walk outside. Search the world around you for something that inspires you…a stone, a leaf, a front door. Examine it carefully and note the details that in passing you might have simply missed. How might you have missed what God has been saying all the time? How might you be more aware of God's presence?

#3 Think of the person that you love most. What is it that you love about them? What makes them unique? Give God thanks for that person and offer in some concrete way your gratitude for them.

#4 Think about the person you like least. Why do you dislike them? Do you share anything in common? Is it possible to find things to accept or like about them? What do you suppose God sees in that person?

#5 Read Brother Lawrence's book Practicing the Presence of God.

#6 Listen to the Third movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Pope Pius XII did as he was receiving the last rites of the church. What do you hear? Try the fourth movement of the fifth symphony.

#7 Read the daily newspaper as if it were your job to report on what God is doing in this world instead of what God is not doing.

#8 Pray the following prayer every morning before you begin your day and see what happens as a consequence…“God be in my head and in my understanding. God be in my eyes and in my looking. God be in my mouth and in my speaking, God be in my heart and in my thinking. God be at my end and at my departing.”

#9 Read TS Eliot's The Four Quartets choosing a line to carry with you throughout the day as a form of meditation.

#10 Get some form of exercise bearing in mind that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made” even if some parts are not working perfectly.

If these are helpful use them. Disregard anything that isn't in keeping with your spirit. Create your own opportunity. I look forward to hearing what you heard or saw or experienced of the God who abides in the every-day.