Holy Tedium

It's a cold, wet morning in the mountains--the kind you'd expect in November, not July. The forest ground behind our house is saturated in every shade of green, redolent of some equatorial tropic, when normally the summer flora would be dried out by now: golden brown and thirsty for the moisture of the fall. At the very tip of each pine needle is a tiny water droplet, suspended in the still, cool air, quietly reflecting the gray sky above it with a brightness only Nature can achieve. Before the rain began a moment ago, everything seemed paused in perfect fullness.

Now, I hear the soft shower of rain on the roof and the sweet jabber of my kids waking from their night of slumber. Soon I will get them up, prepare a nutritious breakfast, load everyone into the car to attend my spin class, make a quick stop at the grocery store, and then return home to begin on my list of to-do's before our company arrives this afternoon. Hopefully, I will find those precious minutes to sit on the floor with my pumpkins and savor the sweetness of our lives together.

These quiet moments before the tug of the day begins are holy, sacred. But I'm learning that so are the harried moments of the day's tedium--perhaps more so, as I move into the world and encounter myriad reflections of God's image in my children, in my fellow spin enthusiasts, in Kevin, the grocery store checker who cannot help but mutter constantly under his breath in an exhausting stream of consciousness but who always greets me cheerfully by name, in you.

Holy, sacred, divine tedium: the opportunity to glimpse the fullness of God on earth, as it is in heaven.