Good thoughts PH thank you. I especially loved this:
“Daily life can feel monotonous. But within the steady cadence of everyday life, God provides us with multiple opportunities to step out in faith so the we might honor Him and bless others.
We just have to learn how to spot them in the midst of the mundane.”
I read a book probably in the 90s called “Splendor in the Ordinary,” by Thomas Howard. It’s a really neat book that makes connections between each room in a house and how each is “holy ground” that displays God’s grace and heaven, in different ways.
Howard I think was an Anglican when he wrote it and now he’s a Catholic. He’s a brother of Elisabeth Elliot. Well worth reading, iMHO.
I would be remiss if I did not note that my friend Matt Redmond literally wrote the book on this subject… “The God of the Mundane” should be a Christian classic…
“There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”
“AS I UNDERSTAND it, to say that God is mightily present even in such private events as these does not mean that he makes events happen to us which move us in certain directions like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is. For instance I cannot believe that a God of love and mercy in any sense willed my father’s suicide; it was my father himself who willed it as the only way out available to him from a life that for various reasons he had come to find unbearable. God did not will what happened that early November morning in Essex Fells, New Jersey, but I believe that God was present in what happened. I cannot guess how he was present with my father—I can guess much better how utterly abandoned by God my father must have felt if he thought about God at all—but my faith as well as my prayer is that he was and continues to be present with him in ways beyond my guessing. I can speak with some assurance only of how God was present in that dark time for me in the sense that I was not destroyed by it but came out of it with scars that I bear to this day, to be sure, but also somehow the wiser and the stronger for it. Who knows how I might have turned out if my father had lived, but through the loss of him all those long years ago I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way. As I see it, in other words, God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as the puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don’t, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it. ”
It’s all yours today…
Blogged about ordinary Christianity. A. It of a reaction to those who present a form of performance-driven Christianity that borders on legalism. https://kurtstaeuble.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/mundane-christianity/
Should read: “A bit of a reaction…”
Good thoughts PH thank you. I especially loved this:
“Daily life can feel monotonous. But within the steady cadence of everyday life, God provides us with multiple opportunities to step out in faith so the we might honor Him and bless others.
We just have to learn how to spot them in the midst of the mundane.”
Thank you..
I liked PH’s musings about ordinary Christianity.
I read a book probably in the 90s called “Splendor in the Ordinary,” by Thomas Howard. It’s a really neat book that makes connections between each room in a house and how each is “holy ground” that displays God’s grace and heaven, in different ways.
Howard I think was an Anglican when he wrote it and now he’s a Catholic. He’s a brother of Elisabeth Elliot. Well worth reading, iMHO.
https://www.amazon.com/Hallowed-Be-This-House-Finding/dp/1586177125/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1512798337&sr=8-5&keywords=thomas+howard
Excellent Bob! Ordered. Thank you.
Seeking God in the ordinary/ mundane gets my juices flowing. 🙂
JG,
Me, too!
I would be remiss if I did not note that my friend Matt Redmond literally wrote the book on this subject… “The God of the Mundane” should be a Christian classic…
Indeed Michael it’s in my favorite book pile with Mere Christianity. PH quotes from it in his article. So good!
“There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”
Good thoughts from Lewis…
“AS I UNDERSTAND it, to say that God is mightily present even in such private events as these does not mean that he makes events happen to us which move us in certain directions like chessmen. Instead, events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is. For instance I cannot believe that a God of love and mercy in any sense willed my father’s suicide; it was my father himself who willed it as the only way out available to him from a life that for various reasons he had come to find unbearable. God did not will what happened that early November morning in Essex Fells, New Jersey, but I believe that God was present in what happened. I cannot guess how he was present with my father—I can guess much better how utterly abandoned by God my father must have felt if he thought about God at all—but my faith as well as my prayer is that he was and continues to be present with him in ways beyond my guessing. I can speak with some assurance only of how God was present in that dark time for me in the sense that I was not destroyed by it but came out of it with scars that I bear to this day, to be sure, but also somehow the wiser and the stronger for it. Who knows how I might have turned out if my father had lived, but through the loss of him all those long years ago I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way. As I see it, in other words, God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as the puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don’t, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it. ”
-Buechner
#10
^^