Finding God from the Driver's Seat

In a million unique ways – as we change diapers, eat dinner, return e-mails, pay the bills – we are to be the evidence of God. Jesus factored in the mundane. We need to eat and sleep and shower and clean up and work on our marriages because of the way he made us – typical, inadequate, and human. Embrace the common: a Sunday afternoon watching sports, Starbucks with a friend, cooking dinner for a neighbor, taking the dog for a walk, heading to a job that is making you more humble and needy because it is so unfulfilling, or working through conflict with a friend you have offended. This and more is all part of it.

So do your everyday and your ordinary. Godliness is found and formed in those places…. Jesus says the way we glorify God, the way we step into his story, is by accomplishing the work God gives us to do. Jesus glorified his father on earth by doing that very thing.

We play our part in his story, and the beauty is, it was what we were made for.

~ from Anything, by Jennie Allen

 

After the umpteenth hour in the car this week, I was starting to feel a wee bit sorry for myself.

“I feel like I spend half my life in the car,” I huffed to my husband one evening.

Of course, he assured me that he appreciated my constant shuttling around of our three needy teens and that someday, they would look back and realize the amazing sacrifice their mother had made on their behalf.

Really? Well, a girl can dream, right?

Maybe you’ve felt like me lately… that you’re nothing more than a maid, cook, babysitter, dishwasher, errand runner, or (my personal favorite) chauffeur. Yes? That’s you? Did you ever stop to consider that this is all part of God’s story for you? That God is shaping and molding you into His image through these seemingly mundane tasks? That this is exactly where you belong?

The above passage in the book Anything by Jennie Allen really rocked my world. Instead of complaining about the ordinary, I should be embracing it! This is the way I can glorify God right where I am, in the left hand turn lane, waiting for the slow poke in front of me to turn already! (Oh, yikes, guess I better work on my attitude toward pokey drivers while I’m at it!)

Wow! If I can really get this – that I can glorify God even from the driver’s seat in the turn lane – I can’t imagine how much easier, and more fulfilling, my life would become!

The mundane, the common, the ordinary, the hum-drum – this is where godliness is found. This is where I belong. By accomplishing the tasks God has set out for me to do before the foundations of the world (Eph. 2:10),  I am participating in His grand story for my life.

Don’t know about you, but the driver’s seat (or the dishes, or the dirty laundry, or [insert your mundane task here]) just started looking a lot better!

“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Ephesians 2:10 NIV

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