The average day flows in a blur of triviality. Hours shift from this task to the next in an endless list of chores, flinging us into lifestyles that feel limp, lifeless, and lacking. After all, there’s nothing special about cooking a weeknight dinner, taking a walk around the block, or slipping helplessly to sleep, right? But what if the draining items on your daily checklist actually manifested spiritual truths? How might your days, satisfaction, and purpose change as you realize that God moves within the pulse of the common and the small? Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren answers these questions, unraveling the contents of a life into the motions of the liturgy to discover deep revelations in the typical day—an unlikely landing place for the miraculous.

Jesus lived a relatively human life prior to his baptism when, before his ministry even began, God splashed words of love and favor over him. With God’s love directing his days, Jesus accomplished the work his Father set before him. The revelation of God’s love dripped over him like baptismal water, anointing his hours with a purpose that would soon fall onto the heads of innumerable believers.

In the Anglican church, baptism is a crucial component of the typical liturgy, and it parallels the way believers awaken into days filled with God’s love for them. Believers in the Anglican church participate in infant baptism, guided by the knowledge that God’s love for the individual eclipses each person’s behavior, making it possible for them to receive this gift even as babies. As believers enter their churches, they pause for a moment at the baptismal font. While there, they place their fingers in the water before signing the cross in acknowledgement of their baptism and the grace Jesus demonstrated for them in his life and his death on the cross. This moment at the baptismal font encapsulates what it means to live as people who know that the miracle of their redemption wasn’t gathered by their own hands—there’s nothing any believer did, can do, or will ever do to secure the Father’s love. It’s always there, simply waiting for his followers to notice. 

Similarly, the typical day begins with extraordinary grace. Galatians 3:27 says, “for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ,” allowing every bleary-eyed believer to stumble from her bed to the coffee pot knowing that her life is gilded by grace. Who she is as a unique individual and a child of God, is the prelude to her day. The tasks she accomplishes afterward have no bearing on who she is—her actions are already grounded and empowered by God. As the author poignantly writes, “Grace is a mystery and the joyful scandal of the universe,” a fact that drifts in the ebb and flow of everyday living and breathes color into days that feel tedious and dim.

The hours that unfurl before us, no matter how uninspired they appear, are the vehicles within which we catch glimmers of the God who simultaneously fills and rises above them. No part of the day is unimportant to him—every part, no matter how trivial, is cradled by God. In his work The Divine Conspiracy, philosopher and Christian thinker Dallas Willard writes about the necessity of the average day to the believer’s spirituality—her family situation, job, hobbies, limitations—these are the things within which God moves.

The frustrating or uneventful elements of our lives are necessary for the more evidently meaningful parts to grow. Oftentimes, truth requires the breathing reality of our seemingly small lives—the hours that fall in line like tired, disillusioned soldiers are infused with unimaginable purpose.

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Most people give little thought to the patterns that stitch their days into weeks, months, and years. These nearly unconscious motions do their work undercover, prompting people to perceive the world in a particular way. After growing disillusioned with her typical morning habit of scrolling on her phone before getting out of bed, the author switched things up. Normally, her seemingly meaningless and short digital excursion moved her to seek distraction in technology throughout the remainder of her day, and she’d had enough. For Lent, she abandoned the early morning phone scrolling in favor of a new practice. Upon waking, the author began making her bed and enjoying a few moments of quiet in God’s presence, positioning her to recognize his heart in all parts of her day.

The liturgy the author practices in her Anglican church operates in a similarly constructive way. As a particular kind of worship within the church, liturgies determine the progression of a congregation’s Sunday service every week. Empowered by God, the patterns of these liturgies move believers to glimpse reality through a certain lens and act accordingly. Just as bad habits push people into particular lifestyles, honorable ones do the same, prompting people to establish lives that respect their health and humanity. Whether it’s through pausing at a baptismal font, taking communion, or ending the service with prayer, every church’s liturgy molds a believer in a particular way, inclining her to expect a certain kind of spiritual experience and to strive after a certain kind of daily experience as well. 

Excavating the deeply buried bones that construct our day-to-day experience is crucial to understanding the ways we perceive and build daily life ourselves. The philosopher James K. A. Smith confronts the oftentimes subliminal, yet highly impactful, power of cultural habits in his book Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. In his work, Smith encourages people to peer closely at their days, searching for underlying habits that mark out a false path toward a seemingly ideal life.

It sounds far-fetched to say that an innocent, harmless little scrolling addiction compels users to seek a particular kind of damaging lifestyle, but it’s true. In a study by the University of Virginia, participants chose either to undergo a previously tried, unpleasant electric shock or sit in a 15-minute lapse of silence. Not surprisingly, a majority of the men and a quarter of the women opted for the voluntary shock instead of the small moment of quietude, revealing the pervasiveness of culture’s drives for distraction, excitement, and stimuli. 

 Days start to lose their charm when we constantly demand the new, the fast, and the diverting. As the day strains to meet our false expectations, we forfeit our ability to catch sight of God and his goodness. Recapturing the simple loveliness of everyday living requires that we untether ourselves from the noise. Just as the author must make her bed every single morning regardless of how often she completed the task before, we also must learn to accept the routine, repetitive beauty of common life and authentic faith.

The average weeknight dinner isn’t usually a gourmet spread, or a feast laid out on linen tablecloths between candlesticks twinkling with dim flames. More likely, your typical weeknight dinner is thrown together, an amalgam of a few mismatched items that were cowering in your pantry for the last several months. And yet, food is still food—whether dinner is filet mignon or a bologna sandwich, life is sustained and strengthened through both. Just as the plain, common old dinner provides sustenance, transformative truths arrive gently in ways that may feel unexceptional. Truth is like a slow cooked meal—it’s our job both to wait for it and to enjoy it when it arrives.

In the Anglican liturgy, believers’ reception of the Word and the sacraments is similarly edifying. In many Protestant traditions, the sacraments include baptism and Communion. The sacrament of Communion is also called the Eucharist, and in the author’s Anglican tradition, it consists of a congregational meal. These components are central both to the liturgy and to Christian life, providing the strength believers need to discern truth in the everyday. Similarly, these practices are interrelated, each informing the other and ultimately provided by and leading to Jesus as the believer’s principal source of provision.

While sitting around a common dinner table, Jesus asked his disciples to eat the bread and drink the wine in honorable memory of the things he had done and the things he was yet to do for them. Jesus used something as simple and essential as partaking in food to lead his disciples to ponder him and the gift of redemption. Moreover, in John 6:55, Jesus tells his followers that his body is the only “true food” that’s capable of sustaining life. Not only does all earthly sustenance fall from Jesus, but all spiritual provision is found in him as well.

Sometimes though, reading the Bible feels like a chore—various passages are strange or nearly impossible to understand, making believers who desire truth and revelation want to close the book’s leather-bound cover with a flourish. But amidst the believer’s inability to understand every detail of the Word, its power fills her day. Reading the Word, despite confusing or lackluster experiences, operates in the same way as one’s eating habits do—each strengthens and inclines the person to hunger for particular things. In the case of reading the Bible, the believer is situated to desire truth as an authentic “worshiper” of Christ rather than a “consumer of spirituality.”

When the believer approaches the Word, the sacrament, and even her simple breakfast with an eye for truth and the humility required to perceive it as a blessing, she is sustained. As words of grace fall from her lips and onto her simple food, she’s restored and upheld in a truth that’s anything but bland.

We all know the feeling that rises as we face an object of extraordinary beauty—a Rembrandt, the Himalayan mountains, or a few notes of Bach are enough to inflame hidden embers of joy. In Genesis 1, God creates his endlessly beautiful world complete with light, water, sky, land, plants, animals, human beings, and all manner of living things, calling each of his works “good,” worthy of recognition and rapture. Even the seemingly commonplace beauties of the day express the inherent elegance of God’s world. When a believer experiences even a tiny fraction of the world’s beauty, she experiences an aspect of God’s character.

Liturgical worship manifests God’s beauty in a wealth of ways. Contemporary congregations and ancient traditions have consistently used music, architecture, and other art forms as a way to praise and recognize the praiseworthiness of God. In the author’s own Anglican church, the sanctuary or sanctuarium in Latin, a name drawn from the Latin word for “holy,” outwardly expresses the details of the Bible with an elegantly rendered, symbolically potent space of color, candles, and beauty. James K. A. Smith takes note of the historic relevance of these external emblems of faith, observing that a significant portion of a believer’s spiritual shaping initially takes place in physical ways. Loveliness teaches believers about God, and worship channels this joy and longing for beauty toward him.

Drawing from C. S. Lewis’s fictional work The Screwtape Letters, the author argues that moments of joy and delight in the beautiful, however small they may seem, are not superfluous to the Christian life—they are absolutely necessary to acknowledging one of God’s most entrancing traits. That’s why the wizened demon of Lewis’s work implores his protégé to prevent his assigned person from relishing even tiny hints of the good, as together with the sensation of its opposite, they’re “unmistakably real, and therefore...they give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality,”—a terrifying revelation for a demon to muster considering that “reality” is God himself.

Similarly, a member of the Anglican church plays small hand chimes before the preparation of the Eucharist as a melodic reminder that the time to partake has come. Just like the tiny notes of church bells, even slight flashes of beauty move people to ponder what lies beyond a simple purple flower or an especially riveting film—small wonders are hints of a beautiful God.

In a society where truth is often shunned as an irrelevant, outdated notion, the radiance of a spiritual reality is more crucial than ever. When the recognition of truth leaves, beauty must arise and reawaken people to the revelation of God, as the literary artists and spiritual thinkers Fyodor Dostoevsky and Czesław Miłosz note. Whether it’s through the light-smattered frames of stained glass or the electrifying sensation of a hot shower in the morning, beauty infuses our days with joy and thrills us toward thoughts of the Creator himself.

On the surface, there’s nothing special about clambering into bed and shutting your eyes, but even the necessary cycle of sleep encapsulates deep spiritual truths. Whether you slumber in a bed fit for a king, or twist and turn on a tiny twin-sized mattress, falling asleep resonates with revelations of God’s provision for his people. The act of falling into bed at night recognizes human insufficiency—the ability to close one’s eyes mirrors the believer’s capacity to trust a God who is entirely sufficient, both as she breathes through the day and as she snores in the night.

The power of the Anglican liturgy lies not in its carefully ordered routine or its beautifully crafted atmosphere—the spiritual significance of the liturgy lies in its complete reliance upon Jesus for believers’ renewal. Just as people slip into sleep at night, worshipful believers fall into the movement of the liturgy, dependent only upon God for refreshment. Protestant author Mark Galli writes in his work Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy, that despite culture’s growing influence on the church, leading congregants to attempt to encounter God by their own strength, the liturgy makes space for authentic restoration directed by God himself. Presence is all a believer needs to invite God’s renewal.

But as culture chafes against any indications of dependency, sleep drifts into a rare commodity. According to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted in 2013, too many sleepless nights have created a public health problem, signaling what the author calls a “spiritual crisis—a culture of disordered love and disordered worship.” In an attempt to accomplish all that’s humanly possible in a thin slice of day, many people skimp on sleep and destroy their health and wellbeing in the process. At the altar of human proficiency, culture places human ability above the real power of God. 

Believers must learn to reorder their physical days and spiritual lives within the context of a God who provides endlessly. Genesis 1 and the customs of Judaism capture how believers can do just that, replacing self-denial with the gift of God’s supply. As Genesis 1 states several times, “And there was evening and there was morning,” the Jewish tradition recognizes the restorative abilities of God by welcoming the day with a good night’s sleep. The drift into night marks the beginning of day and creates space for God to enter and refresh weary believers with his love.

Relinquishing oneself to sleep mirrors how believers may approach God—both freely and dependently, weary and hopeful that Jesus will breathe his love into yet another seemingly average, relentlessly divine day.