Two things happened yesterday that God used to gain my attention. The first was a quote from A.W.Tozer that Jan read to me from one of his devotionals titled “Sanctify the Ordinary.” The other was an introduction written by my daughter for a painting she just completed called, “Here and Now.”

Tozer wrote, “When the whole moral and psychological atmosphere is secular and common, how can we escape its deadly effects? How can we sanctify the ordinary and find true spiritual meaning in the common things of life? The answer has already been suggested. It is to consecrate the whole of life to Christ and begin to do everything in His name and for His sake.”

Anna’s introduction to her painting read, “I’ve written on my bathroom mirror, in dry-erase marker: ‘here and now,’ as a reminder to inhabit life fully. Today felt like a good day to paint it, too. To not ruminate about the past or be anxious about the future. Here’s to celebrating the present—in all its messy-marvelous is-ness.”

The next big thing we await is not the most important or impactful thing. The next big thing is many times hidden in the smallness of our misguided expectations of what we considered as important. Our world has taught us the grand and spectacular is where we should invest our time. We spend a great deal of physical and emotional energy on something we consider to be significant because of its scale, but at the end of the day, rarely do those big things take us to a deeper place. 

It’s the little things in life that we too quickly rush by on a hurried mission to accomplish something that have the greatest potential. These spiritually important momentss are not wrapped in grand expectations nor do they stroke our pride because they are typically done in private without the presence of a large audience. A passing embrace between a husband and wife that lingers a bit longer than usual, bending down to give our attention to a child who wants to show us something, or taking a moment to pause at a ridgeline to take in the beauty of God’s creation. These moments offer us something to be discovered. Hidden in these moments are the greater discoveries of life.

These moments are the things we sanctify – to set something apart to God – that are the bigger things of our spiritual lives that come wrapped in the disguise of what appears to be the less-than-spectacular. In those moments, we choose to set aside our hurriedness and a busy schedule to pause in the moment long enough to offer it to the Lord. That pause is where we can begin to explore what it was that He wanted us to see and experience.  Without the pause, we will too quickly rush by those deeper moments in an attempt to accomplish something of lesser value. To sanctify the moment and choosing to set it apart for the Lord is evidence that we have discovered what it means to live a here-and-now life.