The Sacred Mundane

How God can Establish even the Menial Work of our Hands for Eternity

The summer of 1999 I joined twenty teachers from various backgrounds and experiences to become fellows of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project. Some of us were new, some veteran, some taught high school, others elementary, but in this endeavor, we all came together to put pen to paper as writers. We engaged our imaginations in new ways: exploring poetry, short fiction, and memoir. We experimented, took risks, and shared secret parts of ourselves.

Just nine months into my career and barely in my twenties, I was green with dewy optimism, and it revealed itself in tender topics like first loves and sweet childhood memories. One piece, though, sprang from somewhere unknown and held promise of profundity. Relative immaturity and inexperience, however, proved me unable to capture it. No matter how many revisions and iterations it endured, I could not articulate what it longed to say.

It started like this:

“Dishes. There always seem to be dishes. Dirty dishes which have been cleaned a thousand times. Dishes. Cleaned by women. Cleaned by this woman.”

My inspiration was an older woman in my life who had lived through enough pain and heartbreak to fill two lifetimes. I was trying (in vain) to eloquently capture a life that had dissolved into a relentless, daily self-sacrifice. It shouldn’t surprise me, yet I am amazed that it took 25 additional years of living to finally understand what that woman at the kitchen sink was trying to tell me. (And it wasn’t what I expected.)

Just five years into her budding marriage, she left her job to become the full-time nurse of her suddenly disabled husband.

I saw the daily sacrifice.

the daily routine.

the daily sameness.

Wash…rinse…repeat

Round-the-clock care meant saying ‘no’ to many things.

Extended shopping trips

Vacations

Volunteering at church, or in the classroom

Limited time, money, and energy for “self-care”

She did this for 47 years.

Today’s culture of “me first” doesn’t know what to make of a life like this.

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Too Good for Dishes?

Many years ago, I participated in a women’s ministry called MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers). Not all, but a good number of us were full-time homemakers. The first time I walked into the meeting space, I was overwhelmed with the sudden realization that the 70 or so women in that room were mothers with the freedom to meet on a Tuesday morning.

Before you conclude me especially slow-witted, please understand that the make-up of my relationships to that point did not include many young mothers much less mothers who stayed at home. It just wasn’t the norm for me.

This would probably help explain why I was six years removed from teaching and yet was still trying to figure out this new role of homemaker. Apparently, I wasn’t alone in the struggle. In the five years I attended MOPS, I heard a lot of complaining. Motherhood is hard work. Keeping a home is hard work. Maintaining a healthy marriage amid newborn and toddler (and, heck, teenage) years is hard work.

It’s isolating. It’s lonely. And it’s filled with lots of monotony.

The “sameness” I scorned in “Dishes” was now my own daily companion. I believe our culture of self-interest has driven many women away from the home and “oppressive” routines of the mundane.

of laundry

of diapers

of dishes

Such menial tasks are not fitting for the expenditure of so many gifts and talents, society tells us.

Perhaps I am more a product of my culture than I realized. For when I consider my view of the “Dishes” woman, all those years ago, I could only see the hardness, the sadness, the abandoned dreams and plans. I only saw the loss of herself.

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Desiring Greatness

People in every walk of life have grappled with the yearning for significance. We want our lives to mean something. Like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. Instead of being “cooped up in a shabby little office” day after day for the rest of his life, George longed to “do something big and something important.”

Contrary to the world’s definition of what makes a person great, Jesus teaches and illustrates that to be great in God’s Kingdom one must embrace a life of humble servitude.

You seek greatness, do you? He seemed to say to James and John who boldly requested places of honor in His Kingdom (see Mark 10:35-45). Greatness in the Kingdom is not measured on the world’s scales. To be great in God’s Kingdom one must cast aside prestige and status and power and influence and instead assume the role of servant.

This is a hard lesson to learn, much less embrace with enthusiasm. The world’s sense of order and value is tossed on its head when held against the life of Jesus. And rightly so, “For by Him were all things created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible…all things were created by Him and for Him…and in Him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:16-17) It is His creation, and He determines the meaning of significance.

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His Wonderfully Ordered Creation

And what a marvelous and wonderful creation it is! A masterpiece of creative design right down to the most intricate detail. In the beginning, He “stretched out the heavens like a canopy” and every night “brings out the starry host one by one, calling them each by name.” (Isaiah 40:22, 26) And each new day, it is He “who appoints the sun to shine.” (Jeremiah 31:35)

In His wisdom, He set the celestial bodies in the sky with purpose and order. “The moon marks off the seasons, and the sun knows when to go down.” (Psalm 104:19)

Once, in my twenties, I was camping in Pymatuning and woke needing to use the bathroom. It was in the wee hours of the night, long after surrounding campfires had died out and all electric lights had been turned off. Barely awake, I chanced a glance at the night sky and a gasp escaped my lips bringing me full stop. Millions upon millions of stars shone in silent watch over the sleeping inhabitants of earth. Alone I stood in quiet amazement like a secret guest in a procession of God’s majestic glory.

Oh Father! “When I consider Your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have set in place,” who am I that You are mindful of me? (Ps 8:3)

The sun rises, the sun sets.

Long awaited spring always appears after winter.

The moon waxes before it wanes.

You’ll never harvest unless first you plant.

God did not merely create objects, He also established rhythm, order, and patterns for His world and image bearers to follow.

These rhythms create harmony.

Patterns create predictability.

Order creates stability.

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The Sacred Mundane

As a homemaker, my daily life is filled with predictability: there will be dirty laundry, there will be crumbs on the table, there will be toothpaste in the sink.

Wash…rinse…repeat

It can be easy to fall into the discouraged thinking Solomon shares in Ecclesiastes:

“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun…What a heavy burden God has laid on men! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.” (Eccles 1:13-14)

But when I turn my gaze toward God, Supreme Creator God, who in His kindness, wisdom, and goodness never tires to cause the sun to shine day after day or hasten spring’s emergence at the equinox year after year, I am grateful for the comfort and reliability of His predictable order.

But what about the ordinary and mundane tasks of the homemaker? Can they possibly be more than they are?

the making of breakfasts

of lunches and dinners

the folding of laundry

wiping of counters

changing of diapers

the picking up

and the dropping off

Can these have meaning beyond the day after day “sameness?”

Yes.

When we believe our lives can only hold significance outside of the daily routines of creating order, we will forever live with the dissatisfaction of unfulfilled potential and wasted talent—a “chasing after the wind.”

But if we, instead, remember “what bright things might flourish” in our ordered homes, we can see more clearly that the work is not a (meaningless) end to itself. That the work of creating order and rhythms in our homes leads to beautiful things like: “fellowship and companionship, creativity and conversation, learning and laughter, and enjoyment and health.”¹

The routines and traditions and cadence we create and take care to maintain become woven into the fabric of our homes. They create a comforting and familiar blanket of security and warmth and love we wrap around our families. A gift made up of many (often) unseen labors each presented as an offering of ourselves to our Lord and the people He has gifted us to care for.

This is how the mundane can become profoundly sacred.

It’s in this humble and created order of our homes that we partake in the precious privilege of revealing God’s Kingdom to all we welcome into it.

What we do—day in and day out—does matter! And when we look to and depend on and trust in our Creator God to establish the work of our hands, it will matter for eternity.

1. Douglas McKelvey. Every Moment Holy: Volume I. “A Liturgy for Domestic Days.” (Rabbit Room Press, 2019) p. 17