Today's Word
"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."
St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions
Today's Reflection
Ordinary Time.
The name itself can feel like a letdown after the great seasons of the year.
No Advent anticipation. No Christmas joy. No Lenten sacrifice. No Easter alleluias.
Just... ordinary.
But ordinary time is where most of life happens.
It is where we raise children and do our work and tend our friendships and make our small daily choices.
And it is precisely here, in the unremarkable Wedensday of a life, that God is most persistently present.
Augustine spent years looking for God in extraordinary places: in philosophy, in ambition, in pleasure, in reputation. He found him nowhere.
Then he stopped looking quite so hard and allowed himself to be found.
"You were within me," he wrote, "and I was outside."
The extraordinary thing about the Catholic faith is its insistence that God is not hiding.
He is here.
In the ordinary moment. In the morning coffee. In the commute. In the tired conversation at the end of the day.
The mystics do not tell us to escape ordinary life to find God.
They tell us to look more carefully at the life we already have.
Today is ordinary time.
Pay attention.
Today's Prayer
Lord, you are not far away.
Forgive us for spending so much of our lives looking past you.
Open our eyes to the ordinary moments of today
and help us to find you there,
exactly where you have always been.
Amen.
Today's Call
Choose one moment today, just one, and be fully present in it.
Do not look at your phone.
Do not think about what comes next. Just be where you are. That is prayer.