All of Life Is Sacred

There's an old Dennis the Menace comic strip where Dennis's friend Margaret is scolding him while he's talking to another friend. "Shame on you," she says. "Don't you know God hears everything you say in this room?" In the next frame, Dennis turns to his buddy and says, "Let's go into the kitchen."

Most of us would say, if asked, that we believe God is everywhere. But we live as though that isn't quite true. We compartmentalize — sacred and secular, body and soul, spiritual and physical, Sunday and the rest of the week. There is the part of life we bring before God, and the part we quietly keep for ourselves.

Scripture doesn't actually recognize that division. There is no biblical category for "secular." There is only sacred and profaned — things treated as holy, and things treated as ordinary or worse.

That means all of life is, in some sense, spiritual territory. Our money. Our bodies. Our work. Our relationships. Our meals, our music, our rest. Every one of these is a gift entrusted to us by God — not separated off into some lesser category called "everyday life," but woven into the same fabric as our prayers and our worship.

Paul wrote, "Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God." (1 Corinthians 10:31) Not just the obviously spiritual things. Everything.

We get to choose, in each of those ordinary moments, whether we will receive them as gifts — cherishing them, using them well, enjoying them as they were intended — or whether we will abuse and diminish them, treating them as though they don't matter to God at all.

There is no kitchen we can retreat to where God isn't already present.

Your life — all of it, the parts you think of as sacred and the parts you've never thought to call holy — is sacred. God has entrusted you with these gifts. May you receive them as such, today, in whatever ordinary thing you find yourself doing.

Prayer: Generous God, when our eyes and hearts are open, we stand in awe of your beauty and goodness. You have blessed us so richly. Help us treasure your gifts and use them in ways that do not diminish them, or us. Rest your Spirit on us this day, in every corner of our lives. We ask in Christ's name. Amen.

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