Holy Tee Shirt, Holey Tee Shirt

Friday 6/22/2013 6:29 AM

Last month Emily and Garrison got married.  We spent eight months planning the big day and we had a great celebration with family and friends.  Once all of the hullabaloo wore off and family members and friends returned to their respective homes, I returned to my regular routine, having tomato juice and Cheerios for breakfast, going to work, eating peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, mowing the lawn on Saturday, cleaning the bathroom, all the mundane things that make up my life from day to day.

Over the years I have begun to realize that, while we spend much of our lives anticipating the grand events of life that we celebrate with much fanfare, dressed to the nines, the majority of life is lived in the routine of life; going to work each day, repairing a leaky faucet, wiping noses and changing diapers for young grandchildren, washing dirty dishes while wearing stained shorts and a tee shirt with a hole in the armpit.

In his book A Way in the World, Ernest Boyer, Jr. describes how to regularly experience the presence of God.  He writes, “Life at the center lives the reality of the presence of God in the now of every moment of every act that is done.  It is a life that sees the greatness of the smallest of tasks, since these, as all others, are of God’s work.  Life lived at the center is an expression of God’s immediate presence.  It is not a life of imitation; nor one of anticipation; it is instead a life of participation, participation in the truth of its own full reality.  But in saying this, no one should think that life at the center seeks some special mode of existence, some level of being somehow above the mundane toil of day to day.  Just the opposite – it is life at its most human.  It is not a life that ignores or avoids the ordinary, but one that lives it fully, since it knows that in doing so it expresses the profoundest of the profound.  It is a life that may know pain and trouble; it certainly knows routine.  It lives this as it lives everything – moment to moment – and in doing so touches the eternal.”

I need to constantly remind myself that God reveals himself through the everyday routine of my life.  I want God to reveal himself with a holy tee shirt.  He chooses to reveal himself through my holey tee shirt.